How To Workout At Home

Many people think in order to get a good workout in you have to go to the gym to lift weights and use exercise machines. But the reality is you can get a great workout at home using nothing but your body weight. 

Most of my life I never had access to a gym and only ran outside and did body weight exercise. Still to this day I continue to enjoy working out at home and running because going to the gym can sometimes get boring. 

So I decided to share my top tips for achieving better results with home workouts. Firstly there are several benefits to working out at home.

Benefits Of Working Out At Home

  • Saves money
    • no need to pay for a gym membership
    • no need to buy new workout clothes
  • Saves time
    • no more commuting to or from gym
    • no waiting around to use machines or space
  • Increased privacy for us shy people
  • More hygienic

Top Tips For Better Home Workouts

  1. Go into the workout with a plan
    • Before starting the workout decide on what type of workout you want to do, whether its strength training, cardio or a combination of the two with a circuit or HIIT workout.
    • Write down the exercises that you want to do, for how many reps and sets
  2. Create your workout space
    • Designate an area in your home for your workouts that is free of clutter to allow you enough space to safely move and jump around without worry about injury
    • Typically use of a chair or couch may be beneficial for certain movements so have one nearby
    • To make workouts harder and more efficient you may want to invest in weights and other equipment. These items you should have ready in you designated workout space.
    • No money to invest in weights, you can use full gallon of water jugs to substitute
    •  Some home workout equipment that doesn't take up alot of space include:
  3. Use external sources to stay motivated like music or following along to your favorite fitness youtubers workout
    • gone are the days where you need to buy workout dvds, there are so many great free workout videos on youtube.

Creating A Strength training Routine At Home

The same principles still apply when doing bodyweight exercise as with lifting weights, the only difference now is the weight you are lifting is your own body weight. When lifting weights in order to see results, you have to do enough repetitions and lift heavy enough weight to feel your muscles burn. Typically for strength gains you want to do anywhere from 8-12 repetitions for 3-4 sets. For muscular endurance gains you want to do 15-30 reps for 3-4 sets. However because you are only using your bodyweight you can not adjust the weight you move to make the exercise harder or easier. So for some bodyweight exercise might provide more of a muscular endurance workout, while for weaker individuals or with weaker body parts you will get more of a strength workout. 

How do you figure out how many reps to do with bodyweight strength training. Well you have to burn out. For instance if you are going to do push ups, squats, and lunges. Do as many push ups as you can until your muscles burn too much to continue. Likewise do the same for the other exercises. once you have your number you do 3 sets of each exercise. For instance say you burned out at 5 push ups, 25 squats, and 15 lunges. Your workout should be 3 sets of 5 push ups, 3 sets of 25 squats, and 3 sets of 15 lunges. As you get stronger you can increase the reps you do to ensure you always work to get your muscles burning. If you can do more than 30 reps of a bodyweight exercise you may want to invest in resistance bands or weights to make the exercise harder for you to continuously see gains. Here's a simple beginner full body workout for home

4 sets 25 squats
4 sets 25 lunges
3 sets 10 pushups
3 sets 10 dips
3 sets 30 abdominal crunches

Creating A Cardio Workout At home.

The goal of cardio is to keep your heart rate up the entire time, as cardio is a shorten termed for "cardiovascular," which helps your heart and lungs work more efficiently to circulate blood and oxygen through your body. For a cardio workout you want to be moving continuously for 15-45 minutes with different movements or even dancing. Or can circuits where you want to choose exercises that you can do continuously for 20 seconds to 1 minute with rest between each interval. So to create a fat burning cardio HIIT circuit you want to choose exercise you will be able to perform at a high intensity for to full interval time and then give yourself enough rest to repeat the effort. For the exercise to be cardio you want the work to rest ratio to be 1:1 or less. So for instance you can do an exercise continuously for 30 seconds then rest for 30 seconds for a beginner HIIT workout. A more advanced interval would be exercise for 1 minute with 15 seconds rest. I personally prefer doing HIIT cardio because you can get a good workout done in 20 minutes because you are working at such a high intensity. Heres an example of a beginner HIIT cardio workout

30 seconds work followed by 30 seconds rest  5 different exercises. Repeat the entire circuit 4 times with 1 minute rest between circuit for a quick workout
1. squat jumps
2. lunges
3. mountain climbers
4. high knees
5. Squat with side kick

Don't forget after you are done with working out you should do a cool down that includes stretching and/or foam rolling to help you recover better, prevent muscle soreness and hit your next home workout just as hard. Check out my post HERE about the benefits of foam rolling for recovery and how to foam roll properly.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions are if you need help creating better home workouts.


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