A short list looking at the good, the bad, and the ugly of training outside of a gym setting.
TL:DR Version
If you’re a trainer:
- Not all is lost with writing at-home workouts for your clients.
- There are sacrifices that need to be made due to equipment, so program accordingly.
If you’re a powerlifter:
- Your exercise selection is going to vary from your “normal”.
- Don’t go overboard just to get a good sweat. Keep some structure to your plan and understand why you have certain exercises in your program and what they should help improve when you get back to the gym.
It would seem like at-home, bodyweight workouts are all the rage right now with social distancing and self-isolation measures being in effect. I don’t want to write some fluff piece about “6 at home jump squat workouts you can do to keep fit” because frankly, if I read another one of them I’ll throw up all over my desk. Instead, the goal of this article is to examine some of the advantages and drawbacks of bodyweight training as it relates to powerlifters and their powerlifting careers.
Throughout the course of this article, I’ll be referring to any home gym setup that doesn’t have barbells (whether that be no equipment, some bands, some light or heavy dumbbells, etc.) as “minimal equipment” so as not to get too wordy.
Starting out with the positives for minimal equipment workouts:
- The lack of a barbell can force you to address some weak points in your training that would otherwise be neglected. Items like glute medius, hamstrings (especially semimembranosus and semitendinosus), serratus, foot strength, single leg stability, thoracic rotation, and functional range of motion/mobility come to mind here for some common weak points that I see with a lot of lifters. When these get neglected for too long, the training starts to look like an injury waiting to happen instead of just a weak point.
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Taking the time to nip these weaknesses in the bud given a lack of heavy loading could just be your ticket to an extra 20lbs on your squat down the road, instead of a 6 month rehab program to get you back to where you were before you might have gotten injured.
. - Bodyweight workouts are fantastic at improving proprioception (the ability to feel where your body is in space). Without this awareness, you can’t control what your body is doing in a movement. If you don’t have a long athletic history leading up to your powerlifting career, doing some bodyweight workouts and being conscious about what you’re doing, you can actually work towards correcting some imbalances you have in your regular PL training.
- Building on my first two points, having some time away from the big lifts allow you to heal a lot of those nagging injuries in two ways:
- Building better movement mechanics as outlined in #1 and #2, and;
- By taking a break from the heavy loading and sometimes compromising positions that powerlifting training can put you in, your joints, tendons, ligaments, etc. will have a chance to catch up with your muscular system.
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- Building speed. Quite often I’ll see lifters who are strong, but the nature of the lift (especially with bench) dictates that they need to be faster in order to express that strength. Take my client Chad for example: he had missed 120kg in comp (a weight for him that was very hit or miss for a year leading up to this attempt) and then hit 126.5kg (a personal best) just 2.5 months later after a training block centered around rate of force development.
Could it have been a good day? Yes, but look at the difference in bar speed as his elbows pass 90 degrees (a sticking point for him). Statistically, your odds of finishing a bench press when the bar speed drops below about 10cm/second are quite low compared to if you are at or above that speed. Similarly, with at home training, if you are trying to maintain force production and the loads are lighter, you must move faster in order to keep force output high. You’ll get a chance to build lots of explosive speed here for movements like bench press and squats with movements like clapping pushups, jump squats, and banded variations of bodyweight exercises.
5. It’s a heck of a lot better than doing nothing at all. Even if you are in the worst case workout scenario and have 0 equipment and don’t want to be creative with household objects, light workouts have been shown to maintain muscle mass much more effectively than inactivity. If you can maintain your muscle mass, all that you need to do is get your nervous system back up to speed when you get back to the gym which is a WAY faster process than (re-)building muscle.
While there are certainly some silver linings to home exercise, they don’t come without their drawbacks:
- Low specificity. The most specific thing you can do in powerlifting is a 1 rep max of a competition lift. Of course, there is a degree of variation that you need to train with in order to maintain progress, but it’s not that far off from the aforementioned example. With home workouts – especially with light weights – you are extremely limited in how specific you can be with your training. This is less of an issue for hypertrophy training, but moreso an issue for strength training where the goal is neural efficiency. In order to do this, higher loads are required. To some degree, you can work with exercises that have a mechanical disadvantage (focusing on longer levers), but it only works so well.For beginners, this is less of an issue, but more advanced trainees will see this as a more serious impediment.
. - High velocity, multi-planar, high impact workouts can be a recipe for injury if volume or intensity is over-applied initially. Powerlifting isn’t exactly the most “athletic” sport. In the same way as if you were to load up a bar to 600lbs for a squat on your first day in the gym, it probably wouldn’t go too well, going all out for a good “sweat sesh” with jump squats, burpees, lateral jumps, and AMRAP handstand pushups probably wouldn’t be your best idea either. If powerlifting is your only sport in your athletic history, you’ll probably be missing a few key components to some of these movements and end up compensating in a way that could provoke injury. Make sure that you take your time to own the movements before making them heavier/faster/higher intensity, just as you would with regular powerlifting training.
With all that in mind, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be outlining some useful tools for maintaining or even gaining some muscle with no equipment, some equipment, or alternate equipment so that you can still keep your gains for when you return to the gym.
PS – Here’s 3 ways I can help you get stronger:
3. Apply to join my “Momentum Program” and become a case study. We’ll work with you 1-on-1 (in-person or online, depending on location) to consistently increase your PRs.
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