Due to everything that is going on at the moment, more people are having to workout at home or outside more than ever. For a lot of people this is completely new and culture shock. Obvious things such as running and cycling have always been outside activities.
But, what do you do if you spent all your time training in a gym, lifting weights using equipment. Now you have none of that. I'm gonna cover some tips to help you workout at home or outside.
First thing I want to address is equipment. Not a lot of people have any sort of gym equipment at home. Depending on the sort of training you are looking to do, you are more than likely gonna need to buy some. Now this doesn't mean buy a squat rack or bench or rowing machine.
But I personally have been working out at using a basic set of adjustable dumbbells, 8,12 and 20kg kettle bells and a couple a couple of resistance bands.
This is also the equipment I have used with clients, now that we can train outside. If your focus is cardio, then you can get by fine with running and body weight HIIT. But for those wanting to maintain or increase muscle mass, you're gonna need resistance.
Some people already have some of this equipment lying around the house or in the garage. So how do you get a workout using these bits of random equipment that you have lying about. It's really quite simple as a lot of these are techniques that you would or should use for progressive overload in the gym anyway.
One of the first techniques is time under tension. Simply slow the pace of your reps down. This is great for push ups, squats and anything else you can think of. If you don't have a heavy enough weight for, over head pressing for example, you can pause at the bottom, fast up, pause at the top and then come down slowly.
Really focus on control and then pause again at the bottom and repeat. You will definitely "feel the
burn" with this. Another useful method along the same lines is adding in pauses. Take squats for example, 20 squats isn't too tough. Now add a 5 second pause at the bottom of each rep.
Now it's become a hell of a lot harder. As I toughed on previously, you can combine the two and focus on the lowering, pause for a few seconds and the some up fast. This can be applied to any exercise.
Another way to up the intensity is to shorten your rest period between sets. Now you're not getting your body a lot of time to recover before it has to work again.
This is a great way to increase your work capacity as the one thing that everyone craves for is more rest. By not giving your muscles the normal rest time, you are forcing them to work harder.
The simplest way of all is to just do more. Do more reps and/or more sets. A lot of us won't have the the normally weights we'd use in the gym at home, so instead of doing 8-10 reps on a heavy weight, try 15-20 on a lighter weight. This too will definitely help improve your work capacity.
These are only some of the things that you can do to increase the the intensity or difficulty of your workouts. These methods should also be adapted in the gym. Instead of doing the same reps, on the same weight, with the same rest, instead, use these methods to progressively overload your muscles and allow you to push on to your next level.