5 Apartment Workouts For Close Quarters Living
Here are five apartment workouts anyone can do in a small, crowded space. So grab your yoga mat and prepare for a total body blast.
Living in an apartment means adapting to a small space, as well as finding ways to perform your daily activities without driving your neighbors crazy. This can be especially difficult when it comes to exercise, but don’t consign yourself to the couch just yet.
The five fitness routines below are perfect for even the smallest spaces; they’ll allow you to get moving, with equipment optional.
Tiny Apartment Workouts
You can perform these apartment workouts in any free space you have in your home. You can even do it in a hotel room. Here are the five easy workouts for small living spaces:
1. Engage Your Glutes
Part of developing a successful, apartment-ready fitness routine is learning to combine activities with a shared goal into a small circuit. This glute-and-core workout is a fine example.
Just lay out your yoga mat and cycle through bodyweight squats, hip bridges, and Warrior III. Performed together, this group of exercises will encourage you to focus on balance, engage those vital abdominal muscles, and tone the gluteal muscles.
2. Try Quiet Cardio
It can be tough to get in a good cardio workout when you live in an apartment: your downstairs neighbors are sure to complain if you start doing jumping jacks.
What can you do, then, short of heading outside or joining a gym? One option is this quiet cardio routine, with moves that are broken down but may actually be more challenging than a more traditional version.
What distinguishes this quiet cardio routine from earlier approaches is the way it breaks down specific movements such as the traditional jumping-jack or burpee so they’re quiet enough to do in an apartment.
Rather than leaping around, you focus on one side of your body at a time and perform a controlled lift or lunge.
We’ve all seen how hard it can be to execute tighter, more controlled movements, so prepare for some real intensity here.
3. Gym Rat Gear
A growing number of apartment buildings are installing a gym as part of the amenities arms race, especially in major cities. But if yours hasn’t gotten there yet and you’re desperate for some real equipment, don’t despair.
Small pieces of equipment can be easily fit into your apartment to amp up your workout. Popular options include folding treadmills, mini steppers or mini pedal bikes designed to fit under a desk, and resistance bands.
Sure, it’s no Planet Fitness – and that folding treadmill probably won’t hold up to serious running – but it’s a start, and these items won’t eat up all your floor space.
4. Power Up Your Yoga
Many people think of yoga as a relatively gentle form of exercise, but that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, if you adopt the right sequence, yoga poses can form the foundation of an intense, heart-pumping workout.
Many of Baron Baptiste’s Vinyasa sequences, such as those found in the book Journey Into Power, will push your body through challenging poses (with proper alignment demonstrated in the text) while helping you find your center.
5. A Bookworm Workout
Popular apartment workouts like yoga, resistance bands, and squats can get dull after a while. Some of us failed to find them appealing in the first place.
Either way, you can break up the monotony with the book push … which is exactly what it sounds like. Just stack your heaviest books on either the carpet or a towel, crouch in front, and push your books down the hallway or across the room.
Want to boost this workout? Stack the volumes and lift them on and off the shelf, using them as the weight in a squat or resistance in an overhead lift.
It’s entirely possible to work out in your tiny apartment, so don’t let the small space get you down. As described above, you can even do a different workout every day of the week!
The secret is to make use of elements like bodyweight resistance and slow, controlled movements to get the greatest benefit from the simplest movements.
Whether you prefer yoga, cardio, or weight training, every workout has its small-space analog when a gym is beyond your reach.
