The Greater Princeton Area Ask the Doctor Spring Issue March/April 2018

No Equipment Exercises for Your Arms By Gabriella Mancuso

Upper body exercises are a crucial part maintaining a fit body. They create better posture and form, increase speed and benefit your entire body. Toning your shoulders and arms helps to benefit your posture and increase your speed. With a better posture and faster speed, you can complete your daily workouts quicker. When working out your upper body you are also works out the rest of your body. In order to complete most upper body exercises you use a variety of muscles from our quads, abs and back. The muscles from your upper body are very important to your form considering they connect to all parts of the body. This is why you should exercise them in the most beneficial and natural way, without weights.

Working out without weights is more efficient for helping build muscle throughout your whole body. Some examples of no equipment exercises for your arms include:

Planks : planks are an exercise that involves you staying up in an elevated push up position for a certain period of time. Planks help build muscles on your core and shoulders. There are multiple times of planks such as regular planks, lateral plank walks, plank jacks, etc.

T H E S T R O N G & L E A N B O D Y

Inchworm: the inchworm is an exercise that consist of you starting off standing and then walking into a plank position. You then walk back up into an upright standing position, and repeat this for the desired amount of sets.

Pushup: in order to complete a push up you must start in a plank position and then move your body/elbows up and down continuously at a steady pace. Just like planks, push ups have a variety of different forms. You can complete a regular push up, elevated push up, diamond push up, etc.

Burpee with Push Up: a burpee is a combination of a jumping jack, a push up and then a jump up. You start off by doing a jumping a jack, then you retract into push up position to complete a single push up which you would later jump up from into an upright standing position. You then repeat this for as many sets as you would prefer.

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ASK THE DOCTOR September/October 2016

MARCH/APRIL 2018