Walking Lunges - A Great Exercise

This blog entry will look into an exercise known as walking lunges. It will identify what muscles are worked with the exercise, how to do walking lunges and the benefits of including them in our workout routine.

What are Walking Lunges?

Walking lunges are an exercise that can be performed with or without weights and they exercise our glutes, hamstrings and quads.

How to perform Walking Lunges

Walking lunges are a simple exercise to perform and they are super beneficial to our body. We can either perform this exercise with a dumbbell in each hand, or we can put our hands on our waist – whatever we feel comfortable at. To begin, we stand upright, with our feet together. We then take a step forward with one foot, lowering our hips to the floor and bending both our knees. We then push from the other foot back to the starting position for one rep.

Benefits of walking lunges

There are a number of benefits associated with performing walking lunges as part of our workouts.

First of all, walking lunges work a variety of muscles all in one go, which is a great thing! Basically, our complete lower body will get a workout if we perform walking lunges, particularly the glutes, hamstrings and quadriceps.

Secondly, we can perform them anywhere! The fact that they are so convenient is beneficial as there is no excuse to not include them a few times a week. We may look strange doing them down the street though.

Walking lunges are also fantastic because not only can they be considered a cardio-vascular exercise, they can also help to build and develop muscle as well.

Finally, walking lunges promote mobility, strength and flexibility in the joints. 

So, walking lunges are a fantastic exercise for us to include in our workouts. The exercise works the majority of the lower body and can help to keep us fit. Get them in your workout!

Improving Our Fitness

This blog entry will look into some tips for improving our fitness. We all want to be as fit and healthy as we can be (right?) and these tips will help us to achieve this. This list was adapted from an article in Men's Health.

Tips to Improve Fitness

1) Increase the intensity - this is a great tip, especially if we are short on time. HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is a fantastic style of exercise that can wield fantastic results, and can be done in a shorter amount of time.

2) Get a pet - ok, maybe not. However, dog owners are more likely to get the exercise they need. We can easily get out to take our dog for a nice long walk, we were going to walk them anyway.

3) Keep motivated - whatever it takes. It is vitally important to stay motivated to get the body and fitness level that we want. Find whatever it is that inspires us to keep up the interest and keep us achieving our goals.

4) Walk - walking is an easy exercise to do and it is great for our body. There is no reason for us not to get out walking, even if it just for a half hour on our lunch break.


Above are four simple tips to help to improve our fitness. Of course it is vitally important that we couple regular exercise with a good diet to get the best results.

Yo-Yo (Bleep) Tests

Yo-Yo Tests

The yo-yo test, also referred to as; yo-yo intermittent recovery tests, beep/bleep tests, and shuttle runs, is a test designed to examine the endurance and aerobic power of athletes in regards to running. These tests can be used by both men and women alike and are very simple to perform.

How To Set Up Yo-Yo Tests

The basics of yo-yo tests is simple. First of all, a CD (or other recording) is required for these tests, but these are readily available. The CD contains a series of beeps, and the gap between this beeps decreases as the recording goes on. The second part of the set up involves setting up two markers, 20 metres apart. The test is now set up.

The Test

The basic idea of the test is to run from one marker to the other, arriving at the same time as the beep. We then turn around and run to the other marker. This continues, from one marker to the other until the test is over. As the gap between the beeps gets shorter as we progress, the difficulty increases. If we fail to make it to the marker before the beep, we lose a life. We get two lives so when we fail to reach the marker twice the test is over. We measure our total time for our final result.