Weight training at Home

If you can’t make it to a gym to train, but you want to gain weight and muscle healthily, then weight training at home may be your answer. Despite the fact you often won’t have the same wide choice of equipment to use, you can still achieve great results. These four tips for weight training at home will help you stay focused, keep motivated and continue to produce great results over time.

 

1) The ‘One Room’ Rule

It’s far too easy to get distracted at home. So we need to be smart about how we train. And one clever move is to reserve all your workouts for one room in your home.

 

Why do this?

Well, there’s this principle in behavioral psychology called ‘State Dependent Learned Memory Behavior.’ And even though it sounds a bit complicated, it’s very simple.

In simple terms, it just means that our minds make quick associations between what we’re thinking and our emotional state. So if you feel happy, you find it easier to remember happy memories and vice versa.

Also, if you use just one room for your home workouts, your brain will find it easier to get into a ‘workout mindset’ than spreading your energies and efforts throughout the rooms where you live.

Focus on using just one room to train, and your brain will get better and better at connecting that one area with focused workout sessions.

As you continue to do this, the connection gets stronger, and so will your commitment and motivation too.

2) Train Heavy For Size

You need to give your muscle cells a reason to grow if you want to gain muscle size and put on more weight. This means subjecting them to enough ‘stress’ that the muscle fibres break down and grow back stronger. Usually, this means lifting weights that cause your muscles to temporarily fail within six to eight repetitions of an exercise. And you’ll need to focus on relatively heavy weights to achieve this effect.

3) Exceed Body-weight

The fact is that most guys need more than just their body weight to gain significant muscle mass and weight. That’s because most regular body-weight exercises (like press-ups, squats or lunges) won’t exhaust the muscle group within 6-8 reps. naturally, there will be exceptions to this rule (including pull-ups, chin-ups, and vertical press-ups). But the difficulty level of these exercises rules them out for many beginners. The main point to recognize is that you’ll probably need to buy some weight training equipment if home workouts remain your preferred way to train.

4) 1-Leg Workouts

A method you can use to squeeze more results from body-weight training is to lift one leg off the ground and perform lower body moves on a single leg. As an example, you might stand on one leg while doing deadlifts or squats with the other. And by doing this, you’ll be supporting far more weight on each muscle as you train.

And you can also do the same with your arms, using 1-arm press-ups for example.

This is one way to get more out of your home workouts and increase the level of difficulty. Again, you’re looking to exhaust the muscle group within 6-8 reps or less, and as long as this is happening, you can expect to make progress.

Make use of the four tips you’ve just learned for weight training at home, and success will follow. It just takes consistent action with smart techniques, that’s all.