Arm Exercises for Indoors: Week 9
Hope the training is going well. I cant wait to get outside into better weather soon. I really enjoy getting out with my friends, but the snow and cold have been difficult to get around. Its been more sunny and the snow is all melting so hopefully it stays this way till next year.
Today I will be breaking down and showing you what I have been doing this year thus-far to work out my arms. I've been basically stuck in my basement doing my workouts so this will be a tutorial of what kinds of indoor workouts I have been doing. They are all very basic exercises almost anyone can do.
I have taken note of some basic movement to be able to understand how to get a good workout for the muscles in the arms. To keep it really simple there are the pushing muscles and the pulling muscles. This is the same for practically every joint in the body. In order to work out these muscles for pushing and pulling, it is important to think of these as the opposite of each other so that you are balanced and capable in your exercises. There are also toning and power building techniques which should be developed as well. I want to go through each of theses and explain what I mean.
Every exercise uses a pushing or pulling movement. It can be difficult sometimes to find an exercise for every muscle opposite without special training equipment, however special equipment is not needed to get a good workout. In fact, the nice thing about parkour is it uses natural movements to build the naturally used muscle groups in our bodies. I like to think of them as the every day muscles, ones that we use in an every day situation, like in climbing, running, crawling, chopping veggies, or even vacuuming. Take climbing a tree for example, climbers use their arms and legs to climb, and as they climb they grab branches and pull them self upward. An opposite to climbing would be crawling which uses the pushing muscles in the arms to push the body upwards and across the floor. With every exercise there is a direction of resistance for parkour it is usually against gravity.
Lets do an exercise. Put your hand out in front of you with your palm facing down. Now pretend to push something forward away from your chest, you are using your tricep as the main muscle to push. Now imagine if you are pulling something towards you instead, your bicep is the main muscle working. Now keep your arm out strait in front of you and imagine pulling a weight out to the side, you just used your back muscles, and if pulled the weight back in front, your chest. If you have your strait arm out in front of you like before or even to the side and you begin to move your arm up and down you are using a combination of your shoulder to go up and lats to go back down.
Toning your muscles means you have form and shape to the muscles but can also mean you are concentrating on being strong but not big. To be big someone might use the word bulk-up. Toning is about staying smaller and looking good. Athletes tone their muscles by doing more reps with lighter weight ratio when exercising. There is another way to tone as well. I can only really explain it with an example. When doing a push-up start with your chest resting on the ground. For a pushup the resistance is as you push your chest away from the ground. The other way to tone is as you come back to the resting position. As you come back down move slowly taking about 3 to 5 seconds then move back to the next push-up with normal speed.
Athletes bulk up when they max out the amount they can lift without doing tons reps. One way I have taken into consideration this aspect since I have been trying to gain weight is to be very explosive against the resistance of the exercise. So as I come up out of a push-up I will sometimes be explosive.
This video is a demonstration, by me, showing some of what I do. It encompasses some basic exercises like push ups, pull up, and QM's, and many varieties of each.
http://youtu.be/vN8qiGtitNw
Here is the list with a little info:
Push-ups plus varieties of them.
Dips.
QM's which tend to work out the ab muscles as well, but they also help with arms. There are tons of ways to do QM's these are some that are more arm related.
Pull ups. and muscle ups. notice how I have one leg on the ground still for the muscle up. If you cant do a full muscle up this is a good alternative until you build up the muscle. I was cheating them this way because it is hard to do them with such little room.
