Top 10 Best Home Exercise to Lead a Healthy Life

1. Planking

Direction

Put your elbows on the floor, raise up on the tips of your toes, and keep your back straight and your abs tight in a line. Hold that position  as long as you can. 30 seconds is pretty good if your kids can hold it that long. (We’re doing planks in the photo above.)

Planking (or the Lying Down Game) is an activity consisting of lying face down—sometimes in an unusual or incongruous location. According to The Daily Telegraph the palms of both hands must touch the sides of the body while toes must touch the ground. Some players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which to play. The term planking refers to mimicking a wooden plank. Planking can include lying flat on a flat surface, or holding the body flat while it is supported in only some regions, with other parts of the body suspended. Many participants in planking have photographed the activity in unusual locations and have shared such pictures through social media.

2. Squats

Direction 

Put your feet a shoulders’ width apart and do deep knee bends as if you’re sitting down on an invisible box. Put your arms out. Make sure your knees don’t extend past your toes.

In strength training and fitness, the squat is a compound, full body exercise that trains primarily the muscles of the thighs, hips and buttocks, quadriceps femoris muscle (vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, vastus intermedius and rectus femoris), hamstrings, as well as strengthening the bones, ligaments and insertion of the tendons throughout the lower body. Squats are considered a vital exercise for increasing the strength and size of the legs as well as developing core strength. Individuals who are interested in strength training can utilize barbell squat in training and rehabilitation programs. If executed with proper form, the squat has the potential to develop knee stability.

3. Push-ups

Directions

Keep your abs tight and your back straight; you can do this with a straight or bent knee.

A push-up (or press-up) is a common calisthenics exercise performed in a prone position by raising and lowering the body using the arms. Push-ups exercise the pectoral muscles, triceps, and anterior deltoids, with ancillary benefits to the rest of the deltoids, serratus anterior, coracobrachialis and the midsection as a whole. Push-ups are a basic exercise used in civilian athletic training or physical education and commonly in military physical training. They are also a common form of punishment used in the military, school sport, or in some martial arts disciplines.

4. Crunches

Directions

Sit-ups, but not all the way from floor to knee. Just curl your chest toward your knees. (These are called “curl-ups” at my kids’ school.)

A crunch begins with lying face up on the floor with knees bent. The movement begins by curling the shoulders towards the pelvis. The hands can be behind or beside the neck or crossed over the chest. Injury can be caused by pushing against the head or neck with hands.

5. Lunges

Direction

Take a step. Touch your back knee to the floor, and make sure your front knee doesn’t extend past the toes.

Lunges are a good exercise for strengthening, sculpting and building several muscles/muscle groups, including the quadriceps (or thighs), the gluteus maximus (or buttocks) as well as the hamstrings. A long lunge emphasizes the use of the gluteals whereas a short lunge emphasizes the quadriceps. The lunge is a basic movement that is fairly simple to do for beginner athletes.A lunge can be performed using bodyweight alone. However, weight trainers may seek to increase the difficulty using either dumbbells or kettle bells held in each hand, or a barbell held atop the neck and shoulders. Grip strength may be an issue with the dumbbell lunge so practitioners may prefer the barbell lunge.

6. Side leg raises

Just like Jane Fonda used to do! Keep your legs straight.

7. Burpees

These are pretty tough for me, and a whole sequence of them will really get your heart racing. Squat, then put your hands to the ground. Kick your legs straight back behind you, landing on your toes. Then do a push-up, bring your legs back underneath you, and jump straight up off the floor. That’s one burpee.

8. Mountain Climbers

Start in a push-up position, then alternate bringing one foot at a time forward toward your armpit and then extend it back out. It almost looks like a stationary bear crawl.

9. Butterfly Kicks

Lie on your back. Keeping your abs tight, raise your feet just barely off the floor and flutter-kick them. This one makes my girls giggle, which then makes their abs loosey-goosey, which makes it hard for them to do the exercise. But it’s fun all the same.

10. V-ups

This one’s like a sit-up, but in the shape of a V. Lie back, extend your arms out above your head on the floor, then lift your legs and raise your torso and hands until you make a V. Reach toward your feet, then back down again.

We always do a warm-up to get everyone limbered-up and ready. Maybe high knees, or booty kicks, pretend jump roping, or jumping jacks. Then we just mix it up. We’ll let each kid assemble a workout by picking three of those exercises. We’ll do 10 of each one and try to finish a circuit: three sets of those three exercises. Or sometimes we do all of them for a minute each, at our own pace. I don’t push them in any way. What’s most important is that they have fun doing it. If they are having fun exercising, then they always want to keep going. With a circuit-style workout, they can look forward to a change in the next exercise. Nobody gets bored doing the same thing for a long period of time. And, of course, we always have some music blasting. Music always makes exercise more fun.