Like others who have posted here, I have been known to use the jungle gyms in parks. I've been through a couple of periods when I could not aford a gym membership. Nowadays I'm less inclined to get "exercise" per se than to get involved in activities I enjoy for their own sake, which also are physically strenuous. Still, I do supplement this with a basic strength workout, but I do this at home, mostly using body weight, but also utilizing a few objects around the house. I find that the mix of moderate and relatively heavy resistance I get this way makes for a good all-around muscle workout. Here are the exercises I do most often:
Chest: push-ups, incline push-ups, dips. I do the dips in the kitchen, at a spot where two counters intersect to form a right-angle corner. I face into the corner and brace my hands on the counters to either side. If you do these, you want to make sure that the counter and your hands are really dry, so you don't slip and send your face crashing against the edge of the counter top. I also occasionally do push-downs at my desk, with my hands braced near the front edge of the desk.
Shoulders: I have an old PA speaker which I'm guestimating weighs around forty pounds. It has a handle because it's a portable speaker. I grab the handle and do upright rows, same number of sets with each hand.
I've also found that an upright vacuum cleaner is good for upright rowing of a lower intensity. I'll do these every now and then, by grasping the upright handle at a comfortable height with one hand, then doing the upright rowing motion while holding the vacuum cleaner somewhat out to the side, which increases the intensity over holding it centered in front of the chest as you would for standard upright rows.
Some good pushing exercises for the tops of the shoulders are jack-knife push-ups for an exercise with lower to moderate resistance, and, for higher resistance, nose-in-ring or the same idea with the hands at shoulder width.
Upper back: A tree limb of the right thickness at the right height is great for pull-ups. Sometimes I'll walk to the local high school, where I do an exercise along the front of the bleachers which is a cross between a pull-up and a rowing motion. You brace your feet against the front edge of the walkway along the front of the bleachers while gripping the top of the front railing. Start with your arms extended so that you hang down as far as possible. One rep is pulling up until your chest touches the top railing and returning to the starting position.
Abs: crunches, alternating crunches, Russian twists, ab curls. I'll also exercise the external obliques with whatever heavy object I can find around the house to do the exercise where you lean to the side against resistance. Crunches with the legs together and swiveled over to the side are pretty good for this area too, but they don't quite get take you through the full range of motion. Good when nothing else is available, though.
Legs/lower body: the classic knee bend. Sometimes I'll do a set of two hundred or so, which lasts long enough that it also nudges briefly into cardio territory. I'll do this just once every couple of weeks. The rest of the time I'll do knee bends on one leg, keeping my weight back, the way you would do when squatting with a free weight.
Side-stepping off of the bottom step in a set of stairs, with both abduction and adduction motions, stepping down in various directions (a little forward, straight out to the side, more toward the back and out to the side, etc.) for the inner and outer muscles of the legs.
Sometimes I'll do dead lifts with an emergency portable generator. Don't know how much it weighs, but it's plenty heavy. This one is good for the lower back as well. Grabbing the handle at one end of the generator, then standing and leaning to the side against the weight of the generator is the way I usually do that external oblique exercise I mentioned above when describing ab exercises.
In one of those too-poor-for-a-gym-membership times, during my younger wilder days, I used to exercise my legs by driving to a quiet side street and pushing my car, walking both forward and backward. These are multi-joint movements which I feel are more the natural way our legs were made to be used than leg extensions and ham curls. Obviously you've got to be really careful doing this, so you don't end up losing control and getting run over if you happen to be on a slight incline so that the car would roll toward you if you weren't pushing it. This is an exercise to do ONLY if you have a really, really good feel for what you can handle.
I now sometimes do a tamer, perhaps more sane, version of pushing the car while walking backward. You can exercise your legs with about the same motion by walking backward uphill. You get the best effect if you can find the steepest hill which still allows you to smoothly do a long step through the full range of motion without having to cut the step short to keep from tipping over forward. Experimenting will give you a good feel for when you have an embankment with the optimal grade. Try to maintain some tension in your quads through the full range of motion, also something for which you can gain a feel after a little practice. I've found that a bank of the right grade which is high enough to allow me to take ten steps to reach the top works well for this exercise. Ten steps up, then do some negative resistance walking forward back down the bank, and do this ten times, for a total of one hundred backward steps uphill, does not take me to exhaustion, but I definitely know I've worked those muscles. If you can't find a slope high enough for so many steps, you can find a slope just high enough to allow you to take one full, long backward step uphill, and do reps with each leg--step up and back, then downward and forward, up and back, down and forward, etc.
Um, well, that's about it. Great idea for a thread, Pitt
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