Variety is an important concept to apply to your fitness program. Aerobic and high intensity anaerobic style conditioning, muscular fitness, stretching, core exercises and balance training should all be part of a balanced workout routine. It can be hard to devise regimes that include all of the above, luckily we don’t have to do it ourselves.

The American military have put together a series of free podcasts that include plenty of high intensity, aerobic and high intensity anaerobic style conditioning, fitness, stretching, core exercises and balance training. I’ve been using them on and off over the past couple of years to help add variety to my workouts.

The work along workouts are led by certified fitness trainers from all branches of the American Military. Most of the workouts are no equipment needed workouts that you can do anywhere, if equipment is called for its either a stability ball, a pair of dumbbells, resistance bands or jump rope.

There are a total of 80 workouts in all, lots of full body workouts or if your looking to strengthen and tone specific body parts there’s a workout for that too. The term podcast can be misleading since neither podcasting nor replaying podcasts requires an iPod or any portable music player in fact no special reader is needed to view the workouts as they’ll open in most browsers or they can be downloaded for use on mp3 players and ipods.

These programs takes viewers through workouts led by service members with expertise in fitness training.

These Fit for Duty episodes focus on high-energy cardiovascular workouts.

These episodes feature the Pilates method used to build strength, flexibility and agility.

These resistance training episodes feature a variety of fitness-building techniques, such as Marine Corps Martial Arts and weight training.

Originally posted 2009-11-22 15:43:51.

Great general video for dynamic warm-up stretching. This can be used to get ready for most workouts.

The Pit Upper Body Workout starts off with a very brief warm up/stretching period which involves jumping jacks, elephants (Clasp your hands together and go up and down like an elephants trunk), Chain Breakers (Pretend your breaking a chain to stretch out your shoulders), Neck Rotations, Arm Circles, Various Punching techniques (Straights, Hooks, Uppercuts) and Knees.

5 minute combination of burpees and shadow boxing. 30 seconds of burpees, then a switch to shadowboxing, then back again this is to simulate a round of fighting

*45 Second Water Break*

2nd 5 minute round of Burpees/Shadow boxing, switch it up more often (about every 20 seconds). This goes on for 5 minutes.

*45 Second Water Break*

We now go into a Pushup/Punching drill that takes up the bulk of the workout.

For every set of pushups either you do 20 pushups or as many as you can do within about 30 seconds.

After every set of pushups you stand up and throw punches that pertain to the type of pushups you were doing.

The Pushups you do are as follows:

-Basic/Standard
-Wide Shoulder
-Robot
-Kempo/Judo
-Over-Unders
-2 Count
-4 Count
-Decline
-Knuckles/Wrist
-Pit (10 counts, you match the amount of the count with pushups, ex. count 7, you do 7 pushups)
-Halfway
-Basic/Standard again, except at a faster pace

*45 Second Water Break*

Kicking drill that consists of low, mid and high range roundhouse kicks. 20 of each alternating left and right legs.

*45 Second Water Break*

A combination of Freestyle Jump Rope (approx. 1 min straight) and Clap Push ups.

For this drill you go back and forth about 5 times for each part. On the Clap Push ups you start off doing 5 for the first set, 6 for the second….all the way up to 10.

Cool down period of Shadow Boxing.

This concludes the Upper Body Workout.