18/11/2020
Missing strength work? No weights, no mates, no dates.
Lockdown sucks, we can't go to the gym, we can't see our friends, we can't go out and meet people.
For those of us who weight train, how can we make up for a lack of heavy weights? I love doing heavy dips, but don't have 100kg of weights or a dip bar in my house.
So what can we do to help stop losing strength and muscle?
The trick is to make exercises you can do at home harder. To mimic adding weight, without the weight.
There are a few ways we can do this. So let's take the example of weighted dips. We can obviously do bench dips, and press-ups. I will use these two exercises to explain methods to do it.
Slow eccentric training is an option. So for the bench dips or press-ups, do the eccentric (lowering) portion SLOWLY. Take 5-10 seconds to lower yourself down, then come up fast!
Add power: Another option is to do power variations of the exercises. For example a clap press-up or speed dip (come up as fast as you can, as if you want to throw yourself off the bench).
Pre fatigue: Another method to make these exercises more difficult is to pre fatigue yourself. For example do bench dips to fatigue your triceps, then move onto a pressup variation like Spiderman pressups.
There are ways we can train at home to make up for a lack of equipment. Don't give up!
