How to Intensify Your At-Home Bodyweight Workout
It is more important than ever to understand how you can customize your workout to keep getting results.
With gyms worldwide closed, the question fitness freaks keep asking is: "Can you still get results if you exercise at home?"
The answer is yes. Can you continue to get consistent results? Yes, provided you understand some important intensity strategies to effectively implement progressive overload. In this article, we give you the six most important ways to achieve results from the comfort of your own home with simple intensity adjustments.
First of all, it is important to understand that you can make serious gains with your body weight.
Though contradicting many popular fitness cultures, the gym isn't the only place where you can lose weight, build muscle, and improve your performance. Here's a quick overview of how you can use body weight training as a critical part of your fitness goal.
Is Your Weight Loss Goal?
If your main fitness goal is to lose weight, your main focus should be on creating an energy deficit – meaning that you are consuming more energy than you are consuming. An energy deficit is typically created by calorie restriction and increased physical activity.
Regardless of whether you increase your physical activity during training or during training at home, What matters is that you move and push regularly.
Body weight training can burn lots of calories, especially if you do a high number of repetitions with limited rest and intense exercise.
Is your goal to build muscle?
To build muscle, you need to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. Without going into exercise science too much, you need to know the following: Muscle hypertrophy requires three mechanisms:
- Muscle damage can occur if you do a workout of sufficient length with enough sets per body part.
- Mechanical tension can occur when you perform each exercise slowly and alternately concentrically and eccentrically.
- Metabolic stress can occur if you do an exercise with a high number of repetitions.
Optimally, you would use heavy weights with progressive overload, with a different repetition, and a set range to build muscle. However, it is possible to build muscle by doing bodyweight exercises if you follow specially curated workouts that promote every key mechanism for hypertrophy.
Is your goal to build strength?
Body weight training is for you. Using your body's weight as resistance is one of the most effective ways to build strength.
Performing functional movements focuses on strengthening the most important movement patterns that are transferred into your daily life and increase your physical strength.
Body weight training is not necessarily superior compared to using weights, but it is just as beneficial and probably more practical, especially in the current climate.
Strength is built by increasing strength and endurance, and body weight training is ideal for both goals. Plyometric exercises help develop strength, and high-repetition bodyweight exercises are a great way to build endurance.
What determines your results in weight training at home is your ability to implement progressive overload. It's easy in the gym. But it can get a little more complicated at home. If you are not yet familiar with the concept of progressive overload, here is a brief overview of what you need to know.
What is progressive overload?
The principle of progressive overload states that muscles have to grow, performance or strength have to increase or a similar improvement has to occur. The human body must be forced to adapt to a tension that goes beyond what it has experienced before.
Ignore anyone who has ever told you that you have to change your exercise routine every few days to shock your muscles. There is no scientific evidence to support this; Your muscles are muscles, not people. You don't know what you're doing, just that you're working under tension.
Research shows that the most effective way to build muscle is to repeat the same movements and exercises and increase the intensity of the workout to keep forcing your muscles to work and adjust.
This increase in intensity is the concept of progressive overload. The progressive overload forces your muscles to work harder each time so that they continue to tear, repair and grow.
If you want to learn more about it, read this article. So keep the exercises the same, but increase the intensity.
Logically, the best way to do this is to increase the weight you use. But if you get stuck at home training, do you still have to buy heavier dumbbells? That would make your fitness trip a lot more complicated than it needs to be. So here is what you need to do.
Implement progressive overload
- Increase the weight – This is the most typical way to implement progressive overload. Even if you only increase the weight by five pounds, your muscles will be forced to work harder and adapt faster. Make a note of the weight you use during each workout so you don't forget it.
- Increase the volume of the sentences / repetitions – Increasing sets or repetitions forces your body to adapt to a higher intensity. It also builds up metabolic stress, which makes your muscles look pumped. However, it also causes large amounts of muscle damage and glycogen deficiency, which takes longer to recover. Also, you can't increase your sets and reps forever, it's not practical. However, this can be an effective intensity strategy for isolation exercises with body weight or low stress. Avoid this method for compound exercises like squats and deadlifts.
- Reduce the rest time between sets – This causes you to work harder and keep your heart rate high. This method is more suitable for endurance exercises than for hypertrophy (muscle building). So you can implement this on the upper body or lower body / HIIT superset day, but not on heavy lower body days when rest is important.
Now that we've covered the basics, what are the more advanced methods of intensifying your body weight training at home?
1. Change the pace
As mentioned earlier, this is an effective way to stimulate mechanical tension, one of the basic mechanisms for building muscle.
With mechanical tension, the time is increased under load, i. H. The time your muscles contract and the force they create to complete the movement.
Remember that your muscles do not know the size of the weights used. You only know the tension.
The pace of an exercise is the timing at which it is performedSo if you want to increase the speed of a squat, count down 2, 3 4 in your head. & # 39; break, 2 3 & # 39; and accelerate in & # 39; one & # 39 ;.
This is an example of a slow eccentric (lowering) phase, a pause at the bottom of the squat, and an accelerated concentric phase that will bring you to a halt.
If you do an exercise slowly and switch between a slower concentric and a fast eccentric, or vice versa, the time under tension increases and your muscles have to adjust.
2. Play around with fixed intensities
There are not just sentences and repetitions. There are a variety of set and rep styles:
You can do a superset for the intensity (do each exercise immediately after the other).
There are different types of supersets:
Read more about different supersets.
3. Manipulate the range of motion
Doing a weight exercise creates an axial load that can prevent a full range of motion.
For example, if you squat with a barbell on your back, your spine is in a manipulated position, so the overall range of motion may be less.
Without external weight, your range of motion will likely increase. So play with the depth and breadth of the movement planes.
4. Manipulate your posture
Similar to the above, you can change your shape to activate different muscles. Following the example of a squat, narrow squats aim at your quads, while wide squats aim at your glutes.
With only minor changes in your posture or position, all exercises can feel different.
5. Change the position of your torso
This does not work with all exercises, Some body weight exercises can be made more intense by changing the position of your torso.
For example, on the next push-up try to put one hand behind your back and shift your weight to the grounded side. This slight displacement of the trunk changes the plane of movement and the rotation of your shoulder joint to beat differently.
6. Use partials and constant tension
When you do an exercise, you play around with partial repetitions and constant tension.
For example, when doing a squat, you can try to generate constant voltage pulses while coming up a quarter of the way from a normal squat and pulsing there for repetitions.
Now you have six tips. Let's put this into practice to get the most out of your body weight training. whatever your goal is
Example workout:
| exercise | Sets | Representative | attitude | tempo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Body weight squats | 5 | 25th | Wide | Slowly concentric, quickly eccentric |
| Pushup superset
a) Conventional push-up b) Push constant tension upwards |
3rd 3rd |
20 AMRAP |
a) The standard for the first exercise b) Keep the voltage constant by staying low and not getting all the way up |
Quickly done for metabolic stress to failure |
| Burpees | 5 | fifteen | Can be plank burpees, floor burpees or push-up burpees | Performed as quickly as possible to increase heart rate |
| Push-pull superset
A dip b) chin-up |
2nd 2nd |
25th 25th |
a) N / A. b) Can be wide or narrow |
Slowly concentric to increase intensity and muscle damage |
| plank | 2nd | error | N / A | N / A |
| Bulgarian split squat | 5 | 50 per leg | Wide | default |