As you get older your body gets weaker. Sure, you may walk a couple of times per week, or even swim on a regular basis. However, bodies age forty and older need strength workouts, too. If you think your budget is too weak to add strength workouts, think again. Some strength workouts won’t cost you a thing.

A classic strength workout includes exercises like push-ups, lunges and squats. In all three exercises the resistance (or “weight”) comes from lifting your own body. If these exercises conjure bad memories of junior high gym class, remember that there is nothing wrong with doing them at the beginning levels. There is no shame in “girl” push-ups or lunges with your hands on your hips, or squats with your hands on your shoulders. It helps with balance and, believe it or not, increasing your balance is another of the classic strength workout. It refines your smaller muscles.

Should these exercises become less challenging for you, adding additional resistance is free and easy. If you really need to use weights for lunges and squats, fill soda bottles or milk containers with water.

Add fun to your routine with a simple deck of cards: With each flip of a card you can increase your repetitions randomly by using the card’s face value. You could pull out the deck’s royalty, but it’s more fun when jacks are worth thirteen, queens fourteen and kings fifteen. The challenge in this strength workout is to get through an entire deck of cards.

Your body doesn’t cost you a thing and it’s an excellent source of resistance. True, our minds are often the part doing the most resistance, but that’s a whole different topic. In a weak economy, you’ve got to be strong.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 4:38 am and is filed under Mean And Lean: Fitness Infos, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.