Whether it be out of necessity (because your gym is still closed) or out of convenience (isn’t it so much easier not to have to drive somewhere to get your workout in?) or some other personal reason, working out at home is a great way to get or stay fit. So, what’s the best way to create a fun and effective home exercise program?
You don’t have to hate exercising or pay hundreds of dollars to see the benefits. In order to create a fun, effective at-home exercise program there are a few things to take into account:
- Include moderate to heavy strength training, warm-ups and mobility routines, cardio performed at various intensities based on your schedule, your current fitness level and your personal goals, as well as some recovery activities.
- Focus on a mindful and nutrient-dense diet
- Attempt to get adequate sleep; and
- Manage your stress levels.
Though we will not dive into these specifics in this article, it is good to know that they are all very important pieces of the fitness puzzle. All of these elements directly contribute to your success in achieving a healthy balance of looking and feeling good, and being healthy and strong.
In this post, you’ll find considerations for your programming, setting up your training schedule, types of activities, and essential (but low cost!) equipment to make the most of your routines.
Read on for all the details on how to implement the elements of safe, healthy exercise into your life in a sustainable and enjoyable way!
Components of an Effective Home Exercise Program – Considerations
When you design your own program, you’ll want to decide first how many days you can realistically train. Check out How to Create a Fitness Routine that Excites You- A Guide for Beginners if you need help figuring out how to set this up. It is here you will decide how many days you will strength train and how many days will be for cardio or recovery.
Types of Activities – Resistance Training
When you’ve got your training days figured out you can create a schedule and decide on how you will break down your strength training workouts – for beginners full-body workouts are great, but some people enjoy doing upper or lower body splits.
From here you will decide which exercises to perform, the order of the exercises, how many times you will perform the exercises (your reps and sets), how much weight you use, how much rest you take between each set, and how the program will progress from week to week or phase to phase.
This sounds like a lot (and we will break it down below!) but once it is done, it’s done for the entire phase of your program. Generally, you will want to stick with each phase for 4-6 weeks before you switch it up.
Exercise Selection – Order, Reps, Sets & Weights
For an at-home program, a great place to start is with compound or multi-joint exercises. These are the “get more bang for your buck” exercises, so to speak, as you can target multiple muscle groups at the same time.
Compound exercises are things like squats, deadlifts, walking lunges, and push-ups, among others. These are the exercises you will want to program at the beginning of your workout as they are more challenging and will require that you are fresh and focused.
First, pick heavy compound exercises
A solid at-home workout should include 1-2 heavy compound exercises. Keep in mind that heavy is a relative term, and it means what is heavy for YOU. You will do a few sets of these exercises at a low rep range, because you are going “heavy” and going to failure. Aim to beat your weight/rep/volume over the course of the next few weeks of your program (progressive overload). Try 3 sets of 5-12 reps.
Then, pick moderate exercises and reps
Next, you’ll pick a few exercises (2-3) that you won’t go quite as heavy on with moderate rep ranges. This is where you want to feel your muscles workout during the movement and focus on using perfect form. The goal is to get your mind-muscle connection going.
The mind-muscle connection is all about consciously and deliberately thinking about the target muscle during an exercise. It is feeling that muscle move through the range of motion of the exercise and consciously contracting, squeezing and isolating that muscle to achieve the utmost activation.
And you know what?
The more you engage the muscle you’re working, the more it will grow! The exercises you choose for this portion of the workout might be isolation exercises, focusing on a specific muscle group like biceps curls or triceps extensions; they might be more compound exercises like overhead presses, rows, reverse lunges, curtsey lunges, etc. Shoot for 3 sets of 8-20 reps.
Finally, choose a finisher
To end your exercise, you might choose a finisher or burnout. This could look like one exercise or even a superset of 2+ exercises. Glute bridges and lateral band walks are a great burnout combination. Here you’re looking for the burn! 3 sets of 30-50 reps, little to no weight. Alternatively, you could finish your workout with 1-2 core-focused exercises like planks, v-sits, or reverse crunches. The idea here is to choose less challenging exercises for the finisher since your body is pretty fatigued by this point.
Types of Activities – Cardio
Let me start this section by saying, you don’t actually need to do cardio to lose weight, get “toned”, lose fat, (insert goal of choice here) believe it or not.
The truth is you can achieve these goals solely through a mindful and intuitive diet, by engaging in resistance training as described above, or with a combination of both.
That being said, just because cardio isn’t necessary doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, especially if you like it. Cardio does have other benefits, both for health and mood, and it can contribute to your overall caloric deficit.
So, how much cardio to include?
At the end of the day, you should do as much cardio as it takes to achieve your goals and no more, and it shouldn’t be so much that it impairs your strength training, recovery, or your health.
Depending on how many days/hours you’ve given yourself for workouts each week, if you still have time for cardio and would like to include cardio, start with one 15-30 minute moderate-intensity cardio session and add it to your schedule.
Moderate-intensity cardio is any activity in which your perceived effort is between a 4 and 7 out of 10, with the most benefits seen at the 6-7 level. This might include jogging, swimming, biking or a quick weight lifting session where the focus isn’t on getting stronger so much as moving quickly and getting your heart rate up.
If there is still more available time in your weekly schedule and your body is feeling up to it, you can add in a 10-15 minute HIIT cardio session. HIIT means you should be training at high intensity throughout the work portion with enough rest in between exercises to get right back into high intensity for the following work portion. You can find a ton of great HIIT sessions online to add to your at-home program, and most of them require no equipment at all.
Essential (Low-Cost) Home Exercise Equipment
Finally, we get to the fun part!
So the idea of your at-home workout program is obviously to be able to perform all of your exercises right in the comfort of your own home. While bodyweight exercises can take you far, you are definitely going to need some weights in order to continue to challenge yourself.
You can invest in a few pairs of dumbbells- a light set, a medium set, and a a kettlebell. For some major savings, you can try and modify household items to use as stand-in weights.
- Filled up laundry detergent bottles
- Milk jugs (1 gallon weighs about 8.5 lbs)
- Coffee cans
- Bags of apples
- Backpacks filled with books
Here is a chance for you to get really get creative!
Resistance bands are an excellent addition to any home gym set up as well. There are mini-loop bands (in either fabric or latex) that add resistance for lower body exercises, as well as longer bands that you can set up behind a closed door to add resistance for upper body exercises.
A swiss ball is another great, inexpensive piece of equipment to add to your home-gym. You can use it to add a bit of extra challenge to stability exercises and it is great for stretching and recovery work as well.
Ankle or wrist weights are another way to add resistance to just about any exercise, and you can usually find them priced very reasonably.
Of course, an exercise mat is good when it comes to floor exercises, though not necessary. You may also want to recruit some of your furniture to get in on the action: a couch can replace the need for a bench and stairs or a sturdy chair are helpful for step-ups.
Conclusion
At-home workout programs can be a fun, challenging, and effective way to practice self-care, especially if you take the time to set them up in a way that is both safe and sustainable. You don’t need to spend a ton of money to purchase equipment, but if you want to buy some staple items you can find them online or in local discount stores as well.
Use this guide when you are ready to create your own home exercise program on a budget! Let me know how it works for you. xoxo Mo
