By the healthiergang writer Gabriele Galasso, Functional Training instructor and K1 competitive athlete.
Get In Shape After The Holidays
A break is always needed: it serves to free us from the stress of diet, from the stress of athletic preparations and from those of work and daily life.
Often however, we forget that a vacation is not a good excuse to put on pounds, then we find ourselves after 2 weeks off to resume our training routine with an extra weight.
Not only from the aesthetic point of view, but also from the point of view of athletic performance, that excess fat at the beginning seems an insurmountable obstacle.
So how to get back in a good athletic and aesthetic condition without wasting time?
Certainly, much of the work is done by proper nutrition, but since this is not the forum for discussion from a nutritional point of view, we will stop to talk about how training can get us back on track assisted by the right caloric intake.
In the end we stopped for about ten days, we can't have made a disaster!
The table that I propose can be a good basis for setting your workouts on 5 days a week, repeated in a 3-week cycle, divided into 2 days of HIIT, 2 days of full body free body, 1 day of core training. .
Day 1: HIIT
HIIT is an interval training method that can be applied to both running and bodyweight exercises. In our case we will exploit it in the first version, taking advantage of the fact that a good HIIT workout ends in thirty minutes in a more fun way than the monotonous continuous run.
Furthermore, in addition to helping us burn calories (most of which come from sugars and not fat), with interval training we will be able to obtain a post-burn effect: recent studies have shown that our metabolism continues to burn calories even in the 24 hours following a session of this type. Before attempting the session it is important to be sure of your state of health, and to have a heart rate monitor to monitor your heart rate.
A HIIT workout idea that you can do is the following:
- 10 minutes of warm-up starting with a walk and then growing and arriving at a run. In these 10 minutes, about 70/80% of the maximum heart rate should be reached.
- 20 minutes of HIIT: here the real work begins, which will last about twenty minutes. The execution is simple, you can divide the work into minutes, of which 10 seconds will be carried out at high intensity and 50 seconds at low intensity (but still maintaining the run). If you are a beginner, you can lengthen the "low intensity" period, or you can replace it with a walk.
Another advantage of running in HIIT, in addition to those mentioned above, is the intrinsic variability of the training, which makes the session less monotonous than running at a constant speed.
Day 2: full body free body
I decided to dedicate the two days of full body to the Tabata methodology, in which different muscle groups will be trained. For those unfamiliar with the Tabata methodology, there are 8 sessions of 20 seconds separated by 10 seconds of rest for a total of 4 minutes.
In our Tabata of day 2, we will perform 4 sessions of 4 minutes separated by 1 minute of rest.
1) Push up: classic version of the push-up on the arms with the hands kept shoulder-width apart and the elbows that remain inclined by about 30 degrees with respect to the hips.
2) Squat: classic bodyweight squat with heels firmly on the ground, physiological curves that remain neutral throughout the execution of the squat and ascent.
3) Mountain climber: maintaining a plank position resting on the hands, we bring one leg forward with the foot next to the ipsilateral hand. With a leap without moving the pelvis excessively upwards, swap legs on the fly. Repeat as fast as possible for the full 20 seconds.
4) Alternating Lunges: lunges performed alternating the legs, taking care not to bring the line of the knee beyond the tip of the foot, and descending with the pelvis perpendicular towards the ground.
NB it is important to try to work at your best during the Tabata trying not to spare yourself when you start to feel fatigue.
Day 3: rest
Day 4: HIIT
Repeat in the same way as on day 1.
Day 5: full body free body
TABATA 4 x 4 min? 1 min rest
1) Dips: with the help of a chair let's place ourselves with our hands resting on the seat and the buttocks slightly forward. The legs are stretched out in front of us with the feet flat on the floor. We flex the arm and stretch it exhaling, trying to repeat as many repetitions as possible in the 20 seconds, and keep them approximately constant for all subsequent series.
2) Burpee: classic full body free body exercise; position yourself in an upright position and with a squat bring your hands to the ground resting shoulder-width apart. With a jump, get into the plank position with the abdomen activated and perform a push-up on the arms. Once the push-up is completed, jump back to squat and jump back to an upright position.
3) Skip Max Effort: very demanding exercise from the cardiovascular point of view, it involves performing a skip at maximum intensity for all 20 seconds.
4) Complete lunge: full lunge exercise where you perform 4 sets on one leg and 4 sets on the other, full lunges forward and back. Example, suppose you start with the right leg, move into a lunge position with the right leg by advancing and as soon as the lunge is completed, bring the right leg into a backward lunge position (thus finding himself with the left leg forward). Then repeat a front lunge and a back lunge on the right leg for all 20 seconds and then switch legs only for the next 20 seconds.
Day 6: core stability
For the core stability work I thought about the execution of a circuit according to the AFAP methodology (as fast as possible) or given a certain number of repetitions, try to finish the session as quickly as possible together with a correct execution of the exercise.
- 100 plank 2 rabbit (positioning yourself in the plank resting on your hands, jump into the squatting position and jump back into the plank position, being careful not to give in with the abdomen, accentuating the lumbar curve)
- 100 sit up (lying prone with the knees bent, the soles of the feet resting on the ground, detach the torso bringing the hands to touch the feet)
- 100 russian twist (Positioning in balance on the buttocks with the torso off the ground and the heels off the ground, perform a counter-twist by bringing the knees on one side and the hands touching the floor on the opposite side. Each pair of twists is considered one repetition.
- 100 (50+50) gladiator press (positioning himself in the side plank resting on the elbow, flex the torso bringing the pelvis to the ground and then bring it back to the plank position. Perform 50 repetitions on each side.
- 100 plank touch (positioning yourself in the plank on the elbows, about 50cm from a wall, remove one hand and touch the wall without twisting the torso bringing the shoulder of the hand that comes off upwards, the shoulders must remain on the same plane !! repetition each time the wall is touched with both hands.
Day 7: Rest
Conclusions
This idea can be followed by an athlete in good physical shape who is trying to find the right path, in the case of beginners, it is good to dose the work and not overdo it, without however sitting on our laurels and using the fact of being a beginner as an excuse. ! Train hard!
