How To Change Up Your Home Workouts
Have you committed to the home workout life? Sometimes it just works out better that way. We can do a quick one whenever we need to, but we don’t always have room for a ton of equipment. If you’ve been doing workouts at home with your dumbbells but don’t have the space for heavier ones, there are other ways to increase the intensity of your workout!
If you have been sticking to the same rep range for a while, you can try adding more reps rather than more weight. If you do not have heavy enough for certain exercises at home, adding more reps to your sets will improve your muscular endurance. As we get to the 15-20 rep range mark this also tends to increase the heart rate quite a bit, therefore also improving our cardio.
You can also try adding another set! Most workouts we do (I do it too) we tend to stick to doing 3 sets. When we are limited on our equipment choices, adding another set to our training can be the extra edge that we need. When adding another set to your workouts I would recommend doing it on your first exercise, this usually being a bigger compound movement. This will burn more calories, elevate the heart rate further and make the body work harder rather than if you add another set to a smaller exercise that uses less muscle groups.
Increasing time under tension, this is always a fun one and surprisingly difficult. The tempo of our exercise is usually pretty standard, taking about 2 to 3 seconds on the concentric part of the contraction, so if we were doing a bicep curl this would be bringing the weight to the shoulders. Then taking about 1 to 2 seconds on the eccentric part of the contraction, this would be bringing the arms back down to the tops of the legs in a bicep curl. Adding time to both parts of the contraction can be an extra challenge, but mostly this is done on the eccentric portion. Negatives are specifically adding time to the eccentric part of the contraction, the majority of muscle fibre damage occurs during this part and adding time under tension here can significantly help improve strength.
Decrease the amount of time your take between your sets, pretty straight forward. Whether you have been doing straight sets, supersets, or circuit training you can try decreasing your rest time to take your workout up a notch. Decreasing your rest time will also improve our cardio and how we recover during our workout. Usually we would want to wait till we are rested enough to try and perform the exercise again, but going when we just aren’t quite ready yet will challenge our body even more, and in a different way. Try doing your workout you normally would, but only rest for 30 seconds between sets instead of 60 and see what you can do!
Isometrics is another fancy word for holding the movement. Exercise’s like the plank and wall sit are great examples of isometric exercises, but realistically we can do it with anything. We just talked about the different contractions when we are training, doing isometrics can be another challenging way of adding time under tension. If you are doing a set of squats, watch your tempo and rather than coming back up right away try and hold yourself at the bottom for 3 to 5 seconds before coming up. You won’t need heavier weight, in fact sometimes we can even go lighter when adding pause reps into our workout, they’re pretty tough! This can also significantly help improve our muscular strength and specifically our core when holding certain postures.
I hope these ideas help you spice up your workouts and of course have some fun. Exercising is like an art, we can always change things up and get creative :).