5 Mistakes That Can Make You Hate Home Workouts
And how to avoid these mistakes
With the 2nd wave of COVID-19 hitting India and France being put under another lockdown, nobody knows who is going to be forced to adapt a home workout routine again.
I am sure that you have got a good idea of how to workout at home and set up a pretty good routine to follow. But with all that, you must make sure that you avoid some major mistakes that have the potential to even make you hate home workouts. And with no further due, let’s head over to the mistakes.
Avoiding the help from your surroundings
Many people struggle to target their back, perform dips or make things harder at home as they don’t have access to dumbbells and weights. But your surrounding is always there for help. Go, seek some help, and it won’t say no.
Just look around yourself during your workout when your head is heavily searching for weights or ways to make things harder and you would get to know what I am trying to convey.
- If you have got a pair of chairs or a slab with a corner inwards such that you can keep your hands aside, you got your dips covered, and with a table, you got your rows and bicep curls covered.
- And if you have plastic chairs and a table attached to a wall, as in my case, then you can perform your rows just by placing a broomstick, mopstick, or any stick or a rod, on the pair of chairs.
- A heightened surface like a table, a bed, or stairs can be used to target legs effectively. With stairs, you have even got a height measure for your jump squats. Moreover, you can use them to perform declined push-ups too.
- And if you can find something that can slide or roll, you got your ab wheel rollout covered.
I am not trying to snatch away anybody’s business, just helping to improvise. Improvisation is the key.
Choosing too difficult bodyweight exercise
This mistake generally results from the previous mistake. Many people, to compensate for the lack of equipment, head over to a difficult variation of the exercise that they can’t perform correctly.
This not only makes the exercise a hell lot harder to perform, but the performer is always prone to injury. There’s a reason why calisthenic athletes mostly get injured during skill training. When the intensity is high, the risk of injury is also high and with no prior training and balance, you are just digging a pit for yourself.
Most often people try to go for harder variations just because they think normal push-ups or pull-ups are easy, but mastering the basics is the most crucial part of any type of training and the same goes with bodyweight training too.
- Let’s take an example of push-ups. Are you touching the ground with your chest, squeezing your chest during the way up, and locking out your elbows at the top in every rep of a set? If your answer is no, then just try it once. Your numbers will reduce drastically. When I suggested this to one of my friends, his numbers dropped to half his best.
Forgetting that variations provide extra stimulus
Yes, the previous mistake says you must not choose a strenuous exercise you can’t perform. But you need progressive overload for continuously building muscles. So, how would you do that?
You see, there's a difference between a strenuous exercise that you can’t perform and an exercise that challenges you to perform its 8–10 reps. Pick the latter one. Variations provide the overload in case of a bodyweight exercise.
Let’s again take the example of push-ups. If you are a newbie, you’d start with kneeling or inclined push-ups. Once you master that, you head over to normal push-ups, then declined and archer push-ups, and then the one-arm push-ups. Skip any of them and you’ll land into mistake number 2.
Forgetting to train your back
This is one of the worst mistakes people make during home workouts. This leads to muscle imbalance and hence, a bad posture.
You see, your back is one of the biggest muscle groups in your body. If you aren’t paying enough attention to it, then all the gains in your chest are just going to deteriorate your posture.
- For the ones arguing for no proper equipment to train their back, you’ve got covered at the first mistake. You got your rows covered with a rod or a stick and a pair of chairs; you got your pull-ups covered with a ledge at a suitable height.
Most importantly, all your problems can be solved in under 50 dollars, with a pull-up bar or a pair of rings. This small investment can give your body a remarkable return.
- For the lower back, you can perform glute bridges with the help of a table. Simple exercises like the superman are also going to help you avoid the postural imbalance.
Just don’t let your chest, front delts, and biceps make all the gains at home, or else, it will be worse than good for you.
A little bit of back training can save your body from no back training.
Picking the wrong room
Imagine picking your living room for a workout. It isn’t difficult to get back to your couch and within minutes get out of your training.
You see, that’s because you’ve chosen the wrong room. If possible, you must pick a less comfortable room. You must get into the training mindset and apply your focus to the training and not to the surrounding comfort.
Get out to your backyard, go to a less furnished room, get down to your basement, just somewhere that can make you feel not being home while being home and provide you the intensity that you are looking for to build muscle.
Takeaway
- Look around, you have ample things in your surrounding to help you with your workout.
- Don’t choose an exercise of which you can’t perform a single rep correctly.
- Make sure you increase the difficulty of the exercise by changing its variation when it gets easy. It should be doable as well as challenging.
- Don’t forget to train your back, or else all the gains in the chest will ruin your posture.
- Pick a room or place that’s not so comfortable so that you can get into the training mindset and train with the right intensity.
I hope you enjoyed and learned something new from this piece. Thanks for reading!!
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