Strength Training At Home

If you want some tips on strength training at home, then you’ll want to read this article. For our purposes in this article, I’m defining strength training as training to increase your strength, health, and body composition.

So we want:

• Full body strength increases…
• A program that has “real life” carryover, makes us strong in everyday life…
• Makes us look better (less fat, more muscle, more tone, etc)…

Here’s how we get it all:

Strength Training 101

In my article, Strength Training 101, I explain that you need a couple different things for an effective strength training program. You need:

• A Push or Press
• A Pull or Row
• A Squat
• An Explosive Movement preferably involving the hips

And you will have covered all your “whole body” training needs. Focusing on training your body in this manner (as opposed to thinking of “what muscles does this exercise work?”) will ensure you’re strengthening your whole body, not ignoring weak links, and working all the muscles and their opposing muscle groups.

Most people make the mistake of only working the lifts/muscles they like. Eg. Most guys bench all the time and do no pullups. Don’t make that mistake.

The program

Since we’re working out at home, I’m going to assume you don’t have access to gym equipment. So that leaves us with bodyweight exercises.

My bodyweight exercise program works great for beginner’s for building strength… and if you haven’t progressed on that one yet, then I suggest you give it a whirl for your home strength training needs.

If you’re a more advanced trainee and you can do 30-50+ reps of each of those exercises easily… then you’ll want to do some harder bodyweight exercsises so you continue to build strength (primarily) and keep yourself challenged.

Get Poor Leverage and Remove Limbs

We do this by giving ourselves bad leverage in the exercises. Example: a pushup becomes harder when you put your feet on a stool, increasing the weight on your arms by decreasing your leverage. It becomes even harder when you kick into a handstand against a wall and do handstand pushups.

Another way to make bodyweight exercises harder is to remove limbs. So if the regular bodyweight squat is easy for you, you take away one foot. Hold it up in the air and squat down like normal, performing one legged squats (pistols).

Putting it all together

So try something like this:

• train 3x per week.
• Full body workouts each time: a push, a pull, a squat, a hip dominant movement.
• Energy work (cardio) can be done either after these workouts (if you have time) or on the other two days of the standard 5 day work week.

So your bodyweight program might look like this: 3 sets of 5 reps of each exercise:

• One legged Squats
• One armed pushups
• Pullups
• High jumps (either jump as high as possible, knees to chest, or jumping onto a platform at least waist height).

And you now have a pretty effective strength training at home program!