Beginner-friendly fitness and movement guides, all in one place. Browse simple home workouts, stretching and mobility routines, habit and motivation tips, and honest equipment advice, with every guide written for total beginners and no gym required. New here? Start with our complete guide to home workouts for beginners or the Start Here page.
A beginner sprint workout is short and simple: a thorough warm-up, then six to eight fast efforts of 10 to 20 seconds at around 80 to 90 percent effort, with a full walking recovery between each one. Not flat-out racing speed, not dozens of repeats, and definitely not without warming up. Start on a gentle…
A good beginner StairMaster workout is 15 to 20 minutes at a steady level 4 to 6, with your hands off the rails and your body upright. That sounds almost too simple, but the machine punishes anything fancier until you have built up some base fitness, and the way you hold the rails changes the…
You can build a strong chest with dumbbells and no bench at all, because the floor press, the floor fly and a few push-up variations cover nearly everything a bench would give you. The floor takes away the bottom few centimetres of the movement, which sounds like a loss but is actually easier on beginner…
AMRAP stands for as many rounds as possible. You pick a few exercises, set a timer, and repeat the circuit as many times as you can before the clock runs out, resting only when you need to. Your score is the number of rounds you finish, which gives you something concrete to beat next time….
The clamshell is a side-lying exercise where you keep your feet together and open your top knee like a clam shell, and it trains the gluteus medius, the muscle on the side of your hip that keeps your pelvis level when you walk. Done properly, you feel a burn on the side of the hip…
The fire hydrant is a glute exercise done on all fours, where you lift one bent knee out to the side without letting your body twist. It gets its name from the way a dog behaves at a lamppost, which is unglamorous but makes it impossible to forget. It trains the gluteus medius on the…
A push day workout trains every muscle that pushes weight away from your body: your chest, the front of your shoulders and your triceps. For a beginner at home, that means five or six exercises, about 45 minutes, done once or twice a week. You can do the whole thing with a pair of dumbbells,…
A deck of cards workout is simple: you give each suit an exercise, shuffle the deck, flip one card at a time and do as many reps as the number on the card. Hearts might be squats, spades push-ups, and so on. You keep flipping until the deck is gone, or until your timer runs…
A jump squat is a bodyweight squat where you drive up hard enough to leave the ground, then land softly and sink straight back into the next squat. It trains your quads, glutes, hamstrings and calves, and because it’s explosive, it builds power and gets your heart rate up far faster than regular squats. The…
The best thing to eat before a workout is something with easy-to-digest carbohydrates and a little protein, eaten 30 minutes to 3 hours before you train. A banana, a slice of toast with peanut butter or a pot of Greek yogurt with fruit all work well. The bigger the meal, the longer you should wait….