Discover How To Get In The Best Shape Of Your Life Without Ever Leaving The Comfort Of Your Home. Are you looking to improve your health and get in better shape?
Table of Contents
If you’re like most people, you’ve likely tried various fitness programs, diets, and possibly even joined a gym.
Although there are a lot of ways to lose weight and get into better shape…
Here’s A Quick Overview Of What You’ll Discover Inside This Powerful Guide…
- The challenges of training from home and how to overcome them
- How to push yourself from home… this can be challenging unless you know this simple workout secret
- What you need to create your awesome home gym
- How to get your home gym going without spending a fortune
- The basics you should invest in to get the best results possible
- You’ll also discover how muscle growth works and the power of using high intensity techniques to unlock your full potential
- A step-by-step section focused on training everything from your upper body to your legs from home
- How to get going on a budget by using body weight training to get in the best shape of your life
- How to introduce cardio and start losing weight right away to get in shape as quickly as possible… and how to do it without risking injury
- The foods you should be eating to maximize your workout results and get in shape even faster…
- Plus, a whole lot more…
This is the ultimate step-by-step guide for getting in great shape from home.
But don’t take my word for it…
Everything You Need to Know About Isolation Training for Working Out From Home
Isolation training means that you are training just one specific muscle group and really focussing on that muscle during a particular exercise. An example of an isolation exercise is the bicep curl. This is a move that targets the biceps specifically and allows you to build muscle tears and metabolic stress in that region without it spilling out in other areas.
This can be contrasted with compound movements, such as the squat. The squat is not an isolation movement because it challenges too many muscle groups all at once. This works the quads, the calves, the hamstrings, the core, and even the lower back to a degree. Put all this together and it is a ‘bigger’ exercise that challenges more muscles and one that is more akin to the way we move in the real world.
And it’s for these reasons that isolation training has become something of a dirty word. But if it’s a size that you’re really interested in, then isolation training also happens to be an absolute must. There is a reason that every bodybuilder uses isolation training and it’s high time you did too – even if you’re training from home!
The Benefits of Isolation
The benefit of isolation is that it allows you to work on specific parts of your body that need focus. This in turn means that you’re more likely to be able to grow that precise area, rather than training the entire body and potentially letting the stronger muscles take over from the ones that you were hoping to emphasize. This leads to more microtears and therefore more growth and more strength in the long term.
At the same time, this allows you to push yourself harder and further to trigger more growth without risking a serious injury during some kind of multi-joint move.
How to Isolate?
So the new question becomes: how do you isolate a muscle?
The answer is to use an exercise that only uses a single joint – and a good example of this is the bicep curl that only uses the elbow to move the weight.
But when doing these, you also need to make sure you are conscious that you are only using that joint and that you are concentrating on contracting the specific muscle. This in turn might often mean using a lighter weight to prevent yourself from ‘cheating’ to get it up. For instance, you may otherwise find yourself swinging your body to use momentum to drive the weight upward.
Another potential tip is to try tensing your entire body throughout the movement. This locks your body rigidly into place and thereby helps you to remove the ‘energy leaks’ that could otherwise require your attention. That then helps to reduce the likelihood of your arm moving around and your body having to compensate.
Finally, consider using other tools to help yourself isolate the muscle. A preacher bench for example is ideal for isolation curls and you can also use the back of an incline bench!
How to Train Your Legs Without a Gym?
Training from home has a huge number of advantages. Not only does this allow you to work out in an environment of your own creation but it also means that you no longer need to travel to the gym when you’re low on energy and you no longer need to feel self-conscious training in front of strangers. It also means you don’t need to wait for the squat rack to become free anymore!
But this brings us to our next point. Because in all likelihood… there probably won’t be a squat rack. If you’re like most people with a home gym, your equipment will consist of some dumbbells and a pull-up bar.
And this is fine for the vast majority of things you need to do. The problem only arises once you want to start pushing beyond those basics and start building bigger muscle. And in particular, it comes when you try to build leg strength. Because it’s much harder to train your legs with bodyweight or even with basic dumbbells. So let’s look at what you can do to solve this little challenge.
Using Dumbbells
First of all, don’t write dumbbells off completely. These can be sufficient for building leg strength as long as your know-how. Using heavy enough weights and performing shoulder presses, for example, you can make your squats quite difficult – even if you’re not going to be able to approach the weights you use for deadlifts or squats. In all honestly, the legs are composed of quite a lot of slow-twitch muscle fiber (we rely on them to get around all day after all) and this means that they respond well to training with lighter weights and higher volumes.
Using Bodyweight
Moreover, you can also train your legs with bodyweight if you know how to make things harder. Performing one-legged squats is a good way to squat twice your body weight (effectively) and requires a lot of balance and concentration. Performing jump squats meanwhile challenges you to use explosive power.
If you then stack these exercises correctly to fatigue the muscle, you can create some quite punishing workouts.
Kettlebells
The best thing to do though? Invest in a kettlebell. This is the closest thing to having a barbell in your home, especially if you get a sufficiently heavy one. That’s because you can use it to perform deadlifts, clean and presses, and even goblet squats. Depending on the weight, you may need a little help picking it up – but a goblet squat can be highly challenging for the legs just as a regular squat is (the only difference being that it places a little more emphasis on the quads over the hamstrings).
Better yet, is to use the kettlebell to perform kettlebell swings – exercises that build your legs by letting you drive the weight up and forward by performing rapid squats and pushing through the floor. This is also brilliant for cardio and triggering a big anabolic hormone response!
The Biggest Mistakes People Make When Training From Home
Training from home can help you to get better results from your workouts 9 times out of 10. Why? Because there’s no commute, there’s no need to feel self-conscious and you can easily fit your training in around your routine. If you have a home gym, then you can opt to do a quick 10-minute workout first thing on a Saturday morning – which is something you just can’t do if you’re training at a gym 20 minutes away.
But home gyms aren’t perfect and if you don’t know how to attack home workouts properly, it’s easy to do yourself a disservice. Read on then and we’ll take a look at some of the biggest mistakes people make when training from home and how you can avoid those problems…
Having the TV On
One common thought process when training from home is that seeing as you have all of your amenities and entertainment around you, you may as well make your training more interesting and enjoyable by sticking on the TV…
The minute you do this though, you just pretty much sealed your own fate. One of the most important things of all when training is that you be completely engaged with your training. Feel your muscles working, watch them work, and dive into your energetic movements.
When you approach training like this, you will be guaranteed to naturally put in more effort and see faster results. This is as opposed to training with the television on, which means you’re constantly distracted, looking up, and generally not paying attention to what you’re doing.
Not Pushing Yourself Enough
Another issue when working out at home is that a lot of people won’t push themselves hard enough. The simple reason for this is that they don’t have enough punishing equipment around. They don’t have a squat rack, a weights bench, or any of the other bits – so they end up just doing press-ups.
But this isn’t enough. To trigger muscle growth, you need to be feeling the burn and the pump. And this is still possible with no equipment – you just need to be a little more inventive and creative in the way you’re going to accomplish it!
Having a Gym You Need to Set Up
Perhaps the worst mistake of all is creating a home gym that you need to set up. In other words, if you have a gym that consists of things that are behind wardrobes, need construction, or are hard to reach, then there’s a good chance you won’t be as easily convinced to train.
The great thing about a home gym is that it’s right there. If you have a bench press in your front room, then that means that you can simply hop on it and start pressing the weight. This makes all the difference to your training frequency and results, so make sure that you are taking full advantage of this with a gym that’s ready to go whenever you are!