5 Simple Movements for Leg Strength and Mobility *follow along*

Good Friday, and yes, it is Good, Good, Good Friday. So, wherever you are in the world, happy Good Friday. If you don't celebrate that sort of Good Friday, I believe it's some part of the Christian tradition of Easter and whatnot, it's a good Friday anyway. At least it's Friday when I'm recording this video. But it is day 25, Reps For Rona, and today we're doing a little bit of, well, the theme is Por qué no los dos? And thank you, Wam, for the shout there. And now, My Spanish is pretty terrible at best, so that might not even mean what the theme is in English. In English, it's "Why not both?" So, in Australia, there's a little ad for tacos, and the family are deciding whether they want hard shell or soft shell tacos, and the little girl says, "¿Por qué no los dos?" And then the whole family starts cheering, and it's just a— it's a really fun ad, and if you speak to anyone who's watched any sort of TV in Australia, They probably know the saying, but where does that relate back to movement? Well, that's today's movement session. We're doing strength and mobility with a lower body theme. So we have 5 exercises, 30 seconds each. We're gonna be doing, and when I say strength and mobility, it's going to both build strength, these exercises for the lower body, as well as work on mobility, which is often forgotten about. Alright, we do a lot of sitting. I've said this, I'll sound like a broken record, but I know I finish the day after sitting down and my hips are tight. This is what this workout, this session, aims to combat, as well as building some lower body strength. So let's get started. We'll get 10 minutes on the clock. Open up the Tabata app on the App Store.

Starting your Tabata workout. Get ready.

So the first movement is a duck walk.

Exercise.

Now this is actually quite difficult if you've never done it. But what you're going to do is just come down nice and low and walk on your legs like this. Now, if you can't walk like that, your alternative is to come down to it fully on your knee and then lean forward, bracing yourself with your hand as you go down. But if you can't, you want to be able to sit all the way down and we're walking like a duck, as if we're waddling to the pond. And then you can try go backwards, which is even harder. Timer just went off to rest, but we're going to keep practicing. Now, we don't have much room in the bedroom, so it'd be great if you had a little bit more space, but we're making the most of what we have. This is because we're recording during the coronavirus self-isolation sessions, or self-isolation advice. We're making the most of working out indoors. You could definitely do this outdoors though. So now, we have knee to standing. Come down, kneel down. If you can't sit in this position, it is quite a bit to work up to, so you could just chill out here for a bit. But I'm going to come up on my knees, raise my toes behind, sit down, and then practice coming all the way up to standing. So we'll go back down, So sit down on your feet, we'll go back, feet on the floor, toes up.

Rest.

Now it probably would have been a better idea to maybe do each of these for a minute or so, so that's what we'll do. It's— the time is telling us to rest, but we'll just practice going up and back down. That's it, all the way down. Now if you can't do this, maybe practice just trying to sit like this and just really working it out, or come up, practice being on your tippy toes, squatting down, knees to the ground, feet up. We'll finish this one— oh, see, it takes some balance. There's the porqué no los dos, strength and mobility. This time we have glute raises, so we'll lean through like this. I actually don't know what the proper name is for these, Now, you have both feet in front of you, and what we're going to do is both to the side and come up, squeeze those glutes at the top. That's it. Rest. Now, for this one, I've got my left, my left leg curled, my right leg up through and thrust. Maybe these could be hip thrusts. We go up like that. Beautiful. I'm going to keep going with the left for about a minute. Feel free to just swap back and forth if you want. Again, these movement sessions aren't strictly structured. I've got a timer on, yes, but the goal is not really to pay attention to the timer.

Exercise.

Oh, that's feeling great on the hips. This will be great for a hip loosen up. And now, if you can't Go up with just your legs, feel free to brace, and then push up like that. I can already feel that my right glute, so now my right leg is bent, I can already feel that my right, especially my lower back, is a lot tighter on the right side than on the left. So keep coming up, switch if you want.

Rest.

That's it. This is a real eye-opener for me. Starting to feel that I need to do some more work on the right side. Keep it up, we'll keep going another minute or so, really squeezing those glutes at the top. Feel that hip release. Now, if you're on some sort of solid floor, you may want to put a towel underneath you.

Exercise.

Now we have one more, which is the the squat reach. So come down, you could just hold a bodyweight squat like this, right? If this is, if this is a challenge, just practice holding it like this. But what I'm going to do, I'm going to grab my ankle and reach up. So again, this is almost a full body mobility and strength exercise. Not only are we holding a full body squat, but We are loosening our upper bodies. Oh, I just felt a whole bunch of cracks go through my vertebrae. Keep it up. We'll keep going to the end. Oh, you can come just sit like this, chill out if you can. Again, if you can't go that deep, just practice holding it like this, sitting there for a minute.

Exercise.

Wonderful. Now we're back to duck walks. So we'll come, go forward again. If you can't do a full duck walk, maybe just practice with a lunge. You can always put your hand down to guide you to the next one. Now just walk this way. We're focusing on strength and mobility here. Walking like a duck, waddling. We gotta walk across the street.

Rest.

Stand up, shake it out, give those legs a little kick, a little jump. You know what it is also today, apart from being Good Friday, a great Friday actually, it's my best friend Don's birthday. So, he got engaged yesterday, so we gave him a shout out for that yesterday. Congratulations, Don. And a big, big, big happy birthday to one of my best friends and brothers, Don. Turns 27 today. That means I'm going to turn 27 this year.

Exercise.

And now we have kneel to standing. So we come down, all the way down to our knees, and then up on our feet. This is really great for the feet and toes. Really great for the for the balance as well. Come down, nice and slow. Remember, if this is hard on your knees, you might want to put a mat down. Oh, balance! Come down here. We'll go for the full minute for this one as well. If you're wondering, the timer, I've got it set on for 30 seconds of movement, 30 seconds of rest. But you could easily just as well do 10 repetitions of this, 10 repetitions of all the other movements, do them twice or three times. I'm just keeping the timer on to, uh, make sure the videos don't get too long. Keep it up. This is feeling great already.

Exercise.

Building strength, strength and mobility. I might start with the right leg curled this time. Again, just coming up, squeezing through. Yeah, that's definitely— actually, what we might do is change it this time. I can feel it with the left, it's a lot looser. Now I'm alternating, I'm going back and forth. Come back, through, up like that. Wonderful.

Rest.

We'll keep going through the rest. Ah, that's excellent. We might even throw in another one to mix it up, you know. Keep it up. Okay, my right hip's starting to loosen up now. That's what it takes sometimes, it's just a little, little bit of loosening up.

Exercise.

Little bit of grease in the groove. Now what we might do, just to mix it up, might do a glute bridge to finish off with a tabletop. So come up, up, reach over, up, reach over. So this is going to be another one like our squat hold that we're about to do. It's a whole body, whole body mobility session. The theme is why not both, right? So why not have strength and mobility? Why not have— let's get up— why not have both? Why not have lower body and upper body? But the focus of this session is lower body strength and mobility. I'm just shaking it out. That's what we want to do during our rest times of our movement sessions. Sometimes you want to give keep active, but because today's session is a little bit more of a chill out, you want to take as much rest as you need. Get your body mobile, get your body moving.

Exercise.

What do we have? Squat hold. This is the last exercise, or squat reach if you can. Come here. Now, you might not be able to hold it, so I want to give you one more alternative, is find something solid and then just, you could even just hold on like this. And practice your squat. I often just go to the fence in the backyard and grab onto the railing and just sit like this for a bit, a whole minute, and just keep moving around. But—

Rest.

For the last 30 seconds, we're gonna just practice our reaches. It's one of my favorite ways to not only build strength for the lower body but get it mobile. Often the two, the two don't happen, the two imply each other. They don't have to be separate. Why not both, right? We can just sit here, chill out, eat our food off the ground.

Great workout, you spent 10 minutes 7 seconds exercising.

Now if you wanted to, of course, you could keep going. That's a, that's a good way to to just make that session a little bit harder. But that was nice and simple, right? It's 5 exercises, 5 movements. We did have a bonus one there with the glute bridge. Now, my hips are feeling far looser than when they started. You could do that as a wake-up session. You could do that as an end-of-day session to go, you know what, finish work, it's time for me to get mobile and go for a walk outdoors. But thanks for tuning in. Hopefully your lower body is a little bit stronger and a little bit more mobile. Have a great, great, great, great Friday, and once again, happy birthday, Don. Love you, brother. We'll see you tomorrow.