100 Fun and Free Exercise Alternatives to Your Gym Membership

Going to the gym gets old. It can be so awkward to sweat and huff and puff in front of 50 other lean, fit people. If you don’t have a gym membership, then you’re stuck trying to figure out how to exercise at home without costly equipment. Get out of an exercise rut with these fun alternatives to joining or dragging yourself to a gym. There is something for everyone on the list, so get cracking.

Men

1. Men’s Fitness: Fitness Workout Routine Articles – These articles are as refreshingly direct as they are varied. Whether you need a skinny-specific workout or are crafting a fighter’s physique for yourself, Men’s Fitness has got you covered.
2. Dust off the weights and work out old school style at home.
3. Men’s Health: Fitness Workout Plans – These plans are great at home and the gym.They vary from ab-revealing at-home routines to tips for completing your gym workout when the benches get a little too crowded.
4. Take your dog or a neighbor’s dog on a run. Nothing makes heads turn faster than a fit man with a cute dog.
5. BNet: Health Publications – A 20-minute “no-excuses” exercise routine that offers quick fitness training, whether you’re low on time or equipment.
6. Go play a round of golf with some friends.
7. Men’s Fitness: 101 Ways to Lose Your Gut – These great tips range from physical tips (techniques to alter or enhance your workouts to burn more calories) and simple lifestyle changes, such as swapping that popcorn for a dill pickle. You’re snacking on just one calorie.
8. Body sculpting for Men: 5 Key Exercises for a Complete Arm Workout - This essay is all about the arm, offering info about the muscles you’ll be training and straining through their 5 strengthening exercises.
9. Commit to doing 25 crunches a day. A little effort adds up over time.
10. Askmen.com: Top 10 Chest Exercises – This summer-centric guide offers tips and tricks for toning up or bulking out your chest in time for beach season. As an added bonus, you won’t even need Charles Atlas to keep from getting sand kicked in your face.
11. Cut the grass with a push mower.
12. Men’s Fitness: The Complete Chest Program – This article, quicker than the previous one, details chest training exercises that let you exercise with mind and body.
13. myFit.ca: Home Workout Exercises Menu – These exercises help you shape, tone, and display every part of your body. Some workouts include simple accessories and some need none at all…the perfect gym-escaping fitness routine.
14. Articlesbase: Home Six Pack Abs Exercises For Men – Through this quick, four method article comes some quick tips to replace that other home six pack with chiseled abs.
15. Grab some friends and play a game of tag football or ultimate Frisbee. Whatever floats your boat.
16. MSN Health and Fitness: Go from Scrawny to Studly – An article fit for the flabby and ultralean alike, these great tips (a blend of workouts and lifestyle changes) will stud you up in no time.
17. MSN Health and Fitness: Sculpt the Ultimate Upper Body – Let’s face it—you’re not working out just to feel better, but to look better, too. Similar to the chest exercises, these upper body sculpting techniques are the best way to look as fit as you feel.

Women

1. Grab some girlfriends and go out for a night of dancing.
2. Kaboose: 20-Minute Park Workout for Moms -This amazingly thorough, mother-centric article offers ways of working out while taking your children out. Whether you’re power-walking with a stroller or doing chin-ups on the monkey bars, these unorthodox techniques help you find the time to work out.
3. Take a power walk around a park.
4. Real Women’s Fitness: The Best Butt Exercise Routine for Really Sore Glutes – With great info and links to specific exercises, this article unlocks the secret for shaping and toning your butt, allowing you to put your best rear forward.
5. Shape: Workouts – This women’s magazine offers a full service workout site with everything you’ll need. With detailed workouts, informative articles, easy-to-follow videos and even workout playlists, this site will keep you moving.
6. Out and about? Park in the furthest parking spot from a store for an extra boost of cardiovascular activity. Always be aware of your surroundings though.
7. Fitness: Get Fit Moves and Advice – A community friendly site, this page offers sage blogs in addition to articles, workouts, videos, and even a Challenge Countdown that gives you 10 days to start looking your best.
8. Do a few basic yoga or Pilates moves every morning to loosen joints and muscles. Try the 100 or the downward dog.
9. Women’s Health: Women’s Health Workout Downloads – Get in shape by downloading these women’s workouts directly to your iPod.
10. Cook dinner instead of ordering out. The cooking burns a few extra calories, just don’t blow it with desert.
11. About.com Exercise: Top 10 Butt Exercises – 10 tips towards buns of steel are just a click away. The brief-but-informative tips are paired with helpful image galleries, making your backside shapelier than ever.
12. Hand wash the dishes if you must do them yourself.
13. Plant a flower or vegetable garden.
14. About.com: Beginner Lower Body Workout – Targeting glutes, hips, and thighs, these 5 image-aided exercises will shape you up in no time.
15. MSN Health and Fitness: Downsize Your Thighs in Five Moves – This quick articles offers 5 sculpting moves to chisel your legs into a fitter, more toned look.
16. Take a free self-defense class.
17. MSN Health and Fitness: The Best Bikini Workout Ever! – Another quick article, this one offers exercise tips to get you out of your one-piece swim suit and into a bikini bodacious beach body.
18. Crank up some music and dance around the house for an hour in your socks while no one is watching.
19. Web MD: Strengthen Your Mom Muscles – The mom workout circle is now complete with this helpful site offering ways of building the muscles need to bend, lift, and carry your precocious tykes around.
20. Complete those fix-it-up’s on your own. Repaint or recover an outdated room or piece of furniture.

Family

1. Mama’sHealth.com: Start Your Family Exercise Routine Now! For moms sick of having to sneak fitness in comes these tips for involving the whole family in one big workout. As an added bonus, many other mom-centric health and fitness articles are available.
2. Play a family game of tag.
3. Check with your local parks and recreation department to see if it offers any free classes like dancing or karate. Sign the kids up for one class, then take your spouse to another designed for an adult crowd.
4. Family Guide: Get Your Family Moving. More great advice for involving your entire family in the exercise process. Great for getting children (and spouses) off of the couch and onto the fitness trail.
5. Already have a Wii? Bust out the Wii Sports game and bowl or play tennis with the family to burn some extra calories.
6. Kid’s Fitness Central: How to Make a Family Exercise Routine. This article offers tips for helping your family put down the fast food and pick up their sweatpants for workouts that bond while they burn (calories, that is).
7. Jump rope. Can you do Double Dutch?
8. The Diet Channel: Tips To Get Your Family Moving. This family exercise advice article is especially kid friendly, with helpful advice about integrating videos and games into the exercise process.
9. Dogchannel.com: Fit Dog Exercise Routines Into Your Schedule. Because they’re family too, this site offers tips for penciling in Fido’s exercise time around your own hectic schedule.
10. Do you own a trampoline? Jump around and earn some exercise points, but pay attention to weight limits and take precautions to safe guard you or your children from hurting themselves while jumping on a trampoline.
11. Play Twister. Just be sure to watch your back, mom and dad.
12. About.com Family Fitness: First Family Fitness. While we can’t all be the leader of the free world, we can certainly exercise like him. This site offers tips for how Obama and his family stay in shape, and how you can make your exercise positively presidential.
13. Go to a local pool and swim. It’s a cool and fun way to exercise without all the sweat and burn of traditional exercise.
14. About.com Family Fitness: 5 Activities to Do With Your Kids. Just in time for summer, this article offers great tips for coaxing your kids into exercise. These tips can help bring you together and lengthen your life, to boot.
15. About.com Family Fitness: For More Active Kids, Forget Exercise – Have Fun! Another great article about getting kids to exercise, this author de-emphasizes rigorous exercise and re-emphasizes fun and reinforcement.
16. Monkey in the middle, anyone? Toss a bean bag or soft ball back and forth with one person in the middle. The “it” person has to catch the ball to be released as a thrower again. The thrower whose toss was caught is now “it.”
17. About.com Family Fitness Forum. Tired of just reading the articles? Interact with your fellow readers on this active forum, trading tips for motivating yourself, your loved ones, or just shoot the breeze.
18. People: Tips to Feel (and Look) Like a Star! This site borrows exercise tips from the stars themselves, helping you look great whether you walk, jog, or sprint down the red carper.
19. Play catch.
20. Faith and Fitness Magazine: Put a Smile on Your Family Routine. This Christian-oriented site offers tips for instilling learning, reading, and exercising into your children’s lives until it becomes as regular as brushing their teeth.
21. Go to a park and push your kids on the swings.
22. Positive Thinking Information and Advice. A variegated medley of advice, this site offers family exercise advice incorporating pets, vacations, and videos.
23. keepkidshealthy.com: Fitness & Exercise Guide. Offering an obesity intervention for children, this site offers tips to help your kids avoid future problems with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and more.
24. Go to a museum. You’ll be surprised at all the exercise you and your family get from walking around the exhibits.
25. Web MD: Keeping Kids From Becoming Couch Potatoes. This awesome video illustrates innovative techniques to get your kid off of the couch and into shape.
26. Ride bicycles through your neighborhood with your family. Remember your helmets.
27. Putt-putt golf is usually not free, but watch for coupons and family discounts that can get your kids off the couch and becoming the next Tiger Woods.
28. Web MD: Gym Workout. It’s not too late to help your kids get in shape, even after they’ve left for college. This video offers tips for incorporating fitness and workouts as a healthy college pastime; much healthier than beer pong.
29. Play charades.
30. MSN: Seven Ways to Power Your Walks. For those who’d rather walk than jog or run comes these simple steps to burn more calories while doing so. From wearing better shoes to lengthening your stride, these tips are great for power walkers of any caliber.
31. Jumping jacks will get your heart rate pumping and torch a handful of calories.
32. MSN Health and Fitness: Walk Off More Belly Fat. Another walking-centric article, this focuses on specific ways of walking off belly fat. These ways are more effective than even crunches.
33. Run up and down stairs, Rocky-style.
34. Health: Melt Pounds With Mix-and-Match Cardio Routines. This quick article offers three different kinds of cardio exercises. Mixing them up not only breaks up exercise monotony, but burns calories quicker.
35. Buzzle.com: Best – Cardio Workout Plan For Quick Weight Loss. Thinking outside of the box, this article rebukes traditional machine cardio workouts, offering tips meant to take you out of your comfort zone and into a toner you.
36. Wash your dog. It will be a work-out, promise.
37. Men’s Health: Cardio Activities – Articles and videos on cardio workouts and how to avoid packing on the pounds by squeezing in a few heart-pumping exercises each week. This is not just for men, ladies. Everyone needs cardio.
38. Spring clean your house any time of the year.
39. AskMen.com: Top 10 Ways To Maximize Cardio Workouts. This guy-centric advice offers ways to get the most out of your cardio in minimal time—an evening not spent sweating away on a boring machine is a better evening already.
40. Walk to run your errands if possible.
41. Melt Off the Inches: Want Some Aerobic Exercise Samples? Half informative article and half schedule example, this site is great for those who want a little more structure in their aerobics.
42. Volunteer at a humane shelter or pre-school and spend your day running after little bundles of energy.
43. Web MD: Exercise At Your Desk. This informative video offers advice on using an exercise ball to actually burn calories while you’re working. Hey, if it’s good enough for Dwight Schrute, it’s good enough for us.
44. Play a round of tennis.

Strength Training

1. MSN Health and Fitness: 10 Incredible At-Home Weight-Loss Exercises. If you can’t decide between losing weight and building muscles, why not do both? This article offers 10 great tips to get you ripped in time for the beach.
2. MSN Health and Fitness: Burn Fat, Drop Pounds. This offers a specific workout for losing more weight with each workout. All it takes are these five easy moves.
3. Rearrange your furniture.
4. About.com Exercise: Five Exercises You Must Do. With so many exercise options, it’s hard to figure out what’s essential and what’s just extra. Here’s a quick list of five exercises that will benefit whatever shape you’re training for.
5. About.com Exercise: Exercise for Beginners – Strength Training. This beginner-friendly article offers a variety of info and resources for strength training. There’s information for specific training specific areas of the body, and links to much more great information.
6. The Exercise and Physical Fitness Page: Strength Training Main Page. This no frills site offers great safety info, a thorough warm-up routine, and key strength training principals, on top of an awesome routine.
7. Strength-Training-Woman.com: Strength Training Exercises. Another great no-frills site, this page offers links to part-specific workouts, as well as core principals for your workout.
8. ExRx.net: Exercise Instruction. This simple page offers a wealth of knowledge. Whether you’re looking for info on exercises, kinesiology, or just plain weight training, this site’s for you.
9. MayoClinic.com: Fitness. If you’re sick of reading regular articles, then tune into this slideshow. It has everything you need to know weight training specific muscle groups.
10. Work your core by sitting on a balance ball while reading or watching television.
11. ShapeFit: Weight Training Exercise Guides – Photos Database of Resistance Exercises. Another image-friendly site, this page offers animated photos to illustrate specific resistance exercises.
12. About.com Exercise: Weight Training 101. For the complete weight training novice, you’ve found the right site. Get info on basics, warm-ups, exercises, and more.
13. Have an arm-wrestling contest.
14. Men’s Fitness: Yoga Power – If you’ve thought about incorporating Yoga into your weight training and figured you didn’t have time, this site is for you. This 30-minute routine is perfectly designed to integrate with what you’re already doing.
15. About.com Yoga: Yoga Poses for Strength. This simple, seamless article offers Yoga poses to strengthen your abs, arms, and legs.
16. About.com Exercise: Total Body Home Workout. With helpful images and warm-up info, this site offers just what it claims: a quick, thorough workout for your entire body.
17. BeginnerTriathlete.com: Strength Training at Home. Whether you’re a triathelete or just a try athelete, this site offers info on exercises for your upper body and legs, with an emphasis on crunches. For added fitness info, check out the included video.
18. About.com Exercise: Strength Training and Specialty Workouts. This is a site you should bookmark immediately. It offers quick links to 11 specific kinds of workouts, meaning that whatever you need, you’ll get.
19. Muscle and Strength: Workout Routines Database. Another site to bookmark immediately, this page offers workouts suitable to beginners and pros alike. Browse specific workouts for every part of your body, and feel that strength pouring through you.

Need more exercise advice and alternatives? Check out magazines like Men’s Health, Shape, Lifestyle Family Fitness and Self for a monthly reminder to get off the couch and tone up for your health.

Did you enjoy this article?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 2:14 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.