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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, maybe your favourite gym closed down or maybe you started working from home, whatever your reason, it can easily make you feel stressed or even depressed. And when these gloomy feelings hit, most of us tend to find comfort in junk food and TV shows/serials which can be harmful to both our mental and physical health.
Luckily, during the pandemic, virtual workouts started to boom like never before. And many people really like the convenience of virtual workouts. However, there’s a wide range of virtual workout classes on the internet, so, you need to consider safety, space, and equipment to choose the most effective virtual workouts.
That’s why today I’ve listed down the 10 most effective virtual workouts that’ll help you to jumpstart your day energetically while make you stay healthy at home.
- Yoga
I put yoga at #1 because if you have a peaceful place in your home where you can fit a yoga mat, you have everything you need to practice yoga at home. Yoga focuses on your body’s natural tendency towards self-healing and health. Yoga helps you to build strength, awareness and harmony both in your mind and body. There are many yoga instructors who’re good at offering yoga class options tailored to the different level of practicers, which help you to choose the right yoga practices for yourself.
Benefits of Yoga:
- Improves your respiration, energy and vitality
- Increases your muscle strength and tone
- Helps you to maintain a balanced metabolism
- Mobility Exercises
Often people confuse mobility with flexibility, but both are totally different. Flexibility is the ability of your joints to move passively in their full range of motion without pain or stiffness, while mobility is having the ability to actively move and control your joints. Ankle mobility, walking hip openers, shoulder pass-through and neck half circles are some of the examples of mobility exercises. These mobility exercises reduce your risk of injury, let you do better workouts and minimize aches and pains. Plus, these workouts don’t need any equipment, so, they are one of the best virtual workouts to do at home.
Benefits of Mobility Exercises:
- Mobility exercises tend to have a calming feeling and will help you release stress.
- Keep backache, knee pain, and other such problems away.
- Improves your body performance and range of movement.
- Pilates and Barre
Pilates workouts are core-centric exercises which focus on strengthening your abdominal, pelvic floor and postural muscles. On the other hand, barre workouts utilize traditional dance movements with a fusion of pilates and yoga principles. Barre workouts tend to be more leg-centric that use traditional ballet movements to sculpt, strengthen, and lengthen muscles. If you don’t have a Pilates reformer at your home, you can do mat-based Pilates workouts like Criss-Cross, double leg stretch, scissor kick, etc. For barre, you can use a chair or sturdy piece to do workouts like relieve plie pulse, parallel plie pulse, arabesque attitude, etc.
Benefits of Pilates and Barre:
- Enhances your body posture by focusing on core strength.
- Increases flexibility and physical performance.
- Improves your mind-body connection
- Running
Running is a popular form of aerobic exercise that uses more kilojoules and demands more effort from the heart, lungs and muscles. For running, all you need are a pair of running shoes and a pair of headphones with your favourite playlist on your phone. There’s a wide range of audio guides on the internet for each running level, you can use those customizable guides to maintain your individual fitness level.
Benefits of Running:+
- Helps to build strong bones and strengthen muscles.
- Improves your cardiovascular fitness.
- Helps you to maintain a healthy weight.
- Dance Cardio
It’s hard to resist yourself from dancing to your favourite beats. Dancing is a fun activity, a great cardio workout and the best stress reliever. There are endless tutorial videos available for Zumba and other types of dance cardio workouts which you can utilize to kick-start your dance cardio workouts. Just you need a space that is a few feet free in every direction and you’re good to go!
Benefits of Dance Cardio:
- Best for fat burning and muscle toning.
- Increases your overall stamina
- Boosts endorphins that give you stress relief and help to maintain good mood health.
- Spinning
You’ve probably heard your friend talking about that amazing spin class he/she go to and probably wondered how sitting on a bike in a classroom full of sweaty humans cycling to chart music could be ‘amazing’, right? But spinning is one of the best cycling exercises that focuses on endurance, strength, intervals, high intensity and recovery workouts, Yes, for spinning workout you need to invest on a spin bike, however, there are lots of affordable options on the market to get your spin bike.
Benefits of Spinning:
- Increases your cardiovascular fitness
- Gives lean muscles definition for your legs and core
- Happy hormones release help to reduce stress
- Bootcamp/HIIT Workout
Bootcamp and HIIT workouts are designed to strengthen your muscles, cardiovascular health, mind and confidence. In Bootcamp workout, you can expect exercises like push-ups, lunges, squats, crunches, and cardio exercises like drills and shuttle run. HIIT is a high-intensity interval training that is done in bursts of high-intensity workout for certain periods of time followed by a shorter interval for recovery. HIIT workouts normally last 10 to 30 minutes because they are to be done at a pace that is highly challenging for exercisers. When you do Bootcamp and HIIT workouts at home there are high chances to get injured, therefore it’s good to have a virtual instructor who can guide you throughout your workout session.
Benefits of Bootcamp/HIIT:
- Burn a lot of calories in a short amount of time that helps to lose your body fat.
- Reduces heart rate, blood sugar and blood pressure.
- Improves your body’s oxygen consumption.
- Strength Training
Strength training exercises are designed to improve your strength and endurance. They can benefit your heart, improve your body balance, strengthen your bones, and help you lose weight while keeping your fitness on track. You can find many strength training exercises on the internet that you can do at home.
Benefits of Strength Training:
- Strength training protects your bone health and muscle mass.
- Strength training can help you with managing your chronic disease.
- Strength training helps to boost your energy levels and improves your mood.
- Boxing
You can do boxing workout at home using just your body weight, but, sometimes exercisers may not find it as fun or challenging as heavy bag boxing workouts. So, in case, if you have boxing set up at your home, it can be an awesome virtual workout option for you. With many other benefits, boxing workouts burn up to 600 calories in an hour while sculpting your shoulders, arms, core, and legs. Since punch sequences require you to be extremely focused, boxing is a great exercise to simultaneously train your mind and body.
Benefits of Boxing:
- Improves your total-body strength.
- Boosts better hand-eye coordination.
- Improves cardiovascular health.
- CrossFit
CrossFit is a strength and conditioning workout where functional movements performed at a high-intensity level followed by a shorter interval. While CrossFit workouts are known for incorporating lots of equipment, you can do many of the fast-paced, calorie-burning, and compact CrossFit workouts like Loredo, Cindy, Chelsea, etc right in your living room without any equipment.
Benefits of CrossFit:
- Improves your physical strength and helps you gain muscle strength and stamina.
- Improves your body’s agility, balance, and flexibility.
- Burns calories and helps to manage your body weight.
Conclusion
Honestly, there are even more virtual workouts that you can do at home. But, the above listed 10 virtual workouts require no-equipment – you only need enough space at your home, so, actually, it’s free, of course, barring the internet and computer/smartphone access.
Are you practising virtual workouts? Do you follow any of the above workouts or have any other favourites?
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