Health Beauty & FitnessHealth, Beauty, Fitness Tips

Have you noticed how you get frustrated when having to wait in line, trying to get access to the exercise machines to get in your work out when it’s crowed at the gym?

Don’t worry because with this plan, you can do a full body work out a small corner of the gym. All you need are a pair dumbbells and a space as little as 6 x 6 space.

Before we go on with the actual exercises, you’ll need a five to eight pound dumbbell, and when directed, you want to do 15 reps of each move (except for the half-plank and perhaps the basic lunge) Do three rounds of each exercise without rest. For extra calorie burn, do jumping jacks, jump rope or mountain climbers, for 30 seconds in between each exercise.

Here’s the 6 moves:

Ballet Squats. Keeping your feet, hips with a part, turning legs out, move down until your thighs parallel with the floor. It’s important that you squeeze your glutes as you up.

Half Plank. Get on your tummy with your elbows under the shoulders. Keep your knees bent and cross your legs at the ankles. Lift and keep your torso and hips in a straight-line with your abs tight.

The 90 Degree Chest Fly. You want to stand with your feet hip width apart, with your knees slightly bent. Your arms should be at a 90° angle with the elbow raised up to your shoulder level. Now, bring the elbows and dumbbells together and squeeze your chest muscles. To make it more challenging, squeeze the dumbbells for two seconds before returning to the starting position

Strongman. Grab your dumbbells and bring them up at shoulder level. Straighten out your arms to the sides so they are parallel with the floor. Keep your palms facing up. Now keep your arms steady as you curl them toward your ears. Keep the elbows at shoulder level and don’t let your elbows drop. To make it harder, you could pulse and flex twice at the top as you firm your arms.

Basic Reverse Lunge. Okay, first put your hands on your hips Stand with your feet and knees together. Now take a big step backward on to the ball of one foot. Balancing your weight between both legs. Your back heel should remain lifted off the floor. As you lower your hips towards the floors with both knees making a 90° angle. Push yourself up with your feet and return to the start position. After you’re done with one leg, do 15 reps on each side. To make it harder, grab and hold a dumbbell in each hand. Do the exercise as you keep your tummy tight.

Bent Over Alternating Row. Place your feet together with a soft bend at your knees. Grab and hold a dumbbell to your sides, maybe a 5-8 pound dumbbell. Now bent forward at the hips so that your torso is nearly parallel to the floor. Keep your back flat with a slight curvature on your lower lumbar. With back flat, allow your arms or hang straight down from your shoulders with palms facing away from you. Now slowly allow your arms to hang straight down. Now slowly pull one dumbbell in below your chest while one remains at the bottom. Move one dumbbell at a time and alternating sides. As one dumbbell goes up more the other goes down. To make it more challenging, hold the dumbbells for two second count as you raise before returning to the starting position as you raise the before returning to this the starting position. Make sure your squeeze the shoulder blades.

Now get to it. Focus on each movement and you’ll soon rev up your metabolic furnace.

Yes, it’s true. These two standard ab exercises, crunches and situps, can actually be murder on your low back.

Why? Because they involve spinal flexion (rounding your lower back to allow you to bend forward at the waist). But according to research, that’s the exact mechanism that causes a herniated disc in your lower back. After all, most people “throw their back out” bending over to pick something off the ground.

So it makes sense to limit the amount of traditional sit-ups and crunches in your program. Plus, you can’t spot reduce the fat from one area, so you are better off spending that exercise time on a better total body exercise or intervals. If you want to flatten your abs, you need to lose body fat.

So to improve your abs, use the following techniques:

1) Take half the time you were spending on abs, and do intervals with that time instead.

2) Spend the rest of your ab training time doing endurance ab exercises, such as planks, side planks, mountain climbers, and variations of these exercises.

3) Keep your abs braced in all exercises so that you work your abs in every movement that you do.

For advanced bodybuilding, there will come a time that you will need to do traditional crunching motions. But it is best, for results (i.e. growing your abs) to do these with resistance. Cable crunches are good, and you can get results with a relatively small amount of spinal flexion.

But really, when it comes to having great abs, losing body fat is the most important aspect for most people. And if you are a desk jockey, its more important for you to have abdominal endurance than to risk your back with classic ab exercises.