China Virus has wrecked most people’s workout regimens, and it does not look like the virus is going away anytime soon.
I don’t think it’s safe to go to a public gym for about half a year to a year at the very least, but this does not mean we get no exercise.
While most people spend their time at home eating box-packed garbage and watch their bodies turn into mush, we’ll eat clean and do bodyweight workouts to enhance our strength and endurance.
No equipment bodyweight workouts can be very effective for general fitness, particularly when you do them with proper form and intensity.
You won’t be doing a lot of isolation work, as bodyweight exercises train your entire body – but you will see some overall muscle gain from it! (Or, if you’re big already, you won’t lose all the muscle you’ve toiled for years to gain.)
Cardio
If you can go outside, the best cardio is brisk walking or jogging. Walking under the sun has many health benefits, and it also improves your mood and is a great way to get your day started.
Not to mention you get some Vitamin D too, and since we’re indoors almost all day now, it’s essential to get as much of it as you can.
If however, you cannot go out:
- Burpees
- Mountain climbers,
- Jumping jacks
- High Knees
make an excellent way to get your heart rate elevated.
If you’re doing jumping jacks, make sure you wear shoes, because jumping on tile is not good for your knees.
You only need about 10 minutes to break a sweat and get your body warm enough to begin training.
(By the way, if you don’t know how any particular exercise I mention is done, I recommend just looking it up on YouTube: “how to do <exercise name>”. A good video will tell you how to do it far better than I can with just text.)
Body Weight Exercises
Abdominals and Core:
- Sit-Ups
- Crunches
- Leg raises
Lower Body:
- Squats
- Jump squats
- Sumo squats
- Bulgarian squats
- Lunges
- Calf raises
Upper body:
- Push-ups
- Close-grip push-ups
- Inverted rows
- Pull-ups (if you have a bar)
- Chin-ups (if you have a bar)
- Shoulder dips (between 2 chairs)
- Tricep dips
This is just an illustrative list – you can find many, many exercises via a Google search if you’d like, but these are the basic ones.
Many of them (especially ones you tend to find online) are fancy and look cooler, but I recommend sticking to these until you can buy weights for your home.
These are the primary “foundational” exercises, and while it’s fine to spice things up every once in a while, you need to focus on the basics to get your foundation right.
Just pick any one exercise each for your upper body, lower body, and abdominals and eke out 100 reps of them (break it up in as many pieces as you need).
(The only exceptions to this are pullups and chinups – which if you have a bar, do till failure.)
The next day, pick three different variations and repeat.
The idea is to do simple exercises and to do them consistently (5-7 times a week).
These exercises will build/preserve muscle and keep you from becoming fat and lethargic like many people do when they’re away from the gym.
Personal recommendation: Don’t overdo it. The lockdowns are already a stressful period for almost everyone – keep your workouts moderately hard, so you’re still growing, but not so hard that you don’t feel like doing them. Don’t make starting the workout a massive exercise of willpower. Focus on consistency, with a decent bit of intensity. Don’t be the guy who does 2x his capacity for two days and then breaks down and takes 3 days off.
A Note on Schedule
When you are at home all day, you feel as if you can always work out “later in the evening”.
“I’ll do some work now, and do my workout later in the evening” – then evening arrives, and you’re tired and your willpower is low, so you don’t work out.
I highly recommend working out in the morning when you’re working out at home.
This is not a rule obviously, this is just my experience as I’ve been working and working out from home for a while now. Your motivation and willpower levels are high in the morning, and you can get your workouts out the way quickly and then get to work.
Schedule time for it if you like, for example, 9 am to 11 am will be reserved for your workout, come hell or high water.
I’ve found that this way, you will actually do your workouts instead of skipping them because of the “something came up” issue that is likely to happen in the evening.
Just wake up, brush your teeth, and work out. Then you can take a shower and begin your day – strong, motivated, and ready to kick some ass.
Hope this helps.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
P.S. You’re at home anyway, go all the way and take the 90 Day Self-Improvement project. If you’re not satisfied with where you are in life, you will be after 90 days of intense focus. It can change your life.
wpDiscuz
