Right now we all have to stay at home, stay safe, stay healthy, and try to stay strong. The last part of this sentence might be something you are concerned about. A lot of stressed people contacted me and worried that they might lose their profits. Are you right to worry?
My answer is emphatic … no!
This answer has two parts:
First, in the big scheme of things, when you lose something in size and strength, it's really not that big a deal compared to reality that many people have lost their lives (and many more will lose their lives) as a result of the COVID- 19 pandemic.
Those who maintain their health have the opportunity to lose loved ones, endure extreme financial difficulties, close deals, and watch years of hard work go up in smoke. When you look at things through this lens, it doesn't seem like a big deal to lose 50 pounds from your squat or an inch from your arms, does it?
Second, maintaining muscles is much easier than building them, even if we don't have access to our gyms for several months. So with minimal training, you can pretty much keep the muscles and strength you've built up. You don't need expensive fitness equipment to keep your profits. And even if you lose some size and strength, the phenomenon of muscle memory is real and you can regain it extremely quickly. Panic over!
Although I don't think that training to hit PRs on your lifts or add a quarter of an inch to your calves should be on your radar now, I think exercise is important. It is important for your well-being. In times of unprecedented stress, worry and disorder, we have to do everything we can to maintain our mental and physical health.
Training is almost certainly an important part of your lifestyle when you read Breaking Muscle. It probably serves several purposes in your life. It has taught you valuable lessons and given you so much more than bigger, stronger muscles. It has developed discipline, taught you the value of hard work, reduced stress, made you more resilient, and created an outlet for anger, fear, and frustration.
Your passion for training should mean that you have a healthy body weight, body fat, and blood pressure, and that you have a robust immune system that has been strengthened by both exercise and a nutritious diet.
Your training will likely help you structure your daily routine. When everything else around you is in turmoil, resorting to healthy habits and routines can keep you calm and allow you to be productive. This is important for your way of thinking. For the generation of snowflakes, this time should be a major challenge.
Many of them will fight and adopt bad habits. You're different. You have a catalog of challenges you have to face in the gym. These will help you take on other challenges. For most of us, this will help us deal with it.
Exercise keeps both your body and mind healthy by giving you a physical outlet for your stress. Your daily training is something that you can look forward to and that gives you a sense of achievement. These are two things that are difficult to get at the moment.
Training at home
Let me explain the facts about free time, training from home, muscle wasting, muscle building and some example exercises that you can do with minimal equipment.
Muscle loss does not occur overnight
If you take a few weeks out of the gym, you won't lose all of your profits! According to several studies, you won't lose any. Some excellent studies in 2013 and one in 2017 showed that well-trained gymnastics rats did not lose any muscle mass during up to three weeks of training.
Maintaining muscles and strength is much easier than building them up
Even if your training is very limited in the coming weeks and months, you can keep your gains with very little training. A study from 2011 came to the conclusion that muscle mass could only be maintained with 1/9 of the usual training volume for 32 weeks! Another study from 2013 found that just 1-2 workouts a week are enough to maintain strength.
You don't need heavy weights
One of the biggest concerns people have when training at home is that they don't put up enough resistance to make their training effective. Assuming you don't have a personal iron paradise at home, you probably had the same worries.
I have good news for you …
You can build muscles with lighter weights than normal. Studies have shown that similar muscle growth occurs when exercising with 5 to 30 reps until failure. A 2016 study found that there was no difference in muscle gains when you used 30% or 80% of your 1-rep maximum and exercised to failure.
Another study from 2018 found that loads of 40, 60 and 80% led to the same growth rates. They found that 20% was not optimal. As a result, we can confidently say that you are fine as long as you use loads with a maximum of 30 repetitions (or more) and train until failure.
Muscle memory
If there is no muscle loss three weeks before training, it can occur after that time. If you don't exercise for three to eight weeks, you lose muscle. The good news, it only takes 2-3 weeks to keep it.
Restoring muscles is a much faster process than developing them for the first time. Countless lifters can confirm this after taking a break due to injury.
A valuable lesson from leisure training
One final point to consider is that a break in the gym could be just what you need. Deloads are a well-known and widely accepted strategy for improved long-term results. All top coaches and athletes recognize their value and use it. The typical trainee ignores them. The emotional attachment to being in the gym means that you are unlikely to discharge often enough (or not at all!). Here's a quick, hard-to-swallow truth for you …
… If you think deloads are for wimps, you're probably training like one!
When taking the concept of time away from training, it is advisable to consider periods of active recovery and strategic deconditioning.
Strategic deconditioning is a basic principle of hypertrophy-specific training (HST). HST is a training method developed by Bryan Haycock (an upcoming guest on the Breaking Muscle podcast) to build muscle as efficiently as possible.
Strategic deconditioning can help you build muscle in the long term. If you take some time to train, your tiredness will be reduced, complete recovery will be possible and your body will be "sensitized" to the muscle-building stimuli of traditional bodybuilding training with high volume.
When you return to exercise, you get an increased muscle building response. In the long run, it is far more efficient to improve training volume and intensity and take time out than to constantly grind away the gym 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year!
Almost everyone misses the big impact of this strategy. The next few weeks offer you the opportunity to discover the advantages. When you take trips to the gym off the table, you can finally learn the benefits of strategic deconditioning. Hopefully you are smart enough to use it in the future once the current situation has calmed down.
Long story short, if you've been training hard this year, it's not a bad thing to have some time (2-3 weeks) of training completely. In fact, it's probably exactly what you need.
You cannot expect to grow up and avoid training forever
As I mentioned earlier, the risk of muscle loss increases after the 3 week mark. If you want to avoid it, it is wise to do some exercise. Without a gym, this depends on working with body weight and the equipment you have lying around in the house. I have put together a lot of home trainings for my online and personal customers.
Some of them have no equipment at home and some of them have quite a bit. I had to get a bit creative to give them effective workouts, but I am very confident that they will all get great results with these workouts.
You will also do so if you follow those listed below in this article.
The principles of the training still apply!
This is not a time to do crazy workouts, full of random exercises popularized by a reality TV star who became an Instagram fit fluencer!
Although you can't train the same way as in the gym, you can train logically and productively.
Therefore, you should program workouts with the 6 most important movement patterns in the core.
These are:
- Squat Pattern (single leg versions – number!)
- hip joint
- Horizontal pressure
- Horizontal train
- Vertical print
- Vertical train
If you train and work hard based on these movement patterns, you can do a lot of progress training from home.
Here are some examples:
- Squat patterns – such as lunges, split squats, pistols, step-ups and squats by skaters
- Hip joint – RDLs with one leg, RDLs with band or good mornings, hip thrust with increased heel, back extensions, buttocks and nordics (* Nordics are technically not a hip joint, but they train the rear chain very well!)
- Horizontal pushups – pushups, backpack pushups, ribbon pushups, pushups with heel height, one-arm pushups, dips
- Horizontal train – inverted rows, rows of towels, rows of backpacks, rows of seat belts
- Vertical push – handstand pushups, pike pushups, band-shoulder press
- Vertical pull – chin and chin-up variants, band-lat pulldowns
Now could be a time to train your core. Most of us neglect that and we will likely be humbled by the many body weight options here.
Are you still worried about losing your winnings?
Let's recap:
- Muscle loss is unlikely to occur in the first three weeks of exercise
- Maintaining muscles is much easier than building them
- You don't need heavy weights
- Even if you lose muscle, it will be restored very quickly when you return to normal exercise
- 1-3 weeks without training could be exactly what you need
- Given the wide rep range that is effective, your workouts don't require expensive fitness equipment
- During training (in the gym or at home) we try to generate an internal reaction of the muscle to an external load. This external load can take various forms. Body weight, straps, heavy backpacks and a TRX can do the job just as well as bars and free weights (at least in the short term).
- This is an opportunity to use one of the key mechanisms of hypertrophy that is often neglected – this could actually release some benefits that your normal workout won't use
Hopefully that calms your mind!
There are three mechanisms of hypertrophy:
- Mechanical tension
- Metabolic stress
- Muscle damage
Home training is the perfect opportunity to use number two on this list. Although I have developed body weight training that provides a significant mechanical tension stimulus. You can find this at the end of the article.
Metabolic stress is an extremely strong stimulus to exercise. I often program phases that aim to target this muscle building path as the last block in a mass gain phase. After traditional bodybuilding work is stale and a plateau has been reached, a metabolite-style workout may be just what is needed. In my experience, this type of training is an extremely effective growth stimulus in the short term.
Workouts with metabolic stress are incredibly effective for about a month. I have found that the body responds incredibly well to this type of training. Then falling yields occur and the novelty factor subsides and profits slow down again. Hopefully you are a little more optimistic about the prospect of training from home and can see that the next month is indeed an opportunity to build muscle.
Fortunately, the training techniques that are best used to create metabolic stress require less weight than regular gym workouts. They also generally require higher repetitions, shorter rest times, and intensity enhancement techniques such as partial repetitions, circuits, super sets, tri sets, giant sets, and drop sets.
Do what you can with what you have, where you are
Now is the time to focus on metabolic stress-style workouts.
Metabolic stress is commonly known as "pump" and refers to cell swelling and increased acidity (the "burning") in a muscle during exercise. This happens when higher repetitions are done with shorter rest periods, and there are many scientific studies that show that this contributes to muscle growth.
When developing programs to combat metabolic stress, I often use 15-30 repetition sets or combine exercises in sequence to maximize stressful time and the accumulation of metabolites in a particular muscle. Sometimes this means that you can do up to 100 repetitions in a very short time.
Since this training style is different, it offers a new incentive. A novel stimulus is a powerful tool when it comes to building muscle. As a result, it can trigger accelerated muscle building for about a month while the body adapts to it.
Here are some quick tips to optimize your approach to metabolite-style training:
- Use shorter rest periods than in the gym (e.g. 30-60 seconds).
- Combine exercises (e.g. super sets, tri sets, mechanical drop sets, etc.). You can find an example in my Shoulder Shocker – DB Only Giant Set at the end of this article.
- Train at a higher frequency – these types of training allow you to train more often. Most people can do six days a week. You can also hit each muscle group more often. Exercising a muscle every 48 hours is fine
- Consider using a blood flow restriction (BFR), as this means you can get results with very little strain
- Program the work of individual limbs. For example, split squats require much less external stress than normal squats
- Slow down your pace – especially in the lowering phase
- Paused repetitions – Stop at the hardest part of the movement and pull the muscle tightly together for a few seconds
Metabolite training done right
When you exercise to create metabolic stress and build muscle in higher rep ranges, it is critical that you bring your sets close to failure. Research shows that training up to (or very close to) failure is more important when doing sets with high reps. You can build as much muscle from 5 repetitions as you can up to 30 repetitions, but you have to approach the failure of the sets with higher repetitions for them to be effective.
Given this information, it is important that all of your sets are on the verge of failure. I generally recommend never leaving more than 2 reps on one of your sets in reserve when using metabolite-style workouts. I also suggest that the last sentence you do for an exercise fails.
Below I have listed a few sample trainings that require minimal equipment:
Body weight only mechanical tension & metabolic stress workout
A: Handstand pushups (or pike pushups if HSPU is not possible), 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2010, 120s (this is quite challenging for most and causes high mechanical stresses, so longer rest periods are fine).
B: Pistol Squat (or Pistol Squat to Box), 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2010, 90s (this is quite challenging for most and leads to high mechanical tension, so longer rest periods are fine).
C: Nordics, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 5010, 90s (control lowering phase and push back with your hands)
D: Chins, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2010, 90s
E: One and a half Bulgarian squats, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 3210, 45s (1 repetition = all the way down, a quarter up, down again, all the way up)
F: Inverted lines, 50 repetitions in as few sentences as possible, 2012, 30s
G: Pushups, 100 reps in as few sets as possible, 1010, 30 seconds
The band only workout
Session 1 – Push:
A: Standing Band Shoulder Press, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s
B: Band Push Ups, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 3011, 30-45s
C: Standing Flyes with a bracelet, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s
D: Band Lateral Raise, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s
E: Triceps pushdown, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45 s
F: Band Pallof Press, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2015, 30-45s
Session 2 – Drag:
A: Knee band lat pulldowns, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 3011, 30-45s
B: Seated neutral rows of grips, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2012, 30-45s
C: Band Moto Rows, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 3111, 30-45s
D: Band Upright Rows, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2012, 30-45s
E: Band Hammer Curls, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2012, 30-45s
F: Band Pull-Aparts, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2012, 30-45s
Session 3 – legs:
A: Bulgarian Split Squats, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s
B: Band Assisted Nordic Curls, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 4010, 30-45s
C: Heel Elevated One & A Quarter Band Squats, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s (one repetition = all the way down, a quarter up, down again, then all the way up)
D: Lying Leg Curls, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2013, 30-45s
E: Terminal Knee Extension, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 1012, 30-45 s
F: Band Good Mornings, 3xAMRAP (0-2RIR), 2011, 30-45s
The workout "I only have a light set of dumbbells"
Session 1 – Push:
A: Bulgarian Split Squats, 4 x AMRAP (0-2RIR), 4211, 30-45 s
B: Half-kneeling, one-arm shoulder press, 4 x AMRAP (0-2RIR), 4010, 30-45 s
C: pushups, 4 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 4211, 30-45 s
D: Floor DB Flyes, 3 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2110, 30-45 s
E: Floor DB triceps extensions, 3 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2210, 30-45 s
F: DB Lateral Raise, 3 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2011, 30-45 s
Session 2 – Drag:
A: Pull-ups, 5 x AMRAP (0-2RIR), 2010, 30-45 s
B: Inverted table rows, 4 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2111, 30-45 s
C: DB Lying Leg Curls, 4 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 3110, 30-45 s
D: DB bicep curls, 3 × AMRAP (0-1RIR), 3010, 30-45 s
Super set:
E1: rear delta fly, 3 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2011, 0s
E2: DB Upright Rows, 3 x AMRAP (0-1RIR), 2012, 1960s
Shoulder shocker – DB set only (Hold the DBs in your hands all the time, and don't take them out until A6 is ready.)
A1: DB Rear Delt Flyes Supinated grip, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 2011, 0s
A2: DB Rear Delt Flyes Pronated Grip, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 2011, 0s
A3: DB Lateral Raise, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 2011, 0s
A4: DB Front Raise, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 2011, 0s
A5: DB-upright lines, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 2012, 0s
A6: DB DB Neutral Grip shoulder press, 3 x AMRAP (0RIR), 5010, 90s (yes, this is a 5-second cam – have fun!)
Remarks:
AMRAP is as many representatives as possible
RIR is Reps In Reserve
Tempo is listed as four numbers (e.g. 4211). Each number corresponds to a phase of the elevator. The first number is always the lowering / extending phase.
4211 on split squats means lowering in 4 seconds, stopping at the bottom for 2 seconds, lifting in 1 second, holding up for 1 second … repeating for the next iteration.
For pull-ups, 2010 means 2 seconds lower, no break down, lifting in seconds, no break up.
With these workouts, you can be sure that you …
… Stay at home, stay fit and stay healthy!
If you'd like more sample home workouts, I'll post some on my Instagram page and in the story highlights. You can check them at @tommaccormick. If you want something more individual or more individual in terms of workouts and programs, you can find me at Toms Online Personal Training.
Much depends on your personal circumstances and requires some in-depth reviews of everything from your training options to your physiology.