Despite all the preaching I do about people needing to get out there and exercise and get off the sofa I will admit that I still spend an awful lot of time on the sofa just like anyone else. Sometimes though, especially if the film or tv show I am watching is getting boring enough that I start to check my phone ever 5 minutes, I think maybe I could fill this dead space with something else.
Well a friend of my recommended a couple of "sofa exercises" and i figured I would try them out rather than constantly looking at my phone and destroying my posture more and more by leaning further and further back into the cushions.
This guy in the picture has an exercise band on because in the true form of the squat in question, it is supposed to be weighted. But if you don't normally do squats or never do them, you really do not need this. If you do use it you want to do very few of these because I did a bunch of them thinking they weren't doing "anything" and the next day my legs and my glutes felt really sore.
Reading online they are going to tell you all this important stuff about how your body has to be in such and such perfect angles and what not but man, I'm not saying none of that matters at all, but if you aren't hurting yourself doing something and you can "feel the burn" then just go with that!
The only thing I focus on is to kind of get into the position like the guy above and then lower my back leg's knee down the ground as close as I can get it. Don't try to be a hero, there's no need to put yourself in danger of crashing to the ground. This is actually going to feel very easy, but for people that don't do squats you could actually end up making yourself need to walk funny the next day if you don't approach these in a very conservative manner if you are just staring out.
The opportunity to hurt yourself is almost non-existent though, just like with most calisthenics. If you fall down and break your face that will hurt, so don't do that.
There isn't really a trick here, but you do need some level of flexibility in order to do the whole move. If you can't do the whole thing, don't sweat it.
I would imagine that after you do 8 of these on one side though, you will start to feel a real pain in your thigh because it really isolates that particular muscle quite a lot. Since you alternate side there really isn't much reason to take a break either.
But anyway, this is a "sofa workout" so there is no reason to even bother trying to break a sweat. The way I look at it, if you are doing ANYTHING you are doing a lot more than you would be doing as you watch episode 4 of "The Pitt" trying to figure out why everyone says this boring-ass show is a "must watch."
When I am doing my sofa exercises, I don't have a great many of them but I also don't have any sort of objective in mind. I do as many sets as I feel like doing any time the show gets boring and that kind of mixes things up.
At the end of it all I didn't really feel as though I was doing it correctly but the next day when I woke up I realized that correct or not, I had actuated the muscle groups I was targeting and they let me know by being a bit tight. I don't actually have any glute-specific exercises that I do so this was a strange and kind of welcome surprise to me.
When I did a run later that day I could feel it in my legs... not in a bad way, but just in a "yeah, we know you worked us out yesterday" sort of way.
But do be careful out there folks, especially if you don't normally do a lot of training. I train more days out of the week than not and this made me a bit sore for a couple of days. So if you don't normally exercise at all it could turn you into a stiff and useless person who cannot walk.
Take it easy. just do a couple of sets on your first day and stop once it starts to burn a bit. Then wait a day and see how you fell. For me, someone that exercises almost every day, I was surprised how much this very simply and equipment-free exercise actually did for me.
I'm going to start investigating more tv exercises that I can do henceforth.... just so I don't feel bad about hitting "next episode" on a show I am watching