Author: KrocK

When we think about being in shape, most of the time we think about going to the gym before anything else. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Joining a sports team/group could be a nice way to meet people while doing some exercise, although this article will talk mostly about weight lifting outside of the gym, because I’m not much of a “team player”.

I believe that anyone who wants to be in good shape must do some weightlifting, but it doesn’t have to be done inside a gym.

Generally, what the gym has that we don’t have is equipment. But the thing is that a gym has too much equipment, a lot of machines and other specialized objects that we don’t need. The basic stuff that is really necessary are the dumbbells and barbells, and maybe a pull-up bar and some form of a bench.

What? You don’t have a treadmill or a stairmaster at home? Go fu**ing outside and do some hiking instead, or if you don’t live near any mountain, do some sprints in a park, take your bicycle and ride for an hour or two or at the very least go jogging for half an hour. If you have access to a lake or public pool, go swimming. Jump on things, throw rocks around, anything that make you move and spend some energy. If you’re lucky enough to live near an outside gym, go there.

But the weather is not always good for these activities, or sometimes you just want a quick training because you’re busy with something else but still want to train for a few minutes. If you use social media just a little, you have probably seen many “home workout” videos in your timeline. While I don’t recommend that you buy the fitness plans of those people, who most of the time are just people with a six pack or big booty that improvise themselves as fitness specialists (which also probably train in a regular gym themselves). You can still inspire yourself from them.

It is quite easy to do squats, push-ups, and many other exercices with just your bodyweight. But it still isn’t quite enough, buying a few items would make it better. Having a few dumbbells and/or kettlebells would be nice, there is quite a few compact kits that fit all the weight onto two handles with an adjustable button that lets you pick up the desired weight. While regular dumbbells are definitely the best choice, the compact kits will do the job for home use (you won’t be using them 12 hours every day like the equipment of your local gym is). A step or box could be useful too, and a chin-up bar (please spend a few more bucks on the one that attaches solidly onto the doorframe) and a few rubber bands of different stiffnesses.

If you’re the crafty type, you can probably build up at least half of those items with wood and metal. But for the rest of us, buying them is pretty much the only choice left. It would probably cost a few hundred dollars to get a descent amount of items to create a usable gym, but anyway, how much do you pay for your gym membership every year? Aside from the cheap gyms that cost something around 100-150$ a year, most gyms where I live cost at least 200$ a year. So instead of renewing your gym membership, that you are barely using anyway, just think that the equipment you’re about to buy amounts to 2 or 3 years of gym membership, which you would be paying anyway. With the added benefit that the stuff is yours (which is an advantage up until you have to move them to a new place).

If you didn’t already think about it, most of these things can be found second-hand, because let’s be honest here, a lot of people buy this stuff and almost never use it then after many years of accumulating dust in a corner, they finally decide to sell them. So it is possible to get descent (and almost unused) equipment for a reasonable price.

So it brings me to this: just like not everyone is made to go to the gym, not everyone is made to not go to the gym. Before investing in all the material you need, maybe try working out somewhere else before quitting your gym membership. If you find out that you can’t get any exercice done when you’re not inside the gym (i.e. you get distracted too easily by TV, chores, etc), then maybe you should keep on going to the gym.

But if you can manage to do it, it can very well remove some stress of your back. What I personally like about training at home is that I don’t have to drive to get there and that I don’t have to wait to use the equipment. Gyms generally have a dress code, but at home I can train in pajama if I want. If you’re not going to the gym to talk and meet with people, then you may very well train at home or outside and it will be as effective as the gym, provided that you get the right equipment and use a little bit of creativity.

For many years, I’ve been struggling with the ever present impression of not having enough time to do everything I wanted to do.

I ended up eliminating a lot of things from my life, like social events and work, to be able to concentrate on those things. The problem is that I never managed to gain the upper hand on those projects, even if I seemed to concentrate on them.

What I finally understood is that even though I had the will to do all this stuff that was waiting for me, I didn’t have the determination to actually achieve them for real. Until at some point, I just got tired of just accumulating tasks and decided to complete them for real.

The interesting part of all this is that I didn’t just manage to gain some control over my own self, it also made me a lot more efficient than I thought I would be, if I want it hard enough.

I don’t have any real trick to give here, I just kicked my own a$$ because I was tired of being stressed out about trivial tasks and chores and it just worked.

Like I said in many other articles, for me it all starts with lists, so I took my lists and made a small day schedule in a tabler software in which I ordered my tasks.

After a few days, I already felt a lot less stress. And it isn’t just from having less stuff to do now, it is also because I now get the feeling that I have control over my own life and that I can continue going forward.

In reality, I don’t have that much less stuff to do, because I always get new ideas and projects that come all the time that I don’t even see myself ever coming to a point where I have nothing to do. But just the fact of accomplishing some of them doesn’t make it feel like an unconquerable mountain. I will do some of it today, then I will do some more tomorrow, and so on, instead of just stressing about having so much of it and just sitting doing nothing.

So in short, what this all means is that it isn’t how much we do that is important, but that we steadily do it, so we don’t get overwhelmed.

An iso-hold, in muscular training, is about maintaining muscle contraction under pressure. In other words, it is about holding the position at the peak of the contraction against the force (whichever it is between the good old gravity, a band, a pulley or anything else) that wants to return the weight to its starting point. That “peak” of contraction will normally be in the middle of the movement, between the end of the contraction and the beginning of the controlled release.

As an example, the iso-hold of a pull-up would be to hold yourself at the “top” position, where you are closer to the bar (or farther from the ground).

So if you’ve been following, an iso-hold rep would be to do an iso-hold at the peak of each rep. Taking back our pull-up example, you would lift yourself to the bar, hold for a few seconds, drop back down, and restart those steps until you’re too tired to continue.

I know, there is nothing revolutionary about this, in fact, you probably already knew all that, the longer you hold, the harder it gets.

But I thought that the subject deserved to be talked about, because it can be interesting for a few things like raising mind-muscle connection, increasing difficulty and just exhausting the targeted muscles even more.

I use this technique for movements that I feel weak at. If I take the pull-up again, I can only do 5 or 6 of them, so adding an iso-hold to each rep make me work a little more. The logic behind this is that it increases the time that the involved muscles are under tension, and more tension means more damage to the muscles. Consequently, this damage will be turned into gains, whether it be more endurance, more strength or more muscle fibers. So in the case of my pull-ups, because I’m not able to do as many reps as I should, adding iso-holds with each rep lets me work the muscles a little more without the need for more reps.

The other time I use it is for muscles that need special attention. For example, I tend to have knee pain when walking/running for long distances (by “long distances” I mean more than a few kilometers without breaks, which is generally exceptional circumstances for most people). So I try to strenghten the VMO muscle (Vastus Medialis Oblique, a part of the quadriceps which is sometimes called the “water drop”) which often grows slower than its counterpart and disrupts the knee mechanics. The exercises I choose for this part are the split-squat and other similar movements such as the reverse lunge.

So when a muscle is lagging behind, like my VMO in this example, it will also be harder to “feel”. But then, using a movement that is known to solicite the said muscle and holding it at the toughest point (the peak) will make it come forward because it will start to “burn”. That burn will confirm that you are indeed using the appropriate movement for what you are looking to achieve. Repeat the process for long enough will slowly resensibilize the muscle and someday it will probably act like it should.

In some cases, an iso-hold may be useless, like in the case of biceps curls, where the peak contraction is also at the easiest point. To obtain the same effect, we just have to use an elastic band.

Iso-holds are a nice way to crank up the difficulty of a training without the need for any specialized equipment. It can be incorporated into any workout program as it won’t necessitate any change to it other than just holding reps for longer when doing them. However, don’t go crazy about it by adding holds to every exercise in your program because it will probably become more of an annoyance than anything. Like I said ealier, choosing movements that you feel the need for a little more work would probably be the right choice. Try it and see if it helps.

Solving small problems is not about discarding bigger ones, it is about dismantling them into smaller and more manageable tasks.

If we take an example that most (responsible) adults have to face at some point: Cleaning the house/appartment.

So if we take it as is, “Cleaning the house”, it seems rather vague and possibly quite time consuming. We have to decide what it means concretely, does it mean that I have to clean the whole house, inside and outside, or just parts of it? Most likely, we are talking about a general cleaning of the interior, but is it a spring cleaning or just a “standard” cleaning that we have to do every (few) week(s)? This is the weekly cleaning of the stuff that gets dirty fast, the floor, the toilet, sinks and bath, maybe wash some clothes and dishes too.

I made the list from what I said in the previous paragraph:

• Wash floor
• Clean toilet
• Clean sinks
• Clean bath
• Wash clothes
• Wash dishes

It already feels a lot more manageable than “cleaning the house”. We could go a step further, like precising which sinks we want to clean and which type of clothes. So the list becomes:

• Wash floor
• Clean toilet
• Clean bathroom sink
• Clean kitchen sink
• Clean bath
• Wash work clothes
• Wash other clothes
• Wash dishes

It feels even more manageable now, because some tasks have gotten smaller than they were before, but the list gets a little longer.

We are now at the part where it becomes more personal, we have to decide how specific we need to go the get the right balance between the amount of tasks and how precise they are. For the sake of this article, I will stop here, because for this particular example, I don’t think it would be logical to decompose further than it already is. But for other types of tasks, we could probably go over the list and decompose it a few more times, if necessary.

The reason why balance is important is because too few big tasks and too many small tasks will amount to the same thing in the end, more anxiety towards what has to be done. As with pretty much anything in life, aim for the middle ground.

As I already said multiple times, using lists will make us more efficient, but they can also discourage us by making us realize how much work we have to do. So this is why it is important to build the list in a way that will help you be as efficient as possible.

If you have already been training for a while, you probably already know about “super-sets”, if not, let me explain shortly: The standard or common way would be to “do a set”, “take a 1-2 minutes break”, “do another set”, “take a 1-2 minutes break”, and so on… While super-sets being “do a set”, “take a 10-15 seconds break” (which is approximately the time it takes to set yourself up for the next exercise), “do a set of another exercise”, “take a 10-15 seconds break”, “do a set of the first exercise”, and so on…

So super-sets can either make your overall workout shorter, or allow you to train more in the same amount of time, while also building a little more cardio because the shorter breaks don’t let enough time for your heart to go back to its resting rate.

Now that we know what super-sets are, we can introduce “double-sets”, which is just a name I came up with, so it could already have an official name that I’m not aware of… I guess it could be similar to what some people call “combo-sets” or “complexes”.

In a super-set, you replace the break by another set. In a double-set, each rep of a particular set is composed of two different movements. So depending of how intense you want to train, you can either use double-sets with regular 1-2 minute breaks or even super-set them with other double-sets.

But how do we combine two exercises into one? Exactly as you would expect, by doing one after the other, than count one rep.

Here’s an example: If we want to train legs, than we could double-set some reverse lunges and single-leg RDLs (RDL = Romanian DeadLift). So we start by doing a full reverse lunge with the left leg (meaning that the right leg moves to the back while the left leg lunges), then, instead of continuing with another lunge, we keep our right foot in the air and then do a RDL with our left leg, and we got our first rep. Then we start again until we’ve reached the amount of reps we were aiming for. When we’re done with the left leg, we do the exact same thing with the right one.

As you can see, I picked two complementary movements that can be easily chained together. Of course, some combinations won’t work that well, like if we tried to double-set calf-raises and push-ups. So there has to be some experimentation on your part to find what works well with your workout plan, or adjust your plan to fit some movements that allow for double-sets. The key would be to combine exercises that you can either lift the same weight (changing dumbbells each time wouldn’t make much sense) and/or which the transition between the two is easily done, like in the previous example.

The advantage of double-sets, like for super-sets, is that you can also fit more work inside the same time frame, or just reduce your overall workout time. But there is also another benefit that I found while doing it, depending on which exercises are put together. It can help you work harder on a single muscle, for example, if I do triceps extensions on a pulley, I can alternate between an over-hand and under-hand grip each rep to work the muscle in two different ways at the same time. This one is particularly interesting because I can really feel which “section” is working harder than the other on each alternating rep.

At the end of my workout, I often add a few exercises aimed towards “forgotten” or “lagging” muscles, like the rotator cuff and the low and medium trapezius for example. I usually do face-pulls for the traps and a variation of that move that targets the rotator cuff. They fit really well with double-sets, because they are both done in the standing position with a band/pulley in front of me at face height. The only thing that changes is the path of my arms when I pull them towards my back, which is really easy to do.

Also, just like you could super-set three different exercises, you can also do triple-sets, which is the same thing as double-sets, but with three different moves needed to amount to one rep. The one I use the most is an explosive deadlift (there is a name for it that I can’t seem to find, the one that makes the bar/dumbbells fly up to your shoulders), followed by a shoulder press then a front squat.

So as with any other technique, this is just another tool in your toolbox, I wouldn’t recommend using it all the time for every movement, but to fit it where it makes sense.