How to make home workouts work for you: bashing the excuses stopping you train
Despite being a qualified personal trainer I convinced myself for a long time that I could not workout at home. The “reasons” i gave myself were:
I don’t have the right equipment
Buying fitness equipment is expensive
I don't have a garage/ room to set up a gym
I need music and classes to keep me motivated
I am just not a “15 minute HITT workout on Youtube” kinda person
I don’t want to wake up the family
I don't want to look like my mother doing Jane Fonda workouts in front of the telly - some childhood memories i wish not to recall!
So when Covid 19 hit and gyms closed my regime went out the window. As an ex instructor of RPM and BodyPump, Les Mills classes were my “thing” - it's what i enjoy. I know how to use them to get results and I am fortunate enough to live in the home of Les Mills and have the Programme Directors teaching the morning classes in person!
Then Les Mills offered free access to its Les Mills On Demand to its members for 2 months and I had a spurt of encouragement. I was doing BodyCombat for the first time in years and BodyBalance to counteract the damage done from working on a laptop at the kitchen table.
But i still had this block “I don’t have the right kit”, “I’ve been online and all the bars and stuff cost a fortune”.
These are still just EXCUSES. So here is what i did to set myself back up for success on the fitness front from home:
Create a clear, always set up space
I am lucky enough to have a spare room. It does fluctuate however between being beautifully set up for the overseas visitors (who never came!) and an absolute bomb site dumping ground of anything I want to hide away from the more frequent visitors.
Well clearly neither sets of visitors were an issue in lockdown! So I pushed the bed away, reallocated the scooters to another room, cleared out the rubbish and made the room feel functional but inviting (I had initial ideas of candles and scent but abandoned that pretty quickly!).
Most importantly I laid everything out, ready to go so all I had to do was walk in with my workout kit on and get going.
So whether it is a corner of the garage, an area of the deck, the garden shed or the spare room - designate your workout space and set it up.
Find just the basic equipment and make do with what you have
Yes in my ideal world i would have a garage with a treadmill, a cross trainer and a fancy set of beautiful barbells (not those gritty iron ones for mens’ gyms). Guess what? I don't have any of them.
What I did have was a wind trainer for my bike, a 5kg set of dumbbells, some elastibands and a sarong. Really I had everything I needed. I can do online spin training on the wind trainer, core workouts with the bands, yoga on the sarong and weights workouts with the one set of dumbbells
Ok so i usually use more weights in BodyPump but i can still workout. Where I usually have 22kgs for squats i made do with the 2 x 5kg dumbbells and focused on squatting lower and longer - believe me it still hurts. No i cant stay out of the seat as easily on a wind trainer as a spin bike but i can still hill climb - just longer in the saddle and that hurts more!
So I would encourage you to really make use of what you have and if you need to get some basic equipment - just order the basics online, 2nd hand even. You don't need all the kit or fancy kit to get fit.
Set a daily plan every week based on clear goals
It's not rocket science. Many of us outsource our fitness to the gym instructor and are happy to go through the motions provided we get some exercise in.
Now i am not saying you have to have goals to do an Ironman or run a marathon or drop a dress size but exercising with no real goal is called stagnating and you will begin to wonder why it doesn't seem to be as effective anymore.
A few people have said to me “boy you really work up a sweat and look like you are going hard” in the gym. Well yeah! I got out of bed at 5.30 - why wouldn’t I make it worth it? Those same people also complain to me that despite their years of an expensive personal trainer they don’t feel like he is helping them because they have put on weight and “not as fit as i used to be”. Mmmm!
So the goals need only be small - increase your weights within 3 months in Body pump, be able to run 5k without walking, drop a notch on the belt. But you need to have a goal.
Then you need a plan to hit it. There are plenty of apps out there to help you do it. If you want check out my wellbeing programme (https://www.helenotoolecoaching.com/general-1-1) . Whatever you do “plan your work and work your plan”
So there you go, 3 ways in which you really can get yourself working out at home. Either instead of the gym or to supplement the gym - having home based options really is a time and life saver for busy working mums.
Please note I am in no way affiliated to Les Mills and purely recommend their products based on personal preference.
If you have found this helpful then please share with other awesome and stretched working mums you know could benefit to help them stay sane. Let’s stick together:)
Take care and stay sane!
