Training at Home Part 1: “I have zero fitness equipment.”
Here’s a quick one for those who have no equipment and can’t or don’t want to spend any money buying some right now.
Stick to these two parts and you can’t go wrong.
1. Focus on the main movement patterns with bodyweight:
You still don’t need one-legged squats on one of those giant inflatable balls from the Wal-Mart bins, even if we reach apocalyptic times here.
You need to stick to the movement patterns that will do the most for you.
You need squat movements, horizontal and vertical pushing and pulling movements, and some core and calf stuff if you want it.
Stick to variations of squats, push-ups, some sort of shoulder work (pike push-ups, overhead arm raises with whatever you can find, etc), tricep dips on a chair, and the like to achieve this.
For some of the pulls, you’ll need some household items. Do inverted rows on your table (unless it’s one of the light IKEA ones that will disintegrate on rep 0.5), loop a towel around your leg and do bicep curls with it. Be creative here.
2. Make those movement patterns increasingly more difficult once you can do 10-15 reps.
If part of your fitness goal is to build or try desperately to maintain some strength and muscle, then you want to improve more than just the number of reps you can do after a certain point.
There are some arguments scientifically, but I’d say that after you can do around 15 repetitions of something without stopping, you need to find a way to make it more difficult.
You can do this in all sorts of ways:
Do “tempo sets” where you really slow the movement down. Now, 10 reps will be more difficult.
Grab something heavy around your house and hold it to add weight on some exercises.
Transition to more difficult variations. Put your hands on books so you can get deeper with push-ups, add a jump into your squats, etc. Google will be a good friend to you on this part.
In summation: Stick to the main movement patterns I mentioned above. Once you get to 10-15 reps on an exercise, do something to make it more difficult until you get to that number of reps again, then do it again and again until we get assigned our Districts and released back into the wild.
Let me know if you need some help!
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