Improving Your Strength at Home with No Gym

Strength training is a key part of our health and fitness if we want to maintain our movement in later life. With there being no access to gyms at the moment we have to be a little creative in how we build strength within our workouts at home.

A simple but highly effective tweak you can make to your strength "must-do" exercises, such as squats and push-ups, is to adjust the speed which you complete the movement.

There are 3 types of muscle contraction that our muscles go through when we do a squat for instance - the lowering, the pause when we stop lowering before we begin to lift, and the lift itself.

When you manipulate one or all of these contractions, then the way the muscle is stressed is changed, leading to the muscle being stimulated differently, which leads to change an increase of strength for the muscle.

For example, you could lower yourself for say 2 seconds on a squat then come straight back up in one second. So it takes 3 seconds to complete 1 squat.

But imagine if you took 4 seconds to lower, then paused for 1 second at the bottom, then took 2 seconds to come up, that 3 second squat now takes 7 seconds. And over the course of 10 squats, a 30 second set now means your muscles have been working for 70 seconds.

As you can now see, you have now greatly increased the intensity of your set of 10 squats without using any weights!

Bare that in mind when you give the strength workout below a blast. You will notice that I use a few pauses at the bottom of the lift for a few of the movements.

Movement is Medicine!

Coach Ben