Boost Your at Home Bodyweight Workouts with These Tips

Home bodyweight workouts are a great way to stay in shape. Contrary to popular belief, a well-developed routine can fully replace a gym, coach, or fancy equipment. Let’s explore tips that will take your at home bodyweight workouts to a whole new level. You will learn new ways to torture your body that would make the ways of medieval Inquisition look like a back rub.

Go beyond pushups and try new routines. The classic limiting belief on at home bodyweight workouts is that you are stuck counting pushups until your fists dent the hardwood floor. The human body is amazing and you will be surprised to know it can twist and turn in hundreds of ways that will make you sweat. People give at home bodyweight workouts mostly because they grow bored doing the drill day after day. Breaking routine is like adding spice to food. All you have to do is fire up good old YouTube and watch someone teach you a new way to punish your muscles.

Slowing down the repetition speed can quickly ruin your belief that you fully master a certain bodyweight exercise. If your typical repetition last 2-3 seconds, try prolonging it to 10 seconds. The new ordeal unleashed upon your muscle fibers is guaranteed to give new work to do for at least a couple of weeks from now.

At home bodyweight workouts can be taken to the next level by eliminating the rest period between sets. This sadistic new way to punish your body using its own weight will certainly keep you busy coping. Keep in mind that you can make this slightly easier by only reducing the rest period at first. As you probably remember, your home workout routine needs to remain doable to stick with you on the long term.

Let’s say you are now doing supersets with little as no break in between. Can it get even harder or should you resort to iron? The answer is surprising. You can make your repetitions even more challenging by consciously tightening the muscle at the point of peak contraction for a second or two. Instead of quickly reversing direction, allowing the muscle some rest, you give it a new kind of demand that will certainly lead to grow and development.

Using only the body’s own weight is a rule you are allowed to break. No one said you can’t enlist a training partner. Whether it is a friend or your special one, the only condition is the person to be trustable, and preferably not too heavy. Going from simple pushups to pushups with someone on your back doesn’t happen in a blink. A training partner is particularly useful to provide resistance when doing squats or rows. As you probably know already, training without a fitness equipment makes it harder to isolate a certain muscle group. Your body has the instinct of mobilizing muscles from all over the body to enhance stability, and that is not always what you want.

Another form of cheating in at home bodyweight workouts is by increasing your own weight. Don’t get this wrong. You shouldn’t gain weight to make your exercises more challenging and effective. A simpler alternative is to put on a weighted vested. A purist will consider the vest rule-breaking as it is not bodyweight. However, because the weight is uniformly distributed in a close fit to your body you are definitely very far away from dumbbells, barbells, or any other equipment that concentrates mass a great distance from your own center of mass.

At home bodyweight workouts are boosted each time you try something new. Hiding yourself in the comfort zone of an exercise you know and master well is a quick and sure way to dismissing your efforts as pointless. The reason is simple. You will be working against your body’s tendency to develop efficiency in making repeated movements.

The more sets of repetitions, the more your body will tighten the budget on calorie consumption and heart rate. Always set the bar higher and don’t allow your at home bodyweight workouts to become aerobic. Keep in mind that fun is the enemy of results.