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 winged scapula is a shoulder blade that lifts away from the rib cage instead of lying flat against it. From behind, the inner edge or the bottom tip sticks out, a little like a small wing. I noticed mine in a changing-room mirror, halfway through a push-up phase that had gone badly. My right…
The VMO is the teardrop-shaped muscle on the inside of your thigh, just above the knee. Search for it and you will find two kinds of promise. One is that a special exercise will build the teardrop. The other is that strengthening it will fix your knee pain. When my own knee started aching on…
The 12 days of Christmas workout is the one festive tradition that leaves you fitter instead of fuller. It borrows the structure of the carol. You start with one exercise, then add a new one each round and work back down the list, exactly as the song adds a new gift each verse. I first…
Walk into any gym and you will see people strapped into an impressive amount of kit. Wraps on the wrists, sleeves on the elbows and knees, straps looped around the bar, a thick belt, gloves. It is easy to conclude that you need all of it before you are allowed to lift anything serious. I…
Most people prepare for a big hike by walking more. That helps, and it is not enough. Walking on flat pavements does not get your legs ready for three hours of climbing, and nothing in everyday life prepares your thighs for a long, steep descent with a pack on your back. I found that out…
An obstacle race is the only event I know where you can finish covered in mud, with scraped knees and a soaking wet T-shirt, and be grinning. You run, you climb, you crawl, you carry heavy things up hills, and you help strangers over walls. A friend talked me into my first one with eight…
Buying your first pair of boxing gloves should be simple, and it is strangely confusing. The sizes are in ounces, which is a weight, not a hand size. The same glove comes in bag, training and sparring versions. Prices run from the cost of a meal to the cost of a weekend away. I got…
A marathon is 42.2 kilometres, or 26.2 miles. For most people who sign up for one, the race itself is not the hard part. The hard part is the four or five months of ordinary Tuesday evenings and early Sunday mornings that come before it. I have never met anyone who regretted training for a…
The ab wheel is the cheapest piece of serious fitness equipment there is. It is a small wheel with a handle through the middle, it costs less than a takeaway, and it will humble almost anyone who has not used one before. It humbled me. I had been doing planks and crunches for months and…
Waist trainers are sold with before-and-after pictures, celebrity endorsements and a simple promise: wear this, and your waist will get smaller. Millions of people search for them every year, for women and increasingly for men. I understand the appeal. When I first wanted to lose weight around my middle, I would have bought almost anything…