Continuing your Training from Home

Prepare Your Workout Space

Begin by cleaning up the area that you intend to exercise in.  If you have children and/or dogs, instruct them to stay out of this area, then tell them 300 more times.  Don’t stress though!  They won’t listen to you anyway.

After the area is clean and ready, look around.  Oh, it’s dirty again.  Gross.  Try yelling at your kids and/or dog again.  If you have a cat, don’t have a cat.  If this is not an option, start developing a taste for cat hair.  Start small by incorporating larger and larger amounts of cat hair into your traditional recipes (this is referred to as cat hair loading and is an important part of your fitness journey).

Test your space by jumping up and down.  Objects on the wall should be well secured so you don’t have to explain to friends and family how you were nearly crushed due to burpees.  If you are in a top floor apartment, wear heavy shoes so that others in the building will know just how seriously you take your health.

Prepare Your Equipment

If our “space” is the body, then “equipment” is the lifeblood of our workout.  That makes “you” the brain and the “workout” the digestive system ready to excrete the new and improved you!

You may need to make compromises when it comes to equipment.  Not all of us have fully functioning dumbbells, assault bikes, or weirdo ski-erg things lying around.  Now is the time to look under all those spare room clothes racks and rediscover their original intent. 

If you require heavy weights, think of what items you can use inside your home.  A small child/dog is great for both deadlifts and farmer carries and you can easily add weight by either getting another small child/dog or by adjusting their dinner servings.   Clothes detergent and water containers can also be used in a pinch.  Clothes detergent containers have the added benefit of making your wife/husband/partner/dog think you are busy doing chores.  This can be very helpful if you’ve just spent twelve hours watching Netflix while they did something essential, like work.

Unless you really love burpees (and who doesn’t!), you’ll eventually want to invest in some kind of cardio equipment.   This can be as simple as a jump rope, or as complicated as a more expensive kind of jump rope.  The choice is yours!  

Warm-Up

You’ll know that it is time to begin when you can hear your 7 year old slamming dumbbells on the ground while you lay in bed.  Utilize that panicked adrenaline to rush downstairs and find out if anyone injured themselves.  No?  Then, it’s time for warm-up.

Begin with a Blended squat.  Do the whole thing even though no one is around to make you.  Then do another one.  Or at least think really hard about definitely doing another one.  If you don’t do another one, say to yourself “Hey, I’m working out, aren’t I?”.  Damn straight.  Try an air squat.  For every crack and pop you hear, do a burpee.  Think to yourself, “I should have done that other Blended Squat.”

Take a moment to make sure your exercise is not interrupted by going and getting water, equipment, and pants ready BEFORE starting.  It is very difficult to put on pants in the middle of lunges.  Now that your heart rate is pumping from putting on pants, it is time to get to the workout!

The Work-Out

You should treat every at-home workout with the same intensity that you would bring to the gym (if it was on a Saturday, with a partner, in the back of a crowded class, and you came in late).

If you are participating in a instructor-led online workout, make sure that your cat/dog/children/naked partner are aware so that they can intermittently keep walking into frame and asking if there is any more coffee and meowing and/or barking.  Make sure that your camera is set up with as much artificial light as possible.  With luck, it will lend you a corpse-like pallor that should disguise your actual unnatural paleness as a result of 3 months spent indoors.  

Make sure that you don’t accidentally mute your mike.  You want to make sure that your fellow exercisers hear every grunt and fart that escapes from your body.  If you need to take a break, mumble something about how “that darn internet is acting up again”, and just walk out of frame making static noises with your mouth.  

When you’ve completed the workout, resist the urge to high five your fellow participants.  You should respect their social distance and you will also break your computer.  

As you can see, working out from home can be a very enjoyable and rewarding experience.  With just a few adjustments, and the help of a talented coach, you can continue to suffer from aches, pains, and other muscle soreness!   So good luck on your road to home fitness and remember that exercise and cake batter have one vital thing in common:  Consistency is important.