Raise your hand if you have ever taken part in the TUI BLUE Bodyweight course in one of our hotels. In the BLUEf!t Park, you train on our fitness platform with different exercises in a certain order – all using only your own body weight. We’ll tell you how it works here in our blog!
Stay fit while on holiday – this is important to many of our guests in TUI BLUE hotels. In addition to the wide range of activities, there are also lots of sports and fitness options, offered alone or in a course. We decided to meet at the Palm Garden for the Bodyweight course with BLUEf!t Guide, Lars. We met a number of other participants at the BLUEf!t Park and looked at the luminous, blue panels which are placed around the fitness platform. We grabbed a quick water bottle from the refrigerator – and here we go!
Bodyweight Course: Exercising with your own body weight
It began with planking, an exercise in which we got into a push-up position with level forearms, keeping the body in a straight line and bracing for several seconds. It looks simple, but is quite exhausting! After repeating the exercise several times, we were warmed up quite nicely.
What awaited us at the second station of the Bodyweight course was initially alien to some of us: burpees. We quickly found out how it goes: you start by standing upright. You make a deep squat, putting your hands in front of your body, and then lurch forward in a push-up position. You then do one push-up, go through all the movements back up, and then jump in the air. The exercise can be repeated any number of times, but after 10 burpees, we were already beat! But there are three stations …
The stations to follow were crunches, squats, and jumping jacks. The last one reminded us of childhood, bouncing like a puppet. The squats are your basic squats, and crunches are a sort of sit-up that don’t make you sit all the way up, but rather focuses on small movements – it’s just as demanding, though! In the meantime, our muscles were burning. Our BLUEf!t Guide, Lars, did all the exercises and then walked around to correct the technique of individual participants. “You have to make sure to do it right,” he said, “Or you’ll get pain instead of your body getting any benefit.” He was right – and it was somehow reassuring to just have someone showing us how these exercises in the Bodywight course are supposed to be executed.
Also, training in the group was fun – anyone can join if they want to, regardless of physical condition. By the end, we had done the Bodyweight course all the way through twice and were quite sore, but proud of ourselves for persevering. Even Lars applauded us and said: “You did great with that!”
And we had earned the right to what came next: Off to the shower and then into the pool!