It’s that time of year again where the temperature is rising and the weather is beautiful. Who wants to do their mundane routine indoors during the spring and summer months? Getting a full meaningful workout from equipment you can find at the park sounds ridiculous, but you can get it done if you know what you’re doing.
Here are some easy ways to get some more bodyweight exercises in to your routine when you take it outdoors.
1-Jump Squats
Jump squats are an exercise you can do pretty much anywhere, and you shouldn’t have a hard time finding ample space to do so in a park.
To do this exercise you are going to want to stand in an athletic stance, with your knees bent at about a 45 degree angle, with your feet about shoulder width apart. Bend your legs down to the point where your thighs are parallel with the ground and then jump as high as you possibly can, extending your arms upward with hands held high.
Land with your knees bent to reduce impact, and repeat. Perform this exercise with 10 reps, and work your way down to 1 if possible for a total of 10 sets. If you can, try to perform this exercise on grass as opposed to a harder surface like pavement to reduce the impact on your knees.
2-Pullup
This is arguably the best exercise you can do on a jungle gym or in a park so take advantage of it. When it comes to combination back exercises it doesn’t get much better than pullups.
To do a pullup, find a straight horizontal bar and hand from it, with arms fully extended and palms facing out.. Then, pull your chin up to the bar to where your head should be slightly above it. Go back down to the starting position where your arms are fully extended to complete one repetition.
If possible do 10 reps and work your way down to 1 rep for a total of 10 sets, similar to the jump squats. If you can’t do as many as recommended don’t worry as this is one of the more difficult exercises listed. Just complete as many as possible in each set, and work your way down to one rep in the last set.
3-Dips
Most parks or outdoor gyms have parallel bars which are perfect for doing dips. To do a dip, place one hand on each of the parallel bars, with your body positioned in between the bars. The starting position is where your arms are fully extended, where you are almost standing straight but your feet should be suspended from the ground.
Next you want to lower your entire body down to the point where your upper arm is parallel to the ground. Your elbow should be bent at about 90 degrees to give you an idea of how to do this.
You don’t want to go down any further because this exercise primarily focuses on the triceps and doing so would engage the biceps as well which we want to avoid here.
Like the previous two exercises you want to gas yourself out doing this exercise. Start at doing 10 reps per set and work your way down to 1. If this exercise isn’t new to you, you may want to start a little higher at around 15 reps per set to increase the difficulty.
4-Parallel Bar Hand Walk
This is the exercise everyone first thinks of when they think of outdoor parks and gyms. The parallel bars also known as the monkey bars are great when it comes to working on your upper body strength.
Not only is this an effective exercise, it is probably the simplest one to do as far as knowing how to perform it is concerned. Being able to do an entire circuit without having to stop for rest is another story.
To do this exercise, start by hanging from the bar like you would in the starting position for a pullup. Then you want to take your dominant hand and move it to the next bar in succession, swinging using your body weight as momentum to get from one bar to the next.
Walk back and forth as many times as you can until exhaustion.
5-Sprints
Sprints are another exercise you can do almost anywhere including the park. Since we are doing sprints, we are going to stick to a 50 yard distance.
Run at about 80-90 of your top speed so you don’t injure yourself.
