Towel Day is coming up on Monday 25th, so today we’re going to look at a few ways in which a towel can be employed in your travels towards fitness.
Padding
Let’s start with the obvious. If you’re going to be in contact with a hard, cold surface, you’ll find your exercise a lot more pleasant if you put a towel between you. This helps a lot in exercises like the wrestler’s bridge, where the top of your head is in contact with the ground – it really relieves a lot of discomfort.
When using a towel (or anything else) in this manner, make sure that it’s not likely to slip. Having it slide away under you will throw off your form and could get you hurt.
Stretching and Isometrics
Towels are generally pretty resistant, so you can easily use them to push or pull against. You could do a pretty comprehensive routine using only a towel if you wanted to.
A common neck exercise is to hold the towel behind your head and gently pull forward, while pushing back with the neck. It is important to apply force gently here as you don’t want to strain your neck – just enough to give it something to work against.
Another simple isometric exercise can be done by grasping the towel firmly by the ends behind your back, and using one arm to pull while applying resistance with your other arm.
Similarly, you can brace the towel against one foot and push while applying resistance with your arms.
A word of warning: be careful when doing assisted stretches in this way. If you feel pain, you are going too far.
Pullups
Towel pull ups are a great way to increase your grip strength. All you need to do is hang or tie a towel (or two small towels) around the bar and grip the ends instead of the bar to pull yourself up. If you use two towels, it should not look too different from a normal pull up, while if you use one (or keep two close together), it will feel a bit like pulling yourself up a rope.
Either way, you should be feeling your forearms after this one.
And of course, if your towel is still reasonably clean after all this, you can also use it to dry yourself after a hard workout!
Do you have any other uses for a towel which we have not talked about here? We would love to hear about them!
Header image: Neatly arranged towels in a department store in Brussels.© Dimitri Popov / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.