Yes, this is another post about Corvid-19 and everything that is going on in the world right now! However, I feel that this is a message that we preach here at NK Fitness anyway. It doesn’t matter if we are coaching a Personal Training Session in Sunninghill or leading a Team Performance session. Understanding what and why you are doing the things in your session are vital. By understanding the goal, we understand why we are performing the movements and exercises we are doing. Recognising how these stimuli help us on our journey helps gain a better understanding of the bigger picture.
The Problem With COVID-19!
While this is a very much small scale and specific problem when we look at what is going on, it is still a problem. it is also highly relevant to those wanting to stay on track, particularly when it comes to sports performance. The explosion of home workouts, home built squat racks and scaffolding pull up rigs has been incredible. Now I don’t mean to take anything away from any of this ingenuity, in fact I applaud it. The problem comes when it is all done without the goal in mind. It is essentially all worthless if you cannot get the desired outcome from it. I’ll provide a few examples below.
Completing 10x 15 minute home HIIT workouts in a week – Great, you’ve got a sweat on, you haven’t eaten into your whole day and you’re getting fit, right? When you break it down, you’ve worked at a high intensity for probably around 3-4 minutes then rested a minute or so, every session. You don’t have the luxury of kit, or you’ve got 1 moderate Dumbbell. So, you’ve used bodyweight and that DB, every session. See where I am going? These sessions have a very similar stimulus in terms of weight and work to rest – unless you’re following a programme, they are also pretty “random”, in terms of exercise selection!
You’ve balanced an old barbell onto two wheelie bins and you now have a squat rack! – Again, great! You have a squat rack and you can squat. However, you now go in and do 3 or 4 sets of about 15 reps because the weights quite nice and light… You do this 2 or 3 times a week and can now to 20 reps… you’re getting stronger right?
Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to be getting better, at something! But, is it the something you WANT or NEED to be getting better at?!
Finding the RIGHT Stimuli During Lockdown
Hopefully you are starting to get a better understanding of where I am coming from. While doing a mix and match of squats and home HIIT workouts will get you results in those two domains, they may not be the results or goals you were originally striving to reach.
If you want to get strong, you need to produce maximum force, 4×15 squats at 20kg isn’t going to do this. You want to be explosive, fast and powerful? 4×3 minutes of HIIT, 6x a week isn’t going to do this!
In order to keep this shorter and readable, I am going to separate it into two posts. In part 2, I will go over what kind of adjustments to bodyweight and “light weight” exercises you can make to achieve multiple different stimuli. From there, you can start to put the pieces of your own individual puzzle together.