Home workouts have become the new norm for a lot of fitness enthusiasts during this global pandemic. By now you have probably come up with some pretty good and interesting home workouts to get a good sweat going, but are you really getting the most out of them? I am guessing there are still some ways you could improve here, and there’s no better time to improve than now!
I am going to go through several topics that relate to home workouts. Utilize them within your routines to start to see true progress even with limited equipment and space at home.
Progressive Overload
In order to continue to see progress in your physique, athleticism, power, or strength while working out from home, you must still have some component of progressive overload within your training. Progressive overload simply means doing more work over time. If you are constantly doing the same exercises for the same rep schemes, under the same loads, you will continue to see stagnant results.
How can we do more work without more weight?
There are so many ways to make things harder on yourself over time when training form home, we just need to be a bit creative. Besides adding weight to a given exercise we can add reps at the same weight, increase the total number of sets, or slow down the tempo we perform the exercise at. We can also utilize metabolic technics such as dropsets or rest pause sets to increase the overall stimulus placed on the muscles.
Dropset: Start at a fairly heavy weight (something you can only do 10-15 reps with). Perform as many reps as possible then drop the weight about 20% and again perform as many reps as possible without any rest. Repeat this process 3 to 4 times within a single dropset and you will be humbled by some pretty light weights by the end of it!
Rest Pause: Choose a weight you can perform 10-15 reps with or use your bodyweight. Perform as many reps as possible then set the weights down and take 4 to 5 deep breaths (about 10 seconds of rest) then pick the weights back up and perform another set of as many reps as you can (this set should be around 1/3 of the reps you performed on the first set). Repeat the process 3 to 4 times and reap the benefit of performing all the hard reps in 4 or 5 sets without taking the time to go through the full sets!
Regardless of the techniques you use to do more work over time the trend overall needs to be in an upward direction to see increases in size, strength, and athleticism.
Keep Workouts Short
Motivation levels are certainly not at their highest when it comes to working out during this pandemic, especially when you are forced to do so from your own home with potentially limited equipment and space. One way to battle through is to keep your workouts short an efficient. A 45 minute training session is a lot less daunting than a 2 hour long session and is much easier to work into your daily routine. This doesn’t need to mean you are doing less work throughout the week either, as you should be able to fit in 45 minutes to 1 hour almost daily as oppose to doing 3 or 4 workouts that are 2 hours in length during a given week. Again, this takes some creativity and planning, but if you can put in a little bit of effort before hand to ensure efficiency and progress, the workout itself can be enjoyable and energizing!
As always, the key driver of success is two sided, consistent progress! We need both to continue to see desired results and the tactics discussed throughout this article should give some good tools to remain consistent in your efforts and continue to do more work over time while training from home!
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