There are many instances in a person’s life, whether they are a professional athlete, an amateur athlete or perhaps not an athlete at all, when they will benefit from having some kind of workout that is done with a partner. While the individual workout consisting of elasticity exercises, strength exercises and endurance exercises is still the modern mainstay of the whole athletic movement, there are times when it is far more advantageous to workout in groups. This is either for the benefit of collaboration or simply because more advanced exercises are possible with two people. Below are some examples of excellent ways for working out with your partner.
Medicine Ball Exercises
The core of the collaborative workout programs are exercises that involve medicine balls. Medicine balls are really the main reason that so many partnered workouts happen and many of the exercises that are done with medicine balls are very advantageous to the human body.
Before your workout both you and your partner should already have gone through whatever warm up you need to prepare your muscles. The preparation for this exercise is very easy. Many of the more popular partnered medicine ball exercises requires that one of you starts with the medicine ball while the two of you stand a fair width apart. The distance should be a comfortable throwing distance; in other words not short to pose difficulty catching, but at the same time not far enough to cause serious and strenuous injury. Once this position has been assumed, you are ready to commence with the exercises.
The first thing you want to do is position the medicine ball in front of your chest, just like you would if you were making an air pass in basketball. With the position thusly assumed, you must then push forward quickly and pass the ball in the air to your partner. What this does is emulate the actions that are taken during push-ups. Instead of a difficult exercise however, you are doing a rather pleasant toss of a ball back and forth with the same muscles being exercised.
Weight Lifting Exercises
There are many weight lifting exercises that do not require a person to have a partner and while most of these exercises are quite good to do, in order to really work the body with really heavy weight resistance, it is good to have a partner to "spot" you. The reason for this is that the best way to work muscle groups such as the bicep groups when you are using heavy weight resistance is through utilizing a lifting bar with weights on either end of the bar. There are many different bars that are on sale at fitness shops nowadays and while it is not necessary to use one, doing so helps both physically and psychologically over the long haul.
Standard safety procedures when using that bar call for a spotter to be there to help you out in case you have problems with either the level of weight resistance or alternatively a grip on the bar. Bench pressing (the exercise most commonly done with these weight bars) is an exercise that can be very disastrous to a person that encounters difficulty without a spotter to help them and therefore in this specific case, working out with a partner is a much better idea than working out alone.
Having someone to help motivate you and inspire you are also great reasons to work out with a partner. We all have days where the last thing we want to do is go to the gym, but when we have someone who is pushing us, and who is counting on us, it is a lot easier to overcome those obstacles. Sharing your goals with someone else helps you to better visualize them and when you can believe it, you can achieve it.
These are just two of the many different areas where it has been shown that partnering with someone to workout with is a good idea. There are many other areas as well such as boxing where getting feedback from someone at a similar level to you is a good idea. Don’t let it go too far however, as individual exercises where you are focusing on your own fitness level are still going to be the ones that do you the most good over the long run.
