You might be doing lots of sitting and a little running, or maybe it’s lots of sitting and lots of running. But if that’s the extent of leg day for your time inside, you’re not setting yourself up for success. You need to use your lower half for more than just being planted on your butt or speeding away from everyone once you get outside.
“Working from home equals a lot of sitting in dining chairs or the couch,” says trainer Charlee Atkins, C.S.C.S. “That is not conducive to hip mobility.”
If you aren’t regularly doing stretches and exercises to loosen them, a potential injury may be right around the corner.
Atkins uses this five-move mini band routine to get up and moving. Think of the series as an accessory to leg day that will get you primed to go—or even as something you can do separately from your workout just to stay loose.
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Watch the video above, and perform each exercise for 45 seconds, then rest for 15 seconds:
- Quadruped Hip Extension (Right and Left)
- Lateral Band Walk
- Squat Duck Walk
- Squat
- Clamshell (Right and Left)
Try three rounds of these exercises for a quick seven-minute mobility session. Atkins says you can also slot them in at the beginning a HIIT workout, a more general home lower body workout, or you can add them to the end of your routine as a “metabolic finisher”—which is when you perform an intense set of exercises at the end of your workout to help boost your overall fitness.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health US.
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