Movement: How do I workout during quarantine?

Introduction

This global pandemic has our everyday lives on pause, and one way we manage the stress from our everyday lives is working out. But now all the gyms are closed – how do we adapt? Truth is, we don’t even have another situation similar to this to compare to, for us to recall how we adapted our lifestyle, let alone our workout routine.

What if I have no equipment whatsoever?

This is undoubtedly challenging, but not impossible. A lot of your workouts here, at home will rely on your creativity. Let’s think about what we could possibly do with just our body weight:

• Squats

• Lunges

• Pushups

• Planks

• Pike pushups / inverted presses

So granted ten squats or lunges with our body weight might not feel challenging, okay maybe you do the squats or lunges for 2 minutes straight with no rest, repeat until you’ve completed 4-8 rounds. See how the increased time under tension (while decreased load placed on the body) will provide the progression from the “body weight doesn’t do anything”.

Specificity in training

You most likely had a routine before life was put on hold. It’s definitely going to be a challenge to replicate the majority of your program, but it’s not a reason to abandon your trending progress and conditioning. What I believe is your best method of approach here is to layout your current program and compare it to what you can replicate at home, with the space and equipment at your disposal. So barbell back squats are likely out of the question for most of us: if you’re in an NYC apartment you know this is pretty unlikely. But this won’t mean any lower body workout you do from here on in is worthless. If your load variable, i.e. the weight, is fixed, you have so many other variables to play with such as time under tension, rest period, number of sets and reps. All you need to do is be creative with the variables you can control.

Personal routine

Currently, I’m focusing on two lower body days, two days of metabolic conditioning, then two easy accessory work days or animal flow. I broke down and ordered a couple of kettlebells. Now, while I’m in the gym I’ll admittedly use a variety of weights for each different exercise pattern. Well now with just one 20kg and one 28kg, I have to adapt and redesign my program during this quarantine. Usually I like to perform kettlebell swings with 36-44kg bells for sets of 4×10. Okay, now I’ll perform 15-20 reps each set instead of 10. Changing that variable.

Accessing equipment from online sources has been a real challenge. But if you’re able to access equipment, and you want to keep it relatively inexpensive, I would suggest a medium and heavy weight kettlebell. You can do everything with those two pieces of equipment: any kind of push, pull, hinge, knee flexion, trunk activation, mobility, conditioning or flow pattern. The most versatile tool that should be in your in home workout Arsenal, if you need a few pieces of equipment that will yield maximum usage.

Lastly, you may have seen the gliders being used all over social media. I wouldn’t worry about it, grab a couple of towels. You’ll be able to replicate any core (trunk activation) or even a host of push patterns with your towels. A strong suggestion with using towels or gliders on sliding surface such as wooden floorboards is to own your movement, nice and controlled, smooth.

Summary

Ultimately we have to be realistic and be honest with ourselves. There’s a lot of patterns we may not all be doing for a long time, unfortunately. And it sucks, big time. But there’s nothing we can do about it, and if we feel there’s a skill we may have been neglecting up until now, this may be a great time to work on those skills. I’m confident that you will surprise yourselves with how much you’ll be able to mimic gym patterns or ensure that your weaknesses are now finally worked on. Please reach out if you have the desire to talk about in home training.