Ankle weights were all the fad within the 80s, and we’re pleased to see it is a trend that didn’t die off. In reality, in case you’ve spent any time in a gym, you likely have seen people wearing these mini sandbags around their ankles.
And in case you’ve seen someone wearing them as they perform pull-ups prefer it’s their job, you might have questions. Like, what are those mini weights doing? Is it idea to make use of them? And why is that this crazy person making pull-ups even harder?!
To reply your questions, adding ankle weights to an exercise (or entire workout) makes it infinitely tougher, which brings a complete host of advantages (we’ll speak about these intimately soon). Second answer: It’s definitely idea to make use of them! Third answer: Yes, they might be barely crazy, but they’re also adding extra weight to pull-ups, so who’re we to guage? In our book, a bit of crazy can go an extended method to constructing muscle!
So, now you are probably desirous to begin wearing weights around your ankles too. But, hang on, because it isn’t so simple as just putting them on and waiting for the magic to occur. Just like all other fitness tool, there are some guidelines you might want to follow to ensure your ankle weights workout is not doing more harm than good.
Fortunately, we’re about to get into those guidelines, together with explaining what makes ankle weights so great. Let’s get into it – weighted pull-ups await!
Table of Contents:
- What Are Ankle Weights?
- What Are Ankle Weights Used For?
- 11 Advantages of Ankle Weights
- What Muscles Do Ankle Weights Work?
- Can Ankle Weights Construct Muscle?
- Are Ankle Weights Good For Losing Weight?
- Best Ankle Weight Exercises
- How To Use Ankle Weights
- Drawbacks of Ankle Weights
- Safety Suggestions
- How To Add Ankle Weights To Your Routine
What are Ankle Weights?
Ankle weights are a chunk of coaching equipment mostly marketed to the overall population. They’re viewed as a straightforward, easy method to improve someone’s fitness, normally during day-to-day activities.
They may also be used to make workouts and exercises tougher, working particularly well for many who aren’t able to make an enormous bump up in weight or anyone who desires to make calisthenics or body weight exercises, like pull ups and dead hangs, tougher.
Most ankle weights resemble mini sandbags that you just attach around your ankles using a velcro strap. Although there are various different sizes, probably the most common weights are around 1-3 kilos.
The first goal of ankle weights is to extend muscular strength and improve endurance. By adding this extra weight onto your body, you’ve gotten to exert and produce additional force. This finally ends up strengthening and toning your body, increasing endurance, and may even help with rehabbing injuries.
Ankle weights are removed from an entire fitness solution, but they’re a wonderful tool for targeting specific areas of your body and increasing your strength, particularly in case you are newer to exercise.
What are ankle weights used for?
Since they should not extremely heavy or oversized, ankle weights are sometimes used as a way to supply a bit of extra resistance to a workout. Alternatively, they may also be used whilst you perform each day activities, to assist improve your muscle strength whilst you carry on along with your day.
They sometimes help your legs work harder but aren’t as damaging as strength training exercises with heavier weights. This makes them great for beginners who are only beginning to use progressive overload.
Ankle weights also add easy resistance to body weight exercises.
Since they’re small and straightforward to wear, they permit your body to maneuver freely, enabling you to wear them for every thing from taking a walk across the neighborhood to performing various upper and lower body body weight exercises, along with core moves.
11 Advantages of Ankle Weights
So, why should you concentrate on using ankle weights? These 11 ankle weights advantages will explain what makes them so great.
1) May help lower body fat percentage:
Adding ankle weight resistance to exercises is an easy method to burn more calories and construct strength in your lower body. Once you use resistance training together with a correct weight loss program based on a caloric deficit, you’ll be able to begin to see your body lean out.
Using them might help lower body fat percentage and reduce waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio1. Ultimately, this implies they’ll assist you with any body recomposition goals you’ve gotten.
2) Improve walking mechanics:
If you’ve gotten ever had an injury in your lower body, then you recognize how difficult it might probably be to walk around. In case your feet and ankles are having trouble, then every thing else up the chain may also suffer.
By increasing your walking velocity, step length, cadence, and stride rate, ankle weights improve your ability to walk, ultimately leading to raised biomechanics and fewer injury risk2.
3) Help get well from injuries:
No matter your injury status, whether you’re an athlete who had a nasty ankle sprain or you’re recovering from a stroke, there’s likelihood ankle weights might help by improving your balance3.
Additionally they increase the strength of your ankle and hip joints, which helps decrease foot-dragging through the swing phase of your walking gait. This implies your body can shift weight without developing a limp or muscle imbalance.
4) Improve proprioception:
Proprioception is your body’s ability to sense movement, location, and motion. As we become old, our joint positioning declines, in addition to our stability and balance.
Ankle weights have been shown to assist elderly adults with knee repositioning and improve their walking speed4. This enables your joints to maneuver in the right positions and ranges of motion.
5) Burn calories:
Wearing ankle weights is a type of adding resistance to your body. They will not have the identical effect as something like a barbell squat, but they do make a difference in burning extra calories.
Your body then must burn more calories to provide extra force5.
Burning more calories puts you closer to your goal of a caloric deficit, resulting in a lower body weight and body fat percentage.
6) Allow for higher isolation:
Body weight exercises are great, but it might probably be hard to search out ways to make a number of the moves tougher. This makes it difficult to get stronger and proceed progressing.
Ankle weights eliminate clumsiness and make isolation exercises like side leg lifts or hanging leg raises tougher and effective. This helps you to goal hard-to-reach areas just like the glute medius, hip flexors, and lower abdominals.
7) Enable freedom of movement:
Big exercises like squats and lunges are great for strengthening your lower body. But they don’t strengthen the hip in all of its ranges of motion, and it’s not easy to make use of a weight during a movement like a standing hip rotation exercise.
Because it’s a ball and socket joint, your hip needs to maneuver in all directions to make sure you don’t have any weak spots. Ankle weights allow you the liberty of movement to do exactly that and help improve hip mobility and strength in all these ranges of motion.
8) Higher heart health:
With the additional resistance out of your ankle weights, your body needs to provide more force, meaning your body needs more oxygen.
As you’re employed harder and require more oxygen, you are training your heart, ensuring it becomes more efficient. This ends in a lower heart rate and blood pressure during exercise and while at rest. Training with ankle weights also helps increase stamina, resulting in improved cardiovascular and pulmonary health.
9) Tone legs and construct muscle:
As we mentioned, they won’t have the identical effect as a squat or a deadlift, but ankle weights will help tone your lower body and construct muscle.
Keep in mind that ankle weights also goal hard-to-reach areas like your hip flexors, glute medius, and the foot and ankle complex. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, so strengthening these smaller muscles may have a serious upside for lower body strength.
10) Versatile:
Ankle weights should not a one-trick pony and will be used for multiple activities. Everyone from someone brand latest to fitness to an older adult to knowledgeable athlete can find something useful to do with ankle weights.
You possibly can definitely get creative with how you employ these to strengthen your lower body and core. You possibly can even add them to your next pool session.
11) Construct stronger bones:
Performing light weight-bearing exercises is an important safety measure to fight osteoporosis. Using ankle weights is an important method to start understanding with resistance, improving your bone mass density, and decreasing your risk of fractures.
They’re especially helpful for the hips and ankles.
What Muscles do Ankle Weights Work?
Although ankle weights are lighter in resistance, they will still significantly affect your muscles. They primarily goal your lower body, since they’re worn in your ankles.
Each time you walk, balance on one leg, and even stand still, your glutes act as stabilizers to assist keep your pelvis aligned. Movements like walking lunges, side-lying leg lifts, and donkey kicks are great examples of how ankle weights might help your glutes get stronger in all planes of motion.
Ankle weights mean you can perform several different hamstring curl variations that help decrease your likelihood of knee injury and increase performance. On the flip side of your thigh, they assist strengthen the quadriceps and improve their dynamic relationship with the hip flexors so you’ll be able to lift and extend your knee confidently.
Something so simple as walking or doing calf raises with ankle weights will help construct your calves and muscles of the foot and ankle complex. Additionally they are improbable for targeting the lower abs and hip flexors.
So, to summarize here, ankle weights work your whole lower body muscles!
Can Ankle Weights Construct Muscle?
Ankle weights are a type of resistance, and as we all know, adding resistance with progressive overload is the way you construct strength, and a stronger muscle is an even bigger muscle, most often.
Having said that, they won’t have the identical effect as resistance exercises like a barbell squat, a deadlift, or a bench press.
They’re great at targeting areas of the hips and core, that are essential for overall health and mobility. If these muscles are stronger, you’ll probably get stronger in other movements as well, leading to much more increased strength and muscle.
Are ankle weights good for shedding pounds?
Ankle weights will force your body to provide more force, in turn requiring additional energy and burning more calories. But, remember, a caloric deficit is required to drop extra pounds.
This implies you might want to determine what number of calories your body needs to remain at maintenance and reduce 200 to 500 calories from that, to begin. In case you need assistance with weight loss program, try our 4-week weight reduction meal plan to start.
In case you are obese or are brand latest to exercise, body weight exercises with ankle weights will likely be difficult for you and can burn significant calories. They won’t be as effective as a correct strength training routine, but they’re a start and might help with weight reduction, depending in your fitness level.
The Best Ankle Weight Exercises
As discussed, ankle weights are an incredible tool for making body weight exercises tougher. They make exercises and activities harder, which advantages beginners and advanced lifters alike.
For some inspiration, listed here are a few of the perfect exercises you’ll be able to do with ankle weights.
- Lunges (back, front, and side stepping)
- Leg Lift
- Single-Leg Glute Bridges
- Standing or Prone Hamstring Curl
- Side-Lying Hip Abduction
- Superman Holds
- Squats, Squats w/ Side Leg Lifts, Squat Jumps
- Donkey Kicks
- Fire Hydrants
- Marching Variations (standing, plank position, lying on back)
- Bird Dogs and Dead Bugs
- Scissors and Flutter Kicks
- Hanging Leg Raises
- Walking
The way to Use Ankle Weights
Adjustable ankle weights are relatively straightforward to make use of. Simply wrap one weight around each of your ankles and use the velcro strap to regulate the fit.
It needs to be comfortably snug but not too tight as you fit it above the joint. In case you secure the burden appropriately, you shouldn’t have any issues with the burden coming loose whilst you work out.
Some friction will be uncomfortable, so in case you prefer, wear taller athletic socks to guard your skin.
Drawbacks of Ankle Weights
Ankle weights are great to incorporate in your workout routine, but there are still drawbacks to pay attention to. Here’s what to think about before incorporating ankle weights into your routine.
1) Can create imbalances:
In case you use ankle weights an excessive amount of, it might probably result in significant imbalances in your quads and hip flexors. Wearing these for prolonged periods of walking will add significant resistance to those muscles and may strengthen them an excessive amount of, throwing your system off balance.
Also, in case you are brand latest to using ankle weights and do an excessive amount of too soon, they may cause ligament injuries to your knees, hips, and back.
2) More weight isn’t necessarily higher:
More often than not, when we predict of strength exercises, the goal is to maintain increasing the burden so you’ll be able to overload your muscles.
With regards to ankle weights, it’s best to persist with 1-2% of your body weight. Any greater than that and their effectiveness decreases while your injury risk increases.
3) They should not be the one tool in your toolbox:
It’s vital to do not forget that ankle weights are a tool with a selected purpose.
They’re great for targeting some lower body areas and adding resistance to body weight movements. They should not replacements for a progressive overload training program or a magic pill solution for weight reduction.
Discover a weight loss program you’ll be able to keep on with, and pick a workout split you enjoy. We even have an important body weight workout and calisthenics routine, so there truly is something for everybody!
4) May cause joint pain:
Although they’re a wonderful option for rehabilitating injuries, in some cases, they will find yourself making existing injuries even worse. If you’ve gotten knee or hip issues, avoid using ankle weights until you talk over with your doctor.
This is very true for cardio activities like running or jumping.
In the event that they create an imbalance and you employ them enough, you may find yourself giving yourself all kinds of foot and ankle problems. If you’ve gotten any concerns about this, it could be higher to carry off on ankle weights.
Safety Suggestions
Ankle weights themselves don’t cause injuries. Keep in mind that they are only tools in your toolbox, just like a kettlebell, barbell, or treadmill. But they will increase your risk of injury in case you misuse them.
It’s vital to recollect your intentions when using ankle weights.
Start steadily and progress slowly, similar to with every other fitness routine. Begin with the bottom weight you’ll be able to handle and let your body get accustomed to the brand new load for not less than two weeks, as a rule of thumb.
And in case you are planning on walking with ankle weights, start with a small distance and light-weight weights. You possibly can avoid injuries by increasing your distance slowly over time.
The way to Program Your Ankle Weights
Remember, in case you are latest to exercise and are planning to wear these for walking, start slowly. As a start line, aim to wear ankle weights not less than 3 times per week for no less than 20 minutes.
In case you are using a strength training routine, you don’t normally see ankle weights days listed on a program. You possibly can, nevertheless, program exercises with ankle weights to suit into your workout regardless of what your training split looks like. They’re great for further improving your muscle mass and constructing leg muscles, making them an important addition to your leg workout.
In case you are doing a lower body day, you’ll be able to add these later in your workout, after your strength exercises, as a finisher. In case you are going much more specific with a body part split and it’s glute day, exercises just like the donkey kick are a wonderful addition to activate or finish off the glutes.
On top of that, just about every workout will include some core training, and ankle weights are all the time an ideal addition for the lower abs, lower back, and hip flexor muscle groups. Ankle weights may also be a wonderful option for at-home workouts in case you are busy and can’t make it to the gym.
Ankle Weights Advantages: Final Takeaways
I hope you are starting to comprehend that ankle weights could be the training equipment you are missing out of your routine. They definitely pack a singular set of advantages and are useful for a big selection of individuals.
And, remember, you needn’t wear them daily to see the advantages of ankle weights. Start wearing them, progress slowly, and you may begin to see some remarkable results from this piece of coaching equipment.
