ITMO University’s sports club
How to get your PE credit if the gym is closed and the classes are cancelled? ITMO’s KronBars club has developed a special online workout program which gives the students this opportunity. As of now, you can do some online yoga – livestreams are held three times a week on the group’s VK page, take part in chess tournaments, take a course on physical education theory, or solve educational tests on different kinds of sports. A special emphasis is put on the development of cybersport. According to Angelina Shulyakovskaya, a manager at KronBars, all classes are designed for students training at beginner level.
“The majority of intermediate and professional level groups have put in place their own training arrangements: the sailing team has launched a series of informative lectures (which previously were held offline as part of regular classes), the powerlifting team holds online training sessions. Any student can join these lectures and sessions, but they won’t get points for that because we won’t be able to verify this kind of training for each student. We’ve also launched a #KronbarsAtHome marathon, with our athletes publishing photos and videos of them training at home under this hashtag. Other groups, for example the sports tourism one, are also launching their own challenges,” says Angelina.
Free apps
Apart from this, there are many free apps that will help you get some much-needed physical activity while at home. For instance, the creators of DownDog have made all of their apps free of charge for the isolation period. Until May 1, you can do yoga, barre (a combination of yoga, pilates, and ballet exercises), and high-intensity interval training. The apps’ flexible settings system allows you to not only select the duration and the difficulty level of the workouts but also change their intensity and shift the focus to a specific part of the body. What’s also important is that you can choose a specific type of yoga: options include hatha yoga, yin yoga, and ashtanga vinyasa yoga.
There is also an app where all workouts last seven minutes and which has a separate yoga for beginners workout set. Both mobile and desktop versions of the app are available for you to choose at your convenience.
Another free app is offered by Nike. Nike Training Club has over 190 workouts for improving your stamina, body endurance and agility, as well as yoga flows. You can also create a personalized training program for one month or more.
Another manufacturer of fitness equipment and clothing, Peloton, has made its own home workouts app free for 90 days. The classes on offer include yoga, strength training, cardio and stretching.
If you like yoga, look into the apps Unagrande YogaClub and Track Yoga. The latter incorporates a badge system: the more you train, the more badges you gain, and you can spend your hauls on unblocking new sets of exercises.
Free Youtube channels
It is a truth generally acknowledged that Youtube is a treasure trove of all kinds of knowledge. Among other things, there’s a huge collection of workouts for any type of physical activity.
One example is FitnessBlender, created by a couple of fitness coaches. The channel has hundreds of workouts lasting from five to 50 minutes and ranging from cardio to HIIT and strength training exercises. It also has a related website which compiles all videos into a single catalogue with convenient navigation. Almost 600 workouts are available for free.
Another popular channel, BeFiT, houses an array of classes by OG fitness stars like Jane Fonda and Denise Austin. It hasn’t been updated for a while, but the existing content is enough to boost your fitness level. Conveniently, the channel’s playlists represent fully fledged workout plans for one month or more. Should you, however, want more BeFiT in your life, fear not – there is a 90-day marathon BeFitin90, which will have you do a 10-minute exercise set every day, starting from simple and working up to complex.
The channel POPSUGAR Fitness specializes in the latest trends in the world of fitness – here you have workouts in the form of Tabata training, HIIT, dance fitness, crossfit and others. The host, Anna Renderer, invites famous fitness coaches to record workouts, and the project’s website has over 400 videos which are free during this period of self-isolation.
An extremely charismatic coach Caleb Marshall uploads dancing aerobic workouts – and if you’re not able to reproduce all the movements yet you’re still guaranteed an energy boost.
In addition to recording asana classes and soothing yoga flows, Kino MacGregor, a yoga teacher with a 20-year record, also holds livestreams directly from a beach – a great way to distract yourself from the daily monotony and get a fix of R&R.
Last but certainly not least, Adriene from the channel Yoga With Adriene puts an emphasis on at-home yoga with the approach that following the technique isn’t as important as deriving comfort and pleasure from your practice. And this approach resonates – the channel has more than six million subscribers, and that number is only growing.
Other
Those who don’t have any problem with their motivation and prefer working out independently and at their own pace will find their cup of tea in DAREBEE. This is a voluminous library of exercise sets, workout and nutrition plans, as well as recipes, accompanied by lots of challenges with nifty checklists. All is presented in the form of posters which you can print out and hang on the wall.
It can also be worth remembering that there are other forms of physical activity. The WHO offers a reminder that dancing and doing household chores such as cleaning and gardening is also a way to keep your activity levels up in self-isolation. Even a short five-minute workout during the day is better than nothing.
