In the blink of an eye, our freedom we have grown extremely comfortable with here in Western Australia was taken away at 6pm Sunday night. This hard 5 day lockdown was put into place in response to a community transmission recorded the day before, through a hotel quarantine incident. As a result, most businesses including gyms and fitness centres were instructed to close immediately. In light of this, myself, colleagues and fellow industry professionals have all been working from home as of Monday. I feel as though we are all a lot better prepared for this one, as most of the trainers around Perth have online offers, people have gym equipment at home and most importantly, this is only meant to last for 5 days. With this being said, I have seen some awesome but also some not so awesome approaches to training from home. I’d like to take this time to offer some practical advice in response to the gym from home situation and give you some frame work to structure the rest of your week around.
Firstly, before this week you would have been training for a specific purpose. This could be weight loss, it could be endurance events and it could be cross fit competitions. Whatever it might be, you were training and you were not exercising. The difference between the two is the purpose and intent of your sessions. To exercise, you can go for a walk or a jog, or you can perform a small circuit. This is designed for your overall health in all areas and is purposeless as far as a specific goal is concerned. I am mentioning this because I have seen people who train for very specific things all of a sudden just exercise. This is not going to help your long term strength and performance goals so I argue as to why you would do so in comparison to trying to keep your structure.
Secondly, cooking yourself by training 5 days a week in the sun is probably not going to help your training goals either. If you are somebody who is used to training 3x Crossfit classes per week, why are you doing twice a day WODs in the sun all of a sudden? You would not do this to prepare for a competition so why are you doing it now? The same goes for strength trained athletes who are now running every morning. How is a sudden increase in impact of up to 8-12x BW (Running) going to be good for your very unaccustomed body? Running is one of the best activities you can do for your health and performance, if running is your goal of course. The idea of this sudden increase in force absorption through your ankles and knees might not be the best for YOU though.
In light of this semi whinge, I’d like to offer some practical solutions and tips/tricks you can implement in order to not take any backwards steps during this time. These solutions will need to directly relate to your situation though, so don’t do everything on the list.
Step 1
Identify your current training goals and work out your training frequency, your intensity, your volume load and your immediate goals. Work out what you have available and then aim to replicate as best as you can.
Step 2
Don’t allow yourself to feel guilty if you do end up missing a few sessions. You can’t argue with rest and recovery and if this becomes a reset week for you, then so be it. You can’t go that far backwards in a week so it is important to not think that you will.
Step 3
Do what you can. Within this section I will highlight how to get the most out of yourself with very little available. Firstly, add paused reps to your exercises. Because some of you can’t squat more than a 5kg dumbell, you can add pauses at end range for extra muscle fiber involvement and metabolite accumulation. Secondly, add single leg and arm variants. If you are used to heavy back squats, learn to pistol squat, do Bulgarians and single leg RDLs/bridges/thrusts. Fourthly, add supersets in order to ramp up the metabolite accumulation and stimulate hypertrophy. You can double your working volume in the same amount of time with shorter rests and supersets.
Step 4
Don’t buy into the idea of intensity over everything. There are a large number of exercises categorised as performance enhancing plyometric style movements. These include things like jumping, bounding, throwing and weightlifting. If up until now you have never done these things, now is not the time to start. Jumping 50 times within a session from nowhere is not going to end well. If you want a cardio hit out, get on a bike instead or do something very low impact like skipping or shadow boxing. I understand that we have physical needs, but you don’t “need” to jump up and down within your lounge room to try and call it a workout. You can squat, lunge, crunch, pushup etc and still get the job done. This is also a great time to work on your mobility, so if equipment-less; stretch instead.
My take home points here would be that this is only a 1 week, potentially 2 week issue. Up until now we have all trained with purpose and longevity in mind. We have cared about HOW we move as much as HOW MUCH. Your current strategy shouldn’t be thrown into the bin just because your gym has closed. You should not be aiming to achieve anything unrealistic within this time frame and you should look at what you can do, and not what you cannot. If you need the break, enjoy it. If you need a stretch, do so. If there is something you have been putting off, do it. Just don’t get guilty about what you cannot do or what you wish you were doing. That mindset will never serve you well and will cloud your judgement moving into next week. If we are back in the gym next week, remember to ease back into it. You do not need to make up for lost time. Good luck.