Sports 43
How to Stay Fit at Home Written by Chris Schneider
T
hese days, all of us might lack some proper physical activity. Here is some advice to stay fit using only limited equipment at home.
Basic Principles
My personal belief is that muscle growth can be ensured in two ways: muscle failure and muscle fatigue. While the first saves a lot of time, always aiming to train until failure might be hard on one’s psyche. Muscle failure may sound negative, but it actually sends signals to your nervous system to build enough muscle mass to prevent another failure. Muscle fatigue, on the other hand, feels more comfortable but takes more time to achieve. To provide alternatives, you will find systems based on both principles below.
Workout System 1: High-Intensity Training (HIT)
Another training system that is very useful for home training is the so-called PITT-Myokalypse system by Karsten Pfützenreuter – a German bodybuilder and personal trainer. He specifically designed this system for athletes over 40 and so-called “hard gainers” – people who have a hard time gaining muscle mass. Unless you contribute to his Patreon account, access to the system is only granted via countless vlogs on YouTube. From what I could get out of those videos, the system is based on extremely high reps, low weight, and a high frequency. Every training session should last for about an hour and
June 2020
The system itself is quite simple: short and intense. HIT’s most important goal is to achieve muscle failure. In short, this means to perform an exercise until you fail in the middle of a repetition (rep). HIT workouts consist of only one to two sets per exercise and only one to two exercises per muscle group. For example, a home workout routine targeting chest, triceps, and shoulders could be done by two chest exercises such as push-ups and prowler pushups, dumbbell shoulder presses, and/or pike push-ups and dips. The larger the muscle, the less problematic it
PITT – Myokalypse
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High-intensity training allows you to build significant muscle mass by simply training for 45 minutes twice a week. The system was developed by bodybuilder Mike Mentzer and was proven effective by other bodybuilders such as Dorian Yates as well as by scientific research conducted by Prof. Dr. Dr. Jürgen Gießing. Due to the latter’s insights, the system is also adaptable to general fitness and athletes of other disciplines.
Further, it is advisable to train every muscle with this system only once a week in order to prevent injury and overtraining. If you feel your workout is not intense enough, you could instead do the same exercise again after a rest lasting under ten seconds, perform half reps – breaking your exercise into two parts and perform each to exhaustion – or quickly jump into a related exercise to failure (e.g., jumping from pull-ups to chin-ups or pushups to chest flys). Forty-five minutes, including warm-up, should be just fine – do not overtrain. Equipment-wise, it is recommended to have weights or silicon bands for curls and access to a pull-up bar. To some degree, the lack of such can be solved by using a broomstick and two stools or chairs. Personally, I use a set of dumbbells up to 15 kilograms, a playground, silicon resistance bands, and two stools from Daiso. HIT’s largest disadvantage besides the necessity for at least some equipment is the mindset. Not everyone wants to go all out during their workout, which is absolutely fine. Those not intending to train to muscle failure simply will not get along well with HIT. For those of the latter mindset, there is another system that might suit you just fine.
SPORTS & ACTIVITIES
For this article – and most of my personal fitness activities over the last few years – knowledge of three commonly known fitness personas will be helpful: Prof. Dr. Dr. Jürgen Gießing, a German researcher on high-intensity training for about three decades; Karsten Pfützenreuter, former bodybuilder and personal trainer who has developed several training systems up until the present; and Athlean-X, arguably YouTube’s most famous content creator for fitness in regard to proper execution of exercises.
is to do two exercises. Another important part of HIT is to do your exercises slowly and correctly. Although there are myriad different approaches, the seven-second rule is quite common. The movement, which takes actual effort of pushing or pulling – movements up from the ground via push-ups or down to the ground via pull-ups should last two seconds followed by holding your position for another second; then you should go down for four . Again, there are different conceptions about the rep range, but for the sake of simplicity eight to twelve reps should be fine.
