Best at Home Workout Routine – Is Your Gym Closed?
What is the best at-home workout routine? Welp… with all this Covid-19 stuff going on, most individuals are confined to their home to stay on top of their training.
Instead of just throwing a home workout routine at you and saying that it’s the best, I will be describing how you can assess your situation and go about creating a program for yourself. This will, in turn, create the best home workout routine… because it is what works best for you and your situation!
Let’s get to it!
What is Your Goal:
When looking to develop a plan for anything, it is important to know your goal. This will help steer us in the right direction. This is especially beneficial as we likely don’t have access to what we are used to from an equipment standpoint (unless you workout in a home gym, then just keep doing what you’re doing, lol).
However, if we know our goal then we can dial in what we’re doing and how we are doing it as far as our exercise selection and programming goes.
For example, if you are looking to grow muscle, or at least maintain what ya got, then maybe you do slow eccentric push-ups. This will take advantage of the added eccentric strength we have, and make the exercise more challenging overall so we can reach a certain degree of fatigue to make it beneficial.
Or, if your goal is to gain strength, maybe you perform a plyometric push-up to work on the power production aspect that comes along with strength training.
Bottom line, know your goal and specify your training as close to that goal as possible, especially if your training options are limited.
What Equipment is Available?
The more equipment available, the more options you have and less “drastic” changes/tweaks you need to make to your training. With that being said, if you have absolutely nothing besides your own body weight and space to move, you can still get a great workout in!
Think about your current workout split, how closely can you complete your training sessions to what they currently looks like? For me, I basically need to change all the exercises and incorporate different variables to make them more difficult. I am also doing training for my goal of muscle growth 3 times a week instead of 6. Seeing as training isn’t optimal, I figured I would slash my training down to 3 times per week to maintain what I currently have and focus on a couple of other aspects.
For me, these aspects include recovery. This will allow me to come back to my normal training full force! I am also focussing more on boxing and conditioning as a whole.
What Can You Do?
Now that we know our goal and what we have available to train for our goal, it is time to see what we can keep and what needs to change. As I said, I basically had to change all of my workouts up.
What I decided to do was keep what I could as close to standard training as possible, this looked like using windshield wiper fluid jugs instead of dumbbells for lateral raises.
I also performed exercises that have a similar focus but may be quite different overall. This looked like performing a mechanical push-up drop set to make the exercises challenging enough, and to get in enough volume, for the muscle groups I would be hitting with a standard workout in my gym using an exercise like the dumbbell bench press.
One of the tricep exercises that I used was from Jeff Cavaliere of Athlean-X.com, where I took my own bodyweight to perform a skull crusher variation.
See… there are options!
I also included 2 minutes of boxing before starting the different exercises. Why did I do this? The boxing fatigued my upper body a bit to make the exercises fatiguing and challenging enough to actually do something/be of benefit to me.
Wrapping Up:
Well everyone, if you need to adapt your training to the Coronavirus, remember/know your goal and train specific to that goal. Think about the equipment you have available and how it relates to your standard training. If tweaks need to be made to make things similar to your standard training, you can do that! Tweaks could look like slowing down the eccentric if you’re using a lighter weight, or swapping out an entire exercise! It all depends!
Thanks for reading everyone! Do you have questions about any of this? Be sure to leave them in the comment section below, I always respond! Have a great day and stay safe!
Here are some other articles that may be beneficial for your knowledge!
What is Eccentric and Concentric?
BONUS:
A YouTube video I did that is highly beneficial for bodyweight training ideas! Click here to view it!
Until Next Time,
Kohl Johnson
Please refer to my liability disclaimer to ensure you know who is responsible for the use of this information after reading.