I’m sure you’ve all heard the expression “use it, or lose it.”  That is true of many things in life including muscles.  When muscles are not used the atrophy.  They grow soft and eventually are broken down by the body.  What can you do to prevent that from happening?  It’s really quite easy.  Use it!

Using it doesn’t have to mean hours at the gym, 4 days a week, every week.  It doesn’t mean lying on your floor doing crunches and pushups for hours.  Strength training at home can be as simple as a quick routine with resistance bands for 20 minutes, 2 days a week.  Walking and stretching activate the muscles without a lot of work.

Get yourself some resistance bands and I will give you some exercises that will let you strength train with them.  Do 20 reps of these exercises in a slow and controlled manner to maintain muscle you already have.  You can do leg abductions with your band and a chair.  You can also do leg adductions and hamstring curls with the same equipment.  Another strength training exercise that can be done is a squat.  That takes care of the muscle groups in your legs.  A lateral raise, a chest press, upper back fly, and lat pulldown should take care of the chest and shoulders.  Follow these with a triceps extension, biceps curls for the arms and back extensions and a reverse crunch for a full body strength training session, all done with no equipment but resistance bands.