Stay at Home Fitness Tips to Survive the Quarantine
COVID-19 pandemic is still here, and by the looks of it, it will stay here for a while, or at least until doctors and scientists come up with a vaccine. That means that many gyms are not yet safe, and may stay way for a while.
However, it's not all bad news. Once you start working out at home, you will realize how effective it can be, and how little equipment is necessary to build a nice physique and a healthy body. Plus, you are not wasting time fighting traffic or missing workouts because of the bad weather.
To speed up things for you, this post will give you some tips on how to stay in shape even without leaving your house. Stay tuned!
Tip #1: Go Back To Basics
Most regular gym-goers often forget about fundamentals - bodyweight movements. Even hardcore lifters often treat bodyweight exercises as subpar, something that you only do when you don't have access to equipment, which is a mistake.
Bodyweight exercises, also known as calisthenics, are a fantastic way to build muscle anywhere. If you are creative enough, you will be able to build a great body only with bodyweight exercises - and that comes from a company that sells fitness equipment, but it's a fact!
Bodyweight exercises you can do at home are quite easy to perform. Some of the examples are pushups, squats, lunges, hip raises, crunches, planks, jumping jacks. If you have a bar or a horizontal tree branch in your yard, you should incorporate some pullups, and hanging leg raises too.
Even though they don't sound like much, you will soon notice how bodyweight exercises are more demanding than they initially seemed. No matter how basic they are, pushups can get you very sore the next day, so don't underestimate this old-school favorite!
Tip #2: Get Some Essential Fitness Gear
We said how bodyweight exercises are great, and how you can build a great body just by doing calisthenics alone (any prisoner will confirm that). However, doing that is not exactly easy. Some muscle groups are tough to hit if you don't have access to equipment, or if you are not extremely fit and agile.
For example, doing rows at home can be hard if you don't have a table to crawl under. And even then, inverted rows can be too hard for beginners, and too easy for advanced lifters. Pullups are similar, as you need to have a pullup bar, and they are a nightmare for complete beginners. Also, there is not an effective way to train your lower back with just your bodyweight, which will mean that bodyweight back training will be quite ineffective unless you have the perfect conditions.
Also, training your shoulders just with your bodyweight can be hard too. Sure, pushups hit your front delts, but unless you are strong enough to do handstand pushups, or inverted overhead press (when your feet are on a chair), you will miss a lot.
Resistance Bands - The Most Versatile Piece Of Equipment You Can Buy
Fortunately, you can fix everything we mentioned above just by getting some resistance bands. Resistance bands will let you train every single muscle in your body, just like in the gym, but all that from the comfort of your home.
Resistance bands are great for overhead presses, rows, and even deadlifts. Plus, you can use them to help your pullups, which will unlock this exercise even for complete beginners.
But, you can also use them to make bodyweight squats and pushups harder, as well as other bodyweight movements. In fact, there are so many power band exercises you can do for each body part to keep you busy for a long time.
What's also great about exercising with bands is the fact they take up zero living space, unlike most other fitness equipment. Once you finish your workout, just put them away, and you have your living room for yourself again.
Tip #3: Be More Creative
When training in a gym, things are quite linear, and all that you have to do to keep improving is to add more weight to the bar whenever you can. But, when exercising at home, that's not possible. Still, there are other ways to progress, and lifting more weight is not the only one.
The most obvious way to improve is to try to squeeze out more reps. If you did 20 pushups last week, do 25 this week, and so on.
You can also increase the training frequency. If you went to the gym three times per week, up that to five home workouts per week. More training will challenge your muscles in a new way, stimulating growth even without adding weight.
But, one of the best ways to make home workouts challenging is to incorporate shorter breaks and perform giant sets and supersets. Instead of resting 3+ minutes between sets of a single exercise, rest 30-60 seconds and jump to a new one that works other muscle groups. That way, your muscles will rest while you train other muscles, but the workout will be much more challenging overall.
Conclusion
As you can see, training at home can be fun and challenging if you do it right. What's fantastic is that you don't have to spend a fortune to build a great body; you only need some quality resistance bands. With the right exercise selection, you will be fitter than you ever were before, all from the comfort of your home.
Who knows, when things get back to normal, you might decide that you no longer need that gym membership, which will save you a lot of money and an enormous amount of time you spend commuting to the gym and back.