Working out at home is a great way to avoid the summer heat while helping you stick to your routine and save time (and money). It’s just easier to squeeze in time for exercise, be it 15 minutes of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or an hour-long run around the neighborhood.
Going to the gym or meeting friends for exercise can be great and you shouldn’t cut it out of your routine completely; however, you’ll probably be more disciplined and consistent if you also have some home workouts to toss into the mix.
The trouble is…home exercise tends to be pretty dull. I can only do push-ups on my family room floor for so long before I’m bored out of my mind and running around the neighborhood can get old after a few days of the same route.
But that’s where the tips below come in! These are just a few, fun playful and creative ways to keep home workouts from getting too monotonous and chances are you haven’t tried them before!
3 Ways To Keep Home Workouts From Becoming Dull
Watch a Movie
I read an article recently about how to exercise without realizing it, in which ideas like hiking with friends and dancing were presented and I’m all for a dance party in my living room with my kids! Basically, anything that creates a more active and less sedentary lifestyle can lead to better fitness, even if you’re not doing scheduled workouts. But it’s hard to pull these things off in your home…by yourself. The best you can hope for is usually a distraction, rather than complete unawareness that you’re working out.
Get the job done using a movie and a stopwatch. Figure out a few exercises you can do in your living room (jumping jacks, push-ups, mountain climbers, squat thrusts, etc.) and do them on a scheduled rotation while you watch a movie. Your muscles will remind youe that you’re working out, but your attention will (hopefully) be on the movie, which should keep you from becoming too bored. Besides, who doesn’t love a good binge TV watching?
Let the Slots Decide
Turning to an online slot machine to make anything less boring would have seemed ludicrous a few years ago. These were dull, repetitive games not so very long ago. But there are now all kinds of themes and fun animations used to make them more interesting, and the same themes can also help to spice up your workout.
All you need to do is pick a slot, assign different workouts to different landing options on the reels and then get to work. You’ve probably heard before that it can pay to keep your body guessing with exercise and this is a nice way to take the pace and style of your workout completely out of your own hands. You may need a few tries to figure out a nice balance of workouts to assign to the slot of your choice, but it’s actually a fun process.
Tell Yourself A Scary Story
You may have heard about a little app called Zombies, Run! It’s sort of a game/workout assistant in which you can run in the real world and become a hero in another – or at least that’s how the app describes itself. Basically, you put in headphones and it updates you on zombies chasing you down as you jog about “gathering supplies” by reaching milestones. You have to speed up when the zombies are about to get you and so on. Zombies, Run! is a lot of fun and totally worth trying, but it’s also good inspiration for your own workout incentives.
Instead of relying solely on the zombie narrative, consider recording voice memos for yourself, and using them to direct your runs. The idea is basically the same, but you’ll get to exercise some creativity coming up with different stories and varying the patterns such that you’re telling yourself to jog, sprint, jump, etc. at different intervals within different stories.
If you’re at-home workout are becoming dull, give these creative ideas a chance. You may not use them every day, but you might just find that they make it more fun (and less monotonous) to work out at home and that can make a big impact on your overall fitness.
