Today I want to share with you my top 3 ways to exercise from home.
Why?
Because I want to show you that you don’t need any equipment for a full-body fat-melting effective workout, and that if you put the excuses to one side you can get super-fit, super-lean and healthy in less time and with less faff than you think.
I’ll also write a workout for you 🙂
No Excuses. Sorry!
No need to sit in traffic on the way to the gym.
No need for expensive kit.
No need to make excuses.
I have to admit that I mainly exercise from home. Admittedly I have a lot of kit like kettle bells and medicine balls, but at the same time a large portion of my workouts are body-weight only with no or low equipment.
The benefit?
Save time.
Save cash.
No gimmicks.
Better results in a lot of cases.
True, I mix up my workouts to include weights sometimes, but if you don’t own any, or if you are traveling for work, then put the excuses away and read on!
Effective Exercise From Home
Effective weight loss, fitness and toning all have some common elements that needs to be present in any workout that you perform for it to be effective. Here are a few to look out for:
Full-body compound exercise: Try to engage as many muscles as possible in a single move.
Why? Because this will stimulate adaptation by stressing lots of muscle fibres at once. You are more likely to elicit a growth response from a workout where compound exercises have been performed. In addition to this, you will burn more calories by using more muscles at once, and this is crucial if one of your goals is effective weight loss. Finally, glycogen storage in muscles is delivered as energy only to the muscles that are in use. By using more muscles you will deplete more glycogen stores, and so make your body more insulin sensitive post workout.
Ensure the exercises are performed as high intensity interval training or reps: Why? By performing high intensity interval training you will increase the ‘after-burn’ or EPOC calories burned. By performing high intensity exercise the by-products the body creates need to be disposed of aerobically post workout, and this mean extra calories being burned up to 48+ hours after exercise.
Balance your workouts: Why? By balancing your workouts you will build a properly functioning body that works as it should. Lets consider a common muscle imbalance – protraction of the shoulder girdle and internal rotation at th shoulder joint. Resulting from poor posture at work, and a tendency to perform ‘pushing’ exercises like press up and bench press at the expense of pulling or retraction exercises. The result, shoulder injury, hyper-kyphosis of the thoracic spine (dowagers hump) and a knock on to the pelvis, low back pain and tight hamstrings in an attempt (subconscious) to keep the head on a level. keep workouts balanced to avoid this.
Top 3 Exercise from Home
Ok, so there aren’t only three moves to exercise from home with. However, these tick the boxes mentioned above and can be progressed.
1. Burpee – Yes this is a favourite of many a personal trainer. Its a full-body compound move that is tough. Try the 20-1 burpee challenge (enough for a workout on its own), or the 1minute challenge as part of a workout.
2. Body weight row / Press-up – If you have a bar or a suspension trainer like a TRX or Rip60 make use of it and pull. Horizontal pull as a body-weight row or a vertical pull such as a close grip pull up will stimulate the lats and back as well as biceps.
In addition although the body-weight row / lat pull / push-up appear to be upper body exercises they are actually full body moves requiring bracing and stability.
3. Lunge – A great move that hits the largest muscle groups in the body and so stimulates many muscle fibres.
As an exercise from home, again this requires no equipment and can be progressed easily to a power move or in different planes of motion.
It requires the joints move to ranges not usual in the every day life of a sedentary adult too, and stimulates the glutes which in itself has a whole heap of positive effects. Lastly, as an effective weight loss move the lunge is a fab exercise.
Your Turn: Exercise From Home:
Try the above 3 exercises as a PHA workout which is extremely good way to get fitness results quickly.
Remember, try the above moves as body weight only, and progress them as needed. Here are some suggestions.
Tabata Sessions:
8x20seconds (10sec recovery) Lunges
8x20seconds (10sec recovery) Burpees
8x20seconds (10sec recovery) Pressup / BW row
20-1 challenge:
Time yourself to perform 20 to 1 reps of burpees as 20, 19, 18, 17…… 1reps. Any rest taken is part of the overall time. 30 mins is good. 20 mins is elite!! Its tough – you have been warned!
So, forget the excuses and try exercise from home to see how you get on!
Finally, you may know that good nutrition is as important as exercise. If not more important – although one shouldn’t be independent of the other. With this in mind you might like this article and supplementary weight loss cheat sheet below.
Have fun, be safe and of course if this is helpful please do let your friends know. let me know how you got on. I’m off to do the 20-1 challenge myself now in fact!
If you need more motivation to exercise and eat well, you might like to learn more about online personal training.
Happy training. Nico.