It has been said many times, that great personal trainers don’t need any equipment at all to execute a superb personal training session. An empty room will do. In New York City, or any other metropolitan area, one can take it a step further. As many city residents live in high-rise apartment buildings, the stairwell can become the setting for an intense training session.
At first thought, the stairwell may not seem like an unlikely place for a workout, but if you think about it for a little bit, you realize that there is a lot of opportunity. First, most people take an elevator, because taking the stairs requires energy, muscles at work and calories being burned. If you watch someone going up several flights of stairs, they are typically out of breath and at times pulling themselves up by grasping the handrails a little tighter with each flight. Plus, how many times have you spoken to someone after they have climbed several flights of stairs and they find they are out of breath for a few minutes and they have a slight burn in their quadriceps? Probably more than you can count on your fingers and toes. Maybe you have experienced this as the stair climber yourself.
So clearly, the building stairwell is a place that can promote both cardiovascular exercise and strength training exercises. Much like an empty room, you have walls and a floor. What you gain here is the staircase, the landing as you reach each floor, and the isolation. The stairs provide the trainer with the ability to add elevation and angles to help vary the workout. For instance, on a flat surface, you can do pushups for a great upper body exercise. If you elevate your feet by placing them several steps higher than your upper body, you can isolate the deltoids and the upper pectorals a bit more. By employing that same step, your trainer may be able to position you well for dips to work your triceps. These are just two simple variations of upper body exercises, but your Bronx personal trainer will add on others as the program evolves.
Lower body exercises may be turn out to be the real focus of this session. Of course, you can do the cardiovascular stair climbs until your legs burn so much you can’t go any further. You can do rapid step ups and step down or slow movements like alternating knee bends where you place one foot on the step lengthwise while hanging the other foot over the lower step. This can help strengthen the smaller muscles around the knee. This is a great benefit to runners. Of course, you can combine both by climbing a flight of stairs, as the trainer directs, with intervals of pushups or sit-ups on each floor landing.
This is not an environment to be used for every personal training session, but a knowledgeable Bronx personal trainer could really use these under-utilized spaces to get a client moving. Not only for that particular session, but it could inspire a raining day workout, too. See your doctor before beginning any physical fitness program.
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