Create The Ultimate Home Workout Environment – The 7 Essentials
Jack Thomas talks about creating the ultimate home workout environment, with 7 essential tips to get results, reduce the chance of injury and increase the chance of sticking to the program.
During lockdown, people start to find quick effective home workout since all gyms are closed. Unfortunately, not everyone is doing their home workout right, which can lead to ineffective workout or worse still – injuries.
Here are 7 key takeaways from our Build Your Base Podcast episode 9 on how to get the most out of your home workout.
1.Make sure you have some decent equipment at home: The easiest equipment to use is dumbbells, since they don’t take up a huge amount of space and are easy to use. Kettlebells are also a great option – they’re a little bit harder to use but you can get a good cardio workout in as well as strength.
TRX is great as well. You can hook it onto a door or wrap it around a tree branch. Suspension training is a great way to get a full body workout. So that’s another piece of kit you can add to make it a little bit more interesting to get in some pull exercises, which is sometimes hard to do with body weight.
Other free weights like Wall Balls or Medicine Balls can work if you do have the big space. Barbells and plates are awesome to really get a great strength workout.
2. Prepare the right surface and space: Many of us have small condos or apartments. So we might have limitations in terms of space. Try and have at least enough rooms that you can lie down on the floor. It is important to prepare the right surface. So if you have hard wooden floors, maybe just get a yoga mat so you can do kneeling exercises or plank exercises without experiencing pain.
3. Don’t do too much HIIT – high intensity interval training: Make sure you’re doing strength training to complement the workout. A lot of the free online sessions mostly include a ton of burpees, high knees and jumping jacks.
It’s gonna get your heart rate up and burn calories but there’s a lot of impact with these movements. So they really should be limited. On the other hand, strength training should really be making up a big part of your work. So, we need to slow the movements down and load the muscles. Make sure you are balancing your workout with both cardio and strength training.
4. Be very careful with plyometrics: That means burpee, jumping jacks and certainly tuck jumps. If you do those a lot of these, especially on a hard surface, it can start to impact the joints.
Certainly, squat jumps, lunge jumps and tuck jumps are extremely advanced and should be approached with caution. Unfortunately most online home workouts love to include plyometrics training and that can very easily lead to injury. Especially if the movements are not being done correctly. On online workouts, they don’t usually give you an easy option. They just give you 3 seconds to prepare. Even if you can do plyometrics, it shouldn’t make up a huge part of your workout. In summary, less plyometrics and more strength work is more conducive to a safe and efficient training program.
5. Consider getting a coach: This can be done online through Zoom or FaceTime. Just make sure that you are doing the movements with good form and good technique before you start loading the exercises with extra weights.
Now, there are a lot of online training options to choose or you can use your personal training sessions to get some advice from your coach on the kind of program and exercises you should be doing at home.
6. Find a quality home workout program and stick to it: The appeal of free Instagram lives and the Facebook lives are undeniable, but the quality of these workouts typically aren’t great. They often have a lot of plyometric exercises without much purpose behind the program.
Not knocking these workouts, they are good once in a while, but you will get better results from choosing a program and sticking to a program that’s balanced and has a mix of upper body, lower body push/pull exercises.
That’s what we’ve created with BASE Anywhere, a balance structured program that has a mix of everything and also the support from coaches and community to help you continue with the program, which you don’t get these from free live workouts.
7. It’s good to have accountability: That’s something you get with a physical gym – the coaches are there with you. You can go with your friends, which is hard to cancel a workout. Try and get that same level of accountability at home by joining a community such as BASE Anywhere or another online training platform that offers support from other people.
Get your families, partner and friends involved. If you can train with people, research shows you are much more likely to stick to your program.
These are seven points that will help you get the highest quality home workout training experiences and making sure you still get results even though you’re training at home.
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