You ask - How do I make home workouts more effective? I know, I know - They don’t feel hard enough and you’re “not lifting weight so my muscles are going to shrivel up and diiieeee!” Well, this would be true if you sat on your 🍑 all day, every day and watched Netflix nonstop... BUT if you want to maintain your strength and muscle mass, there are tried and true ways of keeping your strength and muscle mass even without heavy weight. Stimulating the muscular and nervous systems will help to retain these qualities… IF you use proven techniques to make the exercises we are doing more effective.

INCREASE R.O.M. - The easiest way to make something harder it to make the movement bigger. Increasing your ROM (Range of Motion) is often overlooked in its ability to make a big impact. You can do so by elevating your feet during a hip thrust, standing on books for a split squat on both your front and back leg, or by putting your feet on a couch for a push-up.

GO SLOW - I know this can seem counterintuitive but going faster does not make an exercise harder, I repeat IT 👏🏼 DOES 👏🏼 NOT 👏🏼 MAKE 👏🏼 IT 👏🏼 HARDER 👏🏼. Sure, it’s more challenging on your cardiovascular system but it does not make it more productive from a muscular standpoint. Want to grow your glutes? Stop jumping around doing 103829 jump squats. Two ways to make an exercise more effective is to use what we call TIME UNDER TENSION:

ISOMETRICS - Holding a static contraction of a muscle without any movement. A good example is holding a push-up position just hover above the ground or performing a squat hold in the bottom position (if anyone has done “Bring Sally Up squats” with me - YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKIN’ ABOUT
SLOW ECCENTRICS - Slow down the lowering portion of the exercise. For example, take a 3-5 second count to lower into your Bulgarian split squat or a hip thrust while keeping tension in the target muscles.

DO UNILATERAL TRAINING - This is an easy but often overlooked way to build strength without heavy weight. Think about it - with a regular squat, for example, you’re lifting most of your body weight with two legs. Drop into a single leg split squat and you’re practically doubling the weight on a single leg instead. A much more effective way to challenge the muscles and also imperative to balance out any discrepancies in strength from one leg to the other.

GET CREATIVE WITH SUPERSETS - Combine excises that target the same muscle or muscle groups to fatigue even further. For example, a single leg deadlift set into a walking lunge set to target glutes. You could also do a small isolation exercise of a single muscle (say, a tricep extension) and then perform a compound movement like a push-up to max out the triceps.

With the right knowledge and some creativity, you can take your home strength workouts to the next level!

Give these a go and let me know what you think! 👊🏼

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