4 Principles To Designing An Effective Home Workout
Chances are if you’re reading this than the gym you currently go to has closed. This is the case for the vast majority of people who workout, unless you have spent the time and money developing a gym inside of your home. Thus, it seems as though the whole fitness world has turned to at-home workouts in an attempt to maintain or even gain some hard earned fitness through the COVID-19 pandemic. For some reason, however, the workouts that I have seen on social media seem to lack basic principles that need to be adhered to in order to get quality effective training done. This week we are diving into the principles that need to be considered if you want your workout to be worth it.
1) Decide If You Want To Train Strength Or Conditioning
Just like in a regular workout we first need to determine what we want to get out of this workout. Do we want to promote increases in strength? Muscle mass? Calorie burn? Improved endurance? This is the most important aspect of designing the workout because if we have a specific goal then our training needs to reflect it so we are taking steps towards accomplishing what we want to accomplish. For example, why would we do 400 meter running intervals if we want to build up the muscles in our upper body? Conversely, why would we do heavy weighted pressing if our goal is to maximize the calories we burn in a session? What we do in the workout should cause the adaptation we want.
As a general rule of thumb, if we want to train strength or increase muscle mass, then use heavy and slow exercises to maximize muscle recruitment and damage. Since most people won’t have access to heavy weights, we can match the reps with available resistance, such as water jugs or body weight, so that the reps become heavy. This essentially means do enough reps until the exercise becomes difficult.
If we want to train our conditioning, then we want to design the workout where rest times are low enough that we don’t allow full recovery between sets, we do enough repetitions where we are asking the muscle to contract many times over a given time period and the heart rate is rising and staying elevated for several minutes A good way to do this is by setting a clock and doing a large set of an exercise every time the minute changes for a large number of minutes. This will typically cause you to be working more than you’re resting, keep you on task, and satisfy all three requirements listed above.
2) Make Sure You Pull More Than You Push
This principle goes a long way in keeping you injury free and promoting a well balanced training program. The majority of our day as humans involves the anterior or front of our body. This includes using the computer, the phone, cooking, and chances are during the quarantine, when you’re Nteflixing your shoulders will begin to drift forward further promoting an anterior dominant posture.
To counteract this, we want to train the muscles of the backside of the body or posterior more frequently in our workouts. As a general rule of thumb, we want to use pulling exercises in, at minimum, a 2:1 ratio compared to pushing exercises. This can be challenging when writing workouts at home because typically you need something to hang on to or hold in order to pull against it. But, good ideas for puling exercises are single arm rows, banded rows, doorway pull ups, inverted rows under a table, KB swings, deadlifts, RDL’s, glute bridges etc. The list goes on and on depending on what is available to you and how creative you can get!
3) Prioritize Compound Movements Over Isolation Movements
A compound movement is a movement that typically involves multiple joints while an isolation movement is one that only involves one joint. A lower body compound movement would be a deadlift while an isolation movement would be a hamstring curl. An upper body compound movement would be a push up while an isolation movement would be a tricep push down. Compound movements are more beneficial than isolation movements because they involve much more muscle mass, allow for greater loads to be lifted and will result in increased energy expenditure or calorie burn.
Isolation movements are not a bad thing, but for home workouts where the intensity of workouts might be diminished because of the environment or available equipment we want to choose exercises that will give us the most bang for your buck. Keep the isolation movements as finishers at the end of the workout, not as the main focus for the day.
4) Don’t Forget About Running
For some reason I feel that when we design home workouts the go to is to come up with body weight exercises that can be done in the living room and only require a yoga mat’s worth of floor space. But, when we do that we forget about one of the most functional, calorie burning, stress relieving activity there is….running. Running is a great way to train the cardiovascular or strength systems depending on how we set up the workout.
To train the cardiovascular system we can do long distance runs at a slow pace, repeated moderate speed runs with shorter or equal rest times, or short duration, fast runs with moderate rest times. The options are essentially limitless as long as the heart rate rises and stays elevated.
To train the strength systems through running we could do max velocity sprinting with long rest times or we could do resisted sprinting by having a friend resist from the front or from the back with a band or rope of some kind. If you’re fortunate enough to have one, you can also sprint against sleds for a combination of cardiovascular and strength training.
Those are the 4 principles I use when I am writing home workouts for clients and I hope they can help you develop some of your own! If you feel you need help designing workouts, please reach out! Being quarantined is no reason to lose fitness or even stop gaining fitness. This COVID-19 pandemic will be over at some point and you will be glad you kept your fitness up!
