Running up and down stairs is great cardio, but for the next instalment in our stairs-themed fitness challenge, we’re going to get some strength work in. Let’s do some push-ups.

A few weeks ago, I interrupted my regular routine of powerlifting workouts to run a half marathon. I raced it all-out, and woke up the next day with a killer case of delayed onset muscle soreness. But it was a lifting day, so I dragged my sore butt into the gym and did my regular workout. And it felt nice and easy, thanks to RPE.

The three events of a powerlifting meet — the squat, bench press, and deadlift — are easy enough to learn and train at home. And so plenty of us have trained these lifts regardless of whether we have an opportunity to show off at a meet. So if you’ve been hanging out in a home gym and might like a little friendly competition, check out the #GarageGymCompetition that’s happening right now on Reddit and Instagram.

Use workout apps long enough, and you’ll realise you can’t trust a single one. Sometimes they go defunct, or you take a break from running and forget your password, or your phone dies and takes your data with it. And even when all goes well, the apps can’t always track the metrics you should be tracking.

I’ve spent most of my life looking up at pull-up bars, wishing I could ascend to their height. Sometimes I would train hard, and I would get one (1) pull-up. But then I’d slack off for a hot minute, and I’d be back down to zero. I’m a cis woman, not particularly gifted with upper-body muscle. But last year I decided I was going to focus on building the strength to do pull-ups, plural, and by god I did.

How much weight do you need to lift to get stronger? A new study suggests it isn’t as much as you think — but more is still better when it comes to muscle size.

While almost any exercise has a resistance band version, there are only a few exercises where the band is one of the best ways to do it. Here are some of my favourites, with a focus on upper body moves. Join our resistance band challenge and give them a try!

There seem to be two kinds of gyms: the kind where everybody is doing hip thrusts, and the kind where nobody has ever heard of them. In the first, you might feel intimidated; in the second, you might not want to be that weirdo. Fear not: we’ll help you get started with confidence.

I can bench press a grey wolf, I think. (The last time I was at the gym, I did sets of 10 reps, so I went lighter, around a mature wombat). I can easily deadlift a black bear, maybe a baby elephant on a good day, but by the end of 2019 my goal is at least a male giant panda.

This year we challenged ourselves to blaze new trails in lifting, cardio, yoga and more. Along the way we upgraded just about every aspect of our fitness, from achieving near-transcendence on a running path to working around that one arsehole at the gym.

Here are our best fitness posts of 2018.

There are plenty of great apps to keep track of your running mileage, and a clear winner when it comes to cycling (Strava, duh). But it's a bit harder to pick a winner when you're lifting in the gym. Until recently, all the apps were clunky and hard to use. Now... well, only some of them are.

Putting together a bodyweight workout routine is easy: just do some pushups, and some squats, and some...uh...other stuff. To get a balanced workout, you have to know which exercises target which muscles. Which is why we love this bodyweight exercise chart from Darebee.

How's the bench press challenge going? Hopefully you've managed to lift something, whether that's a traditional barbell, or dumbbells or weights of any size. Today we're looking at another challenge that you might face if you don't have a fully equipped gym: how to bench press without a bench.

Summer is a great time to get in shape — you can enjoy the non-freezing weather, the longer days and, depending on your line of work, you might have more free time. But then a holiday happens, and your fitness goals take a back seat for a little while. Here’s how to minimise the damage.

We’ve squatted and we’ve deadlifted, so it’s about time we tackle the bench press.

And we’re doing it with room for everybody: Even if you’ve never tried, and are perhaps slightly terrified of dropping the bar on your face, you can still join in.

We’ve been through a lot in our October fitness challenge. We committed to doing some deadlifts, we psyched up and stretched out, we experimented with single-leg moves and unusual objects, and we learned how to get plates on and off the bar without a struggle.

Now it’s time to settle up: What did you accomplish, learn or otherwise experience this month?

I hope everybody's having fun in the deadlift challenge, but if you're not, is it because you don't have a barbell to lift? We covered some dumbbell and bodyweight alternatives last week (the trick is to do the deadlifts on one leg), but here are some more options for when you still want to lift something heavy, but you don't have convenient equipment.

Hope everyone's enjoying the deadlift challenge! Even if you're an old hand with free weights, deadlifts can be tricky to set up because the bar is on the ground, not on a rack, and you'll soon be dealing with weights that are heavy enough to be unwieldy.

We're deadlifting this month, and I'd love to hear how it's going for everyone so far. (I did one workout already, and will try to get in two next week.) But if you're new to this, or if you find the move intimidating, we have some suggestions for how to prepare.