I know a lot of people feel barriers to resistance training, and one of the easiest ways to get more resistance training in is to simply do it from home. Today I want to share three proven strategies to make your at-home workouts more effective and challenging.
When it comes to resistance training, our main goals are either strength or hypertrophy (muscle building). I’m going to start with a disclaimer: while training at home is a fantastic low-barrier entry way to improving your strength and hypertrophy, you will be limited by the weights that you have.
The tips I’m going to give you today can help you improve the difficulty level and efficacy of what you’re doing with the weights you do have at home. But over time, you might need more bands, more weights, and heavier weights to continue progressing. There’s only so much you can do with a little bit for so long.
That doesn’t mean you can’t make significant progress training at home or that the resistance training you’re doing isn’t benefiting you. Let’s dive into three ways to maximize what you have.
Simply adding a slower tempo and slowing down the movement is going to allow you to go through that range of motion slower and make the weight that you do have feel more challenging.
A tempo is essentially a slower count on the eccentric (the lowering) or slower count on the concentric (the raising up) movement of a lift. Instead of performing your movements at a normal pace, you can slow them down significantly.
How to Apply Tempo Training:
Let’s use a split squat as an example. Instead of going through the movement at your normal pace, you would count: three, two, one down, then three, two, one up. This controlled tempo will make you feel a burn and add much more challenge to the movement.
Adding a tempo of about two to three seconds has been shown to be more effective for hypertrophy. Longer and slower than that, you’re probably just wasting your time – you’d be better off increasing reps or load. But adding this controlled tempo can make the weight that you do have feel significantly more challenging.
Similar to tempo, adding a pause is a way that’s going to improve the time under tension and how long you’re spending in different parts of the movement.
Using our split squat example again: you would descend into the bottom position, but once you get to the bottom, you’re going to pause – one, two – before coming back up.
Benefits of Pause Training:
Adding a pause at the bottom is a great way to add difficulty to your movements, especially if you’re doing bodyweight exercises or using lighter weights than you might be able to handle in the gym. It will essentially make that weight harder and allow you to improve strength in those ranges of motion without using things like a bounce or momentum.
This technique allows you to keep the true tension on the muscle doing the movement and work on some isometrics in those bottom ranges of motion. It’s simply a way to make exercises harder when you don’t have as much weight at home.
If you’re unable to increase the weight because you don’t have heavier options at home, simply increase the reps – up to about 30 reps.
When to Stop Increasing Reps:
Once you start to get to 30 reps of a movement, that’s where I would suggest you absolutely need to be buying more weights, finding heavier objects to move around the house, or adding resistance bands to increase the difficulty.
You can continue to train in that 20-30 rep range with the weights you have, adding tempo, pauses, and other mechanics to increase difficulty. But once you start to get to those 20-25-30 reps and things are feeling like a 5 or 6 out of 10, that’s when you want to consider getting heavier equipment.
Practical Example:
Say you have 20-pound dumbbells and your program calls for three sets of 8-10 bicep curls, but these are pretty light for you. Instead of stopping at 8 reps, keep going until you can only do 2 more reps (reaching about an 8 out of 10 difficulty). If you can do 20 reps before reaching that intensity, that’s your new rep range with those weights.
Increase Sets and Volume
You can continue to increase reps, sets, and load in many different ways. If you’re starting with two sets of something, you can progress to three, then four sets to increase the total volume you’re doing to stimulate muscle growth.
Understanding Strength vs. Hypertrophy at Home
Strength development is going to be a little bit harder to achieve at home because strength is largely neuromuscular and has to do with moving heavier loads. At some point, you might be stronger than your 20-pound dumbbells allow you to express.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t keep making progress at home. For many beginners or those without a large strength training history, the weights they have at home (or even their body weight) can help them get significantly stronger.
As you progress over time, you’ll probably need more weight. That doesn’t mean you have to join a gym unless you want to, but you can continue training at home by using these tactics with progressively heavier weights.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive training program that you can do at home, The Lyss Method offers beginner and advanced programs where all exercises can be substituted for dumbbells and done from the comfort of your home.
Our programs are designed to meet you where you’re at – you don’t need a gym membership. Everything can be substituted to work with whatever equipment you have available, and the programming appropriately balances strength, hypertrophy, and conditioning goals.
For those just getting started with resistance training, I also offer a free lifting calculator that can help you determine appropriate starting weights and rep ranges based on your current fitness level.
The biggest issue for most people training from home is simply lack of weight. But if you can make that weight feel heavier, improve difficulty, add challenge, and understand how to develop muscle and strength within your home environment, you can continue making significant progress.
Remember, you can apply these same techniques as you acquire heavier weights over time. The principles of tempo, pauses, and rep manipulation will continue to serve you well as your home gym grows.
These strategies work whether you’re a complete beginner or someone who’s been training for years but needs to make the most of limited equipment. The key is progression – always looking for ways to make your workouts more challenging within the constraints you have.
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I’m Exercise Physiologist, sports nutritionist, weight lifter, and ultra runner. I am here to bring science to your training in a no-nonsense way. I have helped thousands of women crush big lifting goals, cross race finish lines, and even do both. I’m here to help you do the same!
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