5 ways to workout at Home

Five ways to create load

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1. Unilateral Exercises

Many of your bilateral exercises will become just too light to do with body weight. Shifting all of your weight on to one leg can increase the intensity of the exercise significantly.

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2. Resistance Bands

One of the easiest ways to increase load with just about any exercise is to get your hands on one or two resistance bands. By looping them around an table leg or parts of your own body, you can significantly increase the load. As a band stretches, its tension increases exponentially, meaning that when it’s stretched 10 cm, it doesn’t take twice as much force to stretch as 5 cm – it takes a lot more! With a resistance band looped around your shoulders and feet, you could create loads in excess of 100 kg during a squat!

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3. Larger Water Containers

Pretty straight-forward. One trick you can do to help make the load easily adjustable is to get the biggest container you can find (ideally 5+ L) and weigh out the container with 1 kg worth of fluid and make a mark on the water container, then 2 kg of fluid, 3 kg etc. That way, you can easily poor out and top up the water container to vary its weight. By the way, 1 L of water = 1 kg, so if your container has volume markings on it, that’s a simple way to measure out its weight.

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4. Filling a Backpack With Heavy Objects

Fill it with anything and everything! Water bottles, bricks, rocks, sand, dirt, etc.

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5. Holding/Carrying Heavy Objects

A couch, your pet, kids, partner, grandmother  – whatever! Just make sure the risk of dropping them is low and they don’t exceed your strength capabilities.

There are often many ways you can increase the load of an exercise aside from the lifting equipment you have available to you - resistance bands being one of the best.

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Conclusion

Although only having access to light weights is not ideal for muscle hypertrophy, it’s still very possible to get a lot of solid work in to stimulate muscle growth – you just have to be a lot more strategic with how you train and what you utilise.

If you need help just message me,

Stay safe

Barry