The 5 Most Challenging Exercises To Get Noticeable Improvements
Huffing and puffing, sweating profusely, possibly cursing under your breath…these are telltale signs that an exercise is pushing you to your limit. Love them or hate them, exercises that push you to your limits are one of the best ways to make gains and start to see noticeable improvements in your fitness. Today we will look at five of the most challenging exercises you can incorporate into your fitness regimen.
To kick things off, let’s look at the dreaded Sled Push/Pull. Simply put, the sled push involves sliding a weighted sled (WITHOUT WHEELS) along the green turfed section of the gym. If working out at a park or at home, you can get creative and use other objects in place of a proper weighted gym sled.
The sled push/pull engages a ton of musculature, including the biggest muscles in your body, like the glutes, quads, calves, several core muscles, as well as the deltoids and triceps and gripping muscles to a certain degree. The ensuing response is a massive cardio-respiratory spike, as a result of the engaged muscles requiring extra oxygen via oxygenated blood flow. Alternatively, when you are doing isolated exercises, like triceps extensions or biceps curls, with a relatively small amount of musculature involved, your lungs and heart are not required to work as hard – and hence these exercises don’t produce the same amount of physical exertion.
The Turkish Get Up is a fantastic near full-body exercise, which involves laying on the ground while holding a dumbbell, and then standing up, all while keeping that dumbbell balanced over your body. Again, if working out from home or in a park, you can get creative. If you don’t have a dumbbell handy, try a 1-2L jug of water. In addition to the cardio-respiratory effect previously described, it ALSO requires a ton of coordination AND mobility. The move will test your shoulder, hip, and trunk mobility, as you stand up and down off of the ground.
The Bear Crawl is similar to the dreaded Turkish Get Up, as it will test your brain’s ability to maintain a contralateral sequence of stepping (opposite hand and foot) as your core is being engaged to the max. The bear crawl is essentially a moving plank, in which you are ambulating across the floor while just barely keeping your knees off of the ground.
The Assault Bike, just like the Sled Push/Pull engages many different muscles. This leads to large accumulations of lactic acid in your body, which your circulatory system must work hard to clear away. The movement involves biking (as per a normal exercise bike), in addition to PUSHING and PULLING simultaneously, using the upper handles of the machine.
Our final most challenging exercise is the dreaded Burpee, which is a combination of jumping and pushups, during which you begin face-down on the ground, stand yourself up in one explosive pushup movement, and once standing, jumping into the air. Burpees require your muscle fibers to contract and expand EXPLOSIVELY as you sprawl and jump. This action engages the type I and type II fibers in the calves, quads, and glutes. Your pectorals, triceps and core will also be working overtime. Additionally, the added factor making Burpees so unpleasant is the LEVEL CHANGE, ie going from a horizontal to a vertical position in quick succession. Level changes are an added challenge for the cardiovascular system, as it has to make changes to blood pressure accordingly, in order to maintain homeostasis, or the body’s normal state.
The great thing about these super challenging exercises is that most can be done at home, in the park or at a state-of-the-art fitness facility like AK Fitness. Most of these challenging exercises don’t require any special training equipment, just a foundational understanding of how to do the exercise and the determination to follow through. One benefit of taking your training to a gym facility like AK Fitness is that you will have the support of trained fitness professionals who can monitor your form, ensuring your safety. Another benefit to training at Ak Fitness is that our staff will actively encourage you, helping you get those last few critical reps in. The combination of these challenging exercises, good form and motivation will definitely reward you with noticeable improvements in no time!
