We began our training journey without access to a weight room or gym facilities. Thus, I designed a strength training regime that one can do in any open space using just body weight. Since my husband and I both have other lower body training goals (running), we decided to focus our strength training on primarily upper body and core conditioning.

Core conditioning is a great benefit to any type of running activity and is essential to sports that contain asymmetrical movement (such as ultimate frisbee, soccer, etc…). Core conditioning strengthens and increases flexibility in support muscles of the abdominals, glutes, lower back, and hip flexors. Injuries in other areas of the body (especially the legs) are commonly a result of instability or tightness in core muscles. Thus, a strong core is a building block to powerful running, changing direction, and speed, essential elements to ultimate frisbee and marathon running.

All of our workouts contain a warmup, workout, and cool down section, and last from between 45 min to 1 hour. Many of the exercises are self-explanatory (i.e., regular pushups), but if they are not I will provide a description and a picture or video link showing the proper form. We are doing two strength training sessions per week. Some sessions are designed around a certain theme (i.e., circuits of exercises, pushup variations) or certain home equipment (i.e., a bosu ball, medicine ball, or yoga ball).

Here we go!!