How to maximise your home workout – and that doesn’t mean burpees for time!
- Make your session shorter
- There is no need to plan in an hour like you would at the gym anymore.
- Try several 20 minutes, sessions spread over the day
- This will break up your day as well and form a bit of routine
- There are plenty of 30-minute sessions available online, morning, lunchtimes and evening classes. So, spilt it up – it will give you a mental break as well.
- Make sure you are warming up correctly – A good warm up would be things that mimic the results/effects of the activity you are about to perform.
- For runners, toe touches, jumping jacks, hip openers, quad stretches
- for bodyweight get the area you are about to train mobile
- Muscle engagement – learning to isolate and engage a particular muscle. Activation or movement should target a singular muscle so that you can clearly feel its engagement. Are you using the right muscle in that exercise or are you allowing the larger muscle groups to take over? When in the gym we don’t always think of this so now is the right time to really drill down on the mind muscle connection, really understand which muscle you should be feeling or working in that movement.
- Holds or time under tension – create tension, hold the position or weight for longer. Slow it down, think about the movement, hold the position and pause – you make each phase of the exercise longer therefore forcing your muscle to work harder and optimise strength, endurance and muscle growth! Yes, we can still lose fat and grow muscle while in lockdown with what you have at home!
- Train with someone – we all had a gym buddy so why not have a homework out buddy? Training with someone even if it’s just for 10 – 20 minutes a day will keep you motivated and help you stay on track. We use to use the gym as a place to meet people, you can still have that community online too – join a regular class, facetime your old gym buddy and keep moving together.
- Make it fun – try and have some fun with your workouts, keep them light, if your training with someone give the workout a theme, put some fun music on, wear something silly to a class and enjoy it.
- Be accountable – I still log my workouts to keep track of them, and I also share this with my coach. If you are training with your friend then you can be accountability buddies, I know I work better when I am held accountable. Set small mini goals each week and hold yourself to them or better still send them to your coach.
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