Ultimate Outdoor Exercises

If your plan is to take your workouts a notch up, then outdoor fitness challenges are the best way to go.

And what better way to do this than to operate outdoor, in a surrounding that feels like home.

Jonathan Tuyishime, a fitness consultant, says outdoor workout offers the body a sense of freedom and a desire to push harder.

“The sense of freedom it affords you can be compared to what you feel when you go on vacation. Outdoor workout makes you creative and sometimes you won’t even realise that it’s a workout,” he says.

When you are out there and free, you can sprint, jump, climb trees, skip rope and so on.

He notes that people are going back to ‘their roots’ and are actually preferring outdoor workouts to gym ones.

It is for this reason that Mr Tuyishime prides himself in keeping fit and training his clients outdoor where there is the breeze, greenery and birds to cheer them on.

“To give the body a challenge, try out different exercises for it to keep up, otherwise your mind will get bored and your body will soon follow suit,” he says.

His training in fitness is biased on plyometric, martial arts, boxing, weights and body conditioning.

Plyometric workouts do not incorporate equipment and are targeted at increasing body strength. They include jumps, squats and burpees.

Weights are resistance training targeting various body parts while conditioning mostly targets at building inner strength and cardiovascular fitness.

To achieve these, he has specialised in using tyres, monkey bars and the arm pusher.

Tyre training

Tyre workouts help build strength, boost endurance and burn major calories.

It is the perfect change of pace from the barbells and dumbbells you are used to working with at the gym.

The beauty here is that tyres are readily accessible and available in most neighbourhoods.

“All you need to do is ask the mechanic down the street for a tyre they will sell it at an affordable price,” says Mr Tuyishime who started serious training about nine years ago while still in campus.

Tyres come in different sizes — small, medium and big — and can be flipped, pulled, pushed and so on.

He cautions that safety should prevail all through the workout to avoid injury that could potentially ground you.

The kind of exercise you settle on using tyres is dependent on your body weight.

Monkey bar

This is a piece of playground equipment consisting of a horizontally mounted overhead ladder, from which children may swing.

This is not to say that adults should not use it.

The monkey bar is ideal for pull ups as it improves your pull ups by increasing your grip, back and core strength.

Always put your feet together while on the monkey-bar to avoid energy leaks that could end up getting you clumsy.

Mostly, the monkey bar targets the upper body, that is, the waist all the way to the neck.

Arm pusher

It is inevitable that our skin will lose its elasticity when we age or due to fat accumulation.

If your plan is to look perfect with toned arms, you should get rid of those unsightly flabby arms.

The best way to achieve this is biceps and triceps using the arm pusher.

Here you are just using your arms and are alternating from left to right because you do not want to end up with muscle imbalance.

“It is advisable that you maintain the intensity of the workout too,” he says.

The arm pusher is more demanding compared to the normal push-up.

Mr Tuyishime notes that working out should be perceived as a lifestyle rather than a one-off or an on-and-off phenomena.

This he says is the best way to be happy duriung workout rather than feel like it is a punishment.

He advises that you should be able to push your body to the next level often in order to build strength.

At the end of it all, fitness, is felt, not seen.