How To Exercise at Home Training at home is either one of the biggest luxuries or necessities, depending upon where you're coming from. Some people have to train at home because they either can't afford a gym membership or can't get to one. Some people like to train at home and they've actually gone out and created a little bit of a home gym and it provides them a lot more convenience to be able to make sure that they can stay consistent with their workouts. But either way, regardless of what situation you're in, if you are working out at home, there's 5 things you better start doing, and I'm going to cover them here today. See some people think that training at home means that you can't build muscle and that's the biggest bunch of bull I've ever heard. There are programs that require no bands, no bars, no bench, zero equipment at all and their main focus is to help you build muscle. So today I'm going to pull some of those principles from those programs so you can actually start building some serious muscle training at home. The first thing you have to do is you have to start looking around at your surroundings. There are so many things here that will provide you with the options for equipment that you never thought you had in the first place. Check out just some of the ways that you can utilize some of the very things in your house to help you to start getting more exercise options. You can use a counter-top to actually do bicep exercises and this is a difficult exercise. There's no difference between doing it n the edge of a counter and doing it with a bar. The exercise stays the same, the benefits stay the same. Or use the corner of a kitchen counter to do things like captain's chair ab work. Or dips, you can certainly build your body with a dip, we know what an effective upper body building exercise that is. Who cares whether you're using dip bars or in the corner of a counter. Or you can use furniture to do body weight tricep extensions. Or more advanced variations of push ups. So guys, stop putting the blinders on. There's so many things around you that will allow you to get more exercises in that arsenal for your home workouts and therefore make your workouts better. The next thing you're going to want to do is make your exercises hard at every opportunity. Look, I can do lots of push ups. And doing a lot of push ups can definitely give me a workout but is it going to give me the overload I need to start building muscle? Likely not, especially if you're used to doing a lot of push ups. So let's start finding some harder variations of push ups.
This is a great example. Use the corner of a wall, what we call a one arm posted push up. Now you can overload on that one arm, at one time and make sure that it's doing a lot more of the work. I can tell you this, you might be able to bang out 30, 50, 60, 70 push ups, try these one arm posted push ups. I guarantee you'll be doing a lot fewer and therefore getting a lot more work done in a shorter period of time. Number three and following along on that same very concept, train to failure. What I mean by that is stop counting. If you think that you are going to count your reps and that's going to equate to an intense workout? Forget about it. Because a lot of times, counting is the biggest crutch we have. Stopping at 12 because you're supposed to stop at 12, because someone told you to stop at 12 is not going to get you those extra reps if you still had them in your tank. And those extra reps, those last few, the ones that provide the biggest struggle, are the ones that are going to provide the biggest benefits. So stop counting and start just training until you can't do any more reps. That will dictate when the end of the set is. And now for the clothing. Shirts are optional and socks are mandatory. If you stop thinking that you've got to wear your shoes all the time, now you've just unlocked a whole new avenue of exercises to go down. And that is, a bunch of exercises that utilize your socks on a slick surface. It could be a tile floor, could be a hardwood floor, could be a linoleum floor, I don't care what floor you have, but some surface that your socks will slide on. And now we've got options, things like closed chain hamstring building exercise. This is a very difficult version of an exercise to work your hamstrings. And it's all possible because we can actually slide our feet on the floor or we can shift our entire focus somewhere else, like our abs. Or serpentine ab slide, again possible because of the socks that we're wearing on the floor. This is an intense exercise that works our abs and our obliques. And it's just really simple to do once you throw those shoes off. So stop thinking about what you can't do and start thinking about what you can do just by rethinking your own wardrobe when you do these workouts. Last but not least, my biggest tip I can give you if you're going to be working out at home, is to do something. You see doing nothing is no option. If you do something you're going to start pushing yourself beyond where you are today. And that's what I hate the most, is excuses for not doing something. You don't have one. There's so many things that you can do to turn your own home into a much better gym than it is. And if you start to become more serious about your workouts and you start to love the results that you're getting, you might go out and invest in a small little home gym and that doesn't need a lot of home fitness equipment either.