As coronavirus restrictions continue into 2021, personal trainer Charlie Hockney breaks down the best ways to master the WFH (workout from home).
Whilst in lockdown and at home in general, it’s easy to get distracted from working out. TV, gaming, sleeping and lots of food – all of these are an easy alternative to exercise, especially during Christmas and New Year. At the end of the day, to motivate yourself to workout successfully inside your home, you need to find something you enjoyed doing outside of it.
If you were on the treadmill in the gym every day, then go for a run. If you went to your weekly spin class, then go for a bike ride. If you went to the gym for something a bit more upbeat – like BodyCombat or Grit Cardio – there are endless amounts of bodyweight classes to be found at the tip of your fingers through YouTube and social media. Plenty of personal trainers and class instructors are taking advantage of live Zoom Classes, Facetime Classes, IGTV etc., making it easier than ever to access their expertise from the comfort of your own home (or shed, or garage, or garden – you get the idea).
As a trainer who relies heavily on the weight room, I know exactly how it feels waking up and dreading the thought of a run or a half hour HIIT class. If you’re lucky enough to be able to afford a home gym with barbells, racks, bumper plates and so on, it should be a little bit easier for you to be motivated to train from home. However, a lot of average gym-goers may not be as fortunate.
Resistance bands are a great cheap alternative to working towards your hypertrophy (that’s increase in muscular size) and strength goals in order to maintain your progress made before Tier 4 restrictions. Of course, depending on the length of time we’re forced to remain indoors, there will come a day when resistance bands get too easy for you, and you may want to try adding a little bit more to your exercises in order to progress. Implement the use of supersets (moving quickly from one exercise to the other), negative reps (a shift in rep patterns), and half and quarter reps – even adding a three second pause at the bottom of a press up, rather than just pushing up as fast as possible, will improve your all-round muscular strength.
At the end of the day, to motivate yourself to workout successfully inside your home, you need to find something you enjoyed doing outside of it.
Finally, we come to the hardest part of home workouts. Diet. As I said earlier, it is incredibly easy to walk into the kitchen and nibble on half a pack of biscuits or some leftover Toblerone you still have from Christmas. At the end of the day, everyone has a diet. It is an eating habit which can be good or bad. It’s ultimately as simple as staying in a calorie deficit or calorie surplus. If you burn more calories than you consume, you’re going to lose weight, and vice versa. Tracking calories can be made easy by using fitness pal apps on your phone, as well as seeing how many calories you’ve burned through a Fitbit or smartwatch. In 2021, it has never been easier to see how much food you’re putting in compared to how much work you’re putting in.
Despite being cooped up at home, when it comes to your fitness goals – be they to gain muscle or lose weight – the ultimate question has invariably stayed the same; how much discipline do you have?
Charlie Hockney is a PT based in Hertfordshire; find him on Instagram and Facebook as @cknyfit.