Working out at home? Read this first.
For decades now, gyms have been the center of human movement. Obviously, people have been training and sweating in gymnasiums for centuries now, but in the current society we live in, we’ve taken that to another extreme. Most of us have little to no physical movement required in our daily lives. And if it weren’t for that pesky grass that keeps growing, we wouldn’t even need to get outside.
The issue is that even though our environment has changed, our bodies haven’t. They still need physical movement and activity. In response to this problem we’ve created countless options for fitness centers from massive buildings to small corner studios that house our collective guilt for inactivity.
But has this solved our issue? Last time I checked millions of Americans are obese and dying from preventable disease each year. So… No.
Everyone has their excuses, I mean “reasons”, for not exercising. But at the end of the day, we all have a responsibility to our body to move. If we don’t move, we die. But access is not a problem, information is not a problem, ability is not a problem… We just don’t do it.
So call me crazy, but I think that gyms are part of the problem too. Well, not the businesses and buildings specifically, but the collective way we outsource our entire physical lives to these places. As we are seeing now with gyms closed due to the COVID pandemic, people are having to deal with a whole new situation that can be a bit scary for them – taking ownership of their health and physical activity.
What if we reframed what we thought of as a successful physical day? What if we decided to not use a hard workout as an excuse to eat junk food and drink too much? What if we were forced to incorporate movement throughout our workday instead of trying to consolidate and optimize our body’s physical needs at its expense?
Well, this would be awesome. And it would start with working out and moving more at home. But before you jump straight into 50 burpees every day to really get that sweat going and heart rate pumping, take a second to think about what you actually want from exercise in the first place. Make sure you understand these 5 aspects to create a successful, sustainable, and healthy at home exercise routine.
1) Start with a plan – You can’t outwork a bad diet. You’ve heard this before, and at some level you know it’s true, but you probably still live like it’s not. Sleep, stress management, and nutrition are essential parts of being healthy, but they aren’t sexy, and they aren’t fun. It’s much easier to go do some hard workout to assuage the extra calories you’re eating and the guilt you’d otherwise feel from sitting down all day.
Most people get in the habit of going to the gym and shutting off their brain to go through the motions hoping they’ll pop out on the other side of the workout with a bunch of burned calories. But that will not lead to a long term, sustainable approach to health. If you want that, you have to take ownership of the process and what you are doing.
Start with a plan and a system for how you’ll create a structure to your day. When you’ll sleep, when you’ll eat, when you’ll move. These aspects are as important if not more important for health than exercise.
The point is that you have to step back and think about what you want first in order to effectively get there. If you want weight loss, you have to focus on nutrition and eating habits. If you want to feel better, start with quality and consistent sleep. If you want performance improvement or muscle gain, then focus on eating well and sticking to a consistent training approach that trains with that goal in mind (i.e. running every day won’t be the best way to gain a bunch of muscle).
2) Focus on developing skills, not just how much you sweat – Sure, effort and intensity can be a great gauge of how hard you worked, but there is more to movement than just pure output. You can practice moving better, learn how to run well, become more confident in calisthenics, take a more intentional approach to mobility to get out of pain, get reps in for any sport specific goals, or work on life habits and building structure.
All of these are skill based which means that they require focus and attention to learn well. Though that is heavily moderated by how much intention you put into the practice, they create the foundation for how well and how hard you can train and workout later on. Far too many people let their body and movement ability lapse over the years, resulting in pain and weight gain. And when they want to get back in shape and turn things around, they try to hop back into the quickest route to get there.
Unfortunately, skipping right to the output without focusing on the ability is only the quickest way to get injured. You have limitless access to professionals and information at your fingertips, so use it and start working on developing a set of skills that will reward your body with a lifetime of healthy and fun movement so you can do things like hike, run, or play sports as long as you want to!
3) Reframe what success means to you – There is more to exercise that just high intensity or long duration cardio. You can have an incredibly successful training session without feeling crushed afterwards. To put that another way, running a mile and walking a mile both burn roughly the same amount of calories. But if you are only judging the success of that workout by how hard it was, you might not feel good about it.
“I’m too busy”, “I don’t have enough time”, “I couldn’t get to the gym”, “I don’t have the equipment”, or “I just can’t motivate myself to workout”. I hear this ALL the time. But they are all absolutely made up excuses you tell yourself to justify your poor prioritization. You’re essentially making up reasons as to why you didn’t train. And as long as you keep creating arbitrary criteria for why you can’t exercise, you’re not going to change.
Instead, reframe what a successful movement day looks like. If you don’t want to set aside 30 minutes for intentional movement, that’s fine. Just do quick 5-10 minute movement sessions multiple times a day. Go outside for quick 10 minute walks. Take the stairs. Do a bodyweight routine by your bed in the morning.
Choosing a metric like 60 active minutes total each day, 30 minutes outside each day, or getting your heart rate up once each week can set you on the path of taking ownership and feeling successful about what you can do each day. And that makes all the difference. Look, I don’t even workout every day, only about 4 days a week. But I do something physical every day, even if that’s just a 20 minute walk with the dogs. Because I’ve removed the arbitrary metric for success that it needs to be “hard” or “take a long” time, I’m able to do it consistently.
4) Limited options mean limited movements – If you only know how to do pushups, you’ll just do pushups. And if you jump into doing the same thing every day at high volumes you will risk an overuse injury quickly.
Get some small equipment to use that can expand what you have available to you, like bands or 20 pound kettlebells, and a physioball. You don’t have to have a full rack and weight set to have a well-rounded program. Most of the work I give my clients in a gym only uses minimal weights, bands, and a ball anyways. Having a few extra tools can expand your toolbox greatly.
The other part of this is to be mindful of the volume of work you’re doing. More isn’t always better. 100 pushups a day may make for a good YouTube video, but it can also lead to elbow tendonitis if your body isn’t prepared for the load! Change up the variation, the tempo, and the load and you will be able to train smoothly without risking injury.
5) Don’t overdo it! – Physical stresses are just another source of stress on our body, along with mental, emotional, social, existential, and environmental. Our body responds the same way to all of these. The issue is that we rarely do these two in proportion to managing the extra load and stress that hard workouts put on our system. We work hard, play hard, but don’t rest hard. This lack of acknowledgement for the additional physical stresses added to our system result in a higher frequency of illness, injury, and burnout.
Three populations (No exercise, 1x a month – 3x a week, and more than 4 times a week) were studied for incidence of getting sick. The group least likely to get sick? The moderate exercise group (1x/month-3x/week). But the group most likely to get sick? You guessed it, the high frequency exercise group. Essentially, the people in this group were much less likely to take it easy when they were feeling down and as a result, became sick more often.
So when it comes to your exercise, listen to your body and be aware of what is going on. If you are exercising at home because you’ve lost your job, that can be a super stressful time. So, don’t trash yourself with a hard workout thinking it will make you tougher. It’s just more likely to make you injured and sick.
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The point I really want you to walk away with from reading this is that you are the one that needs to take ownership of your health and body. That can be done anywhere at any time. And if removing the restraint that you have to be at a gym to workout helps you do that, then do it! Working out at home can open up a whole new opportunity to get you activity and exercise in without having added expense and time commitment. But ultimately, it’s all about what you can do consistently. The more options you have, the better!
