Overcoming Your Home-Gym Challenges

Exercising at home can be difficult for a myriad of reasons. Some factors are impossible to overcome, while others can be worked around. Below are some modifications and suggestions that have benefited me and I hope will be helpful to you and your workouts.

Lack of Equipment:

• Sliders: For hard floors: use felt furniture movers or a shammy towel; for carpets: use plastic plates, frisbees, or paper plates
• Dumbbells: Fill up glass jars with water or wet sand; Use aluminum cans. Wrap cordage or straps around bricks.
• Core work: many of the exercises you've done with a physioball can be similarly done with a foam roller. Try using the foam roller for glute bridges, single leg hamstring curls.
• Gravity: You can adjust your body position to maximize the effect of gravity to mimic some exercises usually done with a pulley system. Seated-cable-row can become a bent-over-row and cable rear-delt-fly can become a bent-rear-delt-fly. Check out these other upper back exercises that don't require any equipment.
• Barbell: Use a dowel or pvc pipe and gallon jugs to make a barbell. Wrap socks around either end of the bottle to minimize shift or incorporate the balance challenge into your workout.

Not enough weight:
Lifting more weight is only one way to increase your workout intensity. Here are some more:

• Slow it down: Count the duration of each rep as you're lifting. Instead of one-second-up, one-second-down, try one second up, holding for 5 seconds at the end range of motion, then 3 seconds down. This increases time under tension.
• Range of motion: Most lifts, with their full complete range of motion, biomechanically provide you with a rest on each repetition. For example, the lateral raise is done with arms at the sides, then lifted straight out to the sides so the body forms a T, then back down. If you're lowering your arms down to your sides on each rep, that is a rest. If you only go down partway, then come back up, you'll keep the deltoids (the target muscle) activated the whole time. This is another way to increase time under tension.   
  
• Lever length: A weight will feel heavier if it is positioned further from the moving joint (fulcrum). If you're limited on weights, substitute lateral raises for shoulder presses. Hold your hands extended overhead in line with your torso to make crunches more challenging.
• Less Rest: Take a shorter break between exercises and your workout will become much harder.

Too Hot:
The gym provides a temperature controlled environment that feels ideal for exercise. Our homes, however, are usually a little bit warmer. Air conditioning can be effective, but usually results in cooling your entire home, which the other residents might not appreciate. A fan is a great way to temporarily make one room feel cooler without affecting the temperature in the rest of the house. If you're sweating, the fan will be even more effective at cooling you. And hey, you can probably wear less clothes at home, too.