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Everything You Need to Know About Isolation Training for Working Out From Home

Isolation training means that you are training just one specific muscle group and really focussing on that muscle during a particular exercise. An example of an isolation exercise is the bicep curl. This is a move that targets the biceps specifically and allows you to build muscle tears and metabolic stress in that region without it spilling out in other areas.

This can be contrasted with compound movements, such as the squat. The squat is not an isolation movement because it challenges too many muscle groups all at once. This works the quads, the calves, the hamstrings, the core and even the lower back to a degree. Put all this together and it is a ‘bigger’ exercise that challenges more muscles and one that is more akin to the way we move in the real world.

And it’s for these reasons that isolation training has become something of a dirty word. But if it’s size that you’re really interested in, then isolation training also happens to be an absolute must. There is a reason that every bodybuilder uses isolation training and it’s high time you did too – even if you’re training from home!

The Benefits of Isolation

The benefit of isolation is that it allows you to work on specific parts of your body that need focus. This in turn means that you’re more likely to be able to grow that precise area, rather than training the entire body and potentially letting the stronger muscles take over from the ones that you were hoping to emphasize. This leads to more microtears and therefore more growth and more strength in the long term.

At the same time, this allows you to push yourself harder and further in order to trigger more growth and without risking a serious injury during some kind of multi-joint move.

How to Isolate

So the new question becomes: how do you isolate a muscle?

The answer is to use an exercise that only uses a single joint – and a good example of this is the bicep curl that only uses the elbow to move the weight.

But when doing these, you also need to make sure you are conscious that you are only using that joint and that you are concentrating on contracting the specific muscle. This in turn might often mean using a lighter weight to prevent yourself from ‘cheating’ in order to get it up. For instance, you may otherwise find yourself swinging your body to use momentum to drive the weight upward.

Another potential tip is to try tensing your entire body throughout the movement. This locks your body rigidly into place and thereby helps you to remove the ‘energy leaks’ that could otherwise require your attention. That then helps to reduce the likelihood of your arm moving around and your body having to compensate.

Finally, consider using other tools to help yourself isolate the muscle. A preacher bench for example is ideal for isolation curls and you can also use the back of an incline bench!

Why Jogging is an Important Addition to Your Home Training Routine

Jogging has been getting a lot of bad press lately.

That’s because jogging is an example of ‘steady state cardio’. That means that it involves exerting yourself at a low level for a long period of time – running for 30-50 minutes for example. This is something that fewer and fewer people now advice with the advent of HIIT (high intensity interval training) and it has something that has been shown to be less efficient than that alternative. If you want to build muscle as quickly and effectively as possible, then you should be alternating high intensity with periods of recovery. This will burn more fat in the long term, it will increase the health of mitochondria and it will be less likely to burn through muscle.

Or at least that’s the theory. But actually, there are a lot of good reasons to carry on using steady state and we’re going to take a look at those now.

HIIT is Brutal

The first reason to keep on doing steady state training is that HIIT is brutal. A lot of people paint HIIT as this ‘quick fix’ for muscle, pointing out that it lets you burn more fat in less time. In 20 minutes of HIIT, you can get a full workout and burn a lot more calories than you would on a 30 minute run.

But actually, the difference isn’t that big and it’s not as profound as most people make it out to be. What’s more, HIIT is really, really unpleasant. While you might think that HIIT is the ‘easy option’, the reality is that it is far more gruelling and most people just won’t be able to maintain it as a regular part of their routine. Jogging on the other hand is something that everyone understands, that you can do anywhere and that can be quite fun. Just pick a destination and run!

Running Boosts Anabolism

And what is more, is that running can actually help you to increase your anabolism and build muscle in the long term. This may go against everything you’ve been told but it actually makes a lot of sense.

That’s because running trains the heart. Specifically, it helps you to enlarge the left ventricle, which enables you to pump more blood around the body with each beat. This is good news, because it means you’ll have a lower resting heartrate, which in turn will translate to lower stress and lower cortisol.

And that means you’ll spend a lot more time in a ‘rest and digest’ state, flooded with anabolic hormones like testosterone, growth hormone and more. It also means that more blood, more oxygen and more nutrients can make it around the body when you’re resting and when you’re training to power more brutal workouts.

It’s a Good Way to Get Cut

Running long distances is still a good way to get cut. It will burn a lot of fat and if you run for 40 minutes, you can expect to burn anything up to 700 calories. The negative effect on muscles is far more negligible than most make out too.

So in short: get running!

The Best Supplements for Home Workouts

When you want to get into shape, there are generally three different factors to take into account. These are your workout routines and the way you’re actually training, the way you’re eating and what you put into your body and finally, the supplements you’re going to be taking.

Of these three things, the supplements are by far the least important aspect. In fact, you never ‘need’ supplements to get into shape and you can see some incredible body transformations without them. This then becomes especially true if you’re training from home and you’re probably going to be working with slightly lighter weights and requiring less drive to get yourself to start lifting. Very few people will actually take a pre-workout before training in their living room for example!

But that is not to say that there are no workouts that can be beneficial for a home workout, or that you should completely ignore them. Let’s take a look at some of the best supplements and just how useful they can actually be…

Protein Shake

Protein shake is the number one supplement when it comes to building strength and size. A good protein shake should essentially be designed to simply help you to add protein into your diet, when growth is your number one goal. That’s because it is generally agreed that the optimal protein intake for muscle growth is one gram for every one pound of muscle mass. That’s going to mean 170 grams plus for a lot of people and getting that into your diet naturally is hard work. Protein shake is simply a useful and convenient way to help this process but that’s exactly what it is – a diet ‘supplement’ and not a meal replacement.

Note that you can get ‘bulking powders’ if your main objective is to gain weight (these contain lots of calories) or leaner mixes if you want to add muscle without gaining extra fat.

Creatine

If you’re looking to build mass and size, the taking creatine is one of the very best things you can do. That’s because creatine will instantly increase water retention in the muscles, making you look more pumped, more of the time.

That’s not the principle role of creatine though, which is rather to help you increase your ability to get the most energy out of your diet. Creatine allows the body to recycle ADP and AMP into ATP – in simple terms that means a couple extra seconds of maximum exertion.

Vitamins

A multimineral and vitamin supplement is a very good idea to help build up your immune system and to improve your metabolism and your protein synthesis. It’s better to get it from your diet but a tablet can help you plug the holes in your natural diet.

And the Rest?

But what about BCAAs? What about l-carnitine? What about testosterone boosters and pre-workout shakes?

Sure, sometimes some of these products can have some benefit. Other times they just plain don’t work. But even when they do, the benefits are often so minimal as to not really be worth it for the vast majority of people. Stick to the basics!

The Biggest Mistakes People Make When Training From Home

Training from home can help you to get better results from your workouts 9 times out of 10. Why? Because there’s no commute, there’s no need to feel self-conscious and you can easily fit your training in around your routine. If you have a home gym, then you can opt to do a quick 10 minute workout first thing on a Saturday morning – which is something you just can’t do if you’re training at a gym 20 minutes away.

But home gyms aren’t perfect and if you don’t know how to attack home workouts properly, it’s easy to do yourself a disservice. Read on then and we’ll take a look at some of the biggest mistakes people make when training from home and how you can avoid those problems…

Having the TV On

One common thought process when training from home is that seeing as you have all of your amenities and entertainment around you, you may as well make your training more interesting and enjoyable by sticking on the TV…

The minute you do this though, you just pretty much sealed your own fate. One of the most important things of all when training is that you be completely engaged with your training. Feel your muscles working, watch them working and dive into your energetic movements.

When you approach training like this, you will be guaranteed to naturally put in more effort and see faster results. This is as opposed to training with the television on, which means you’re constantly distracted, looking up and generally not paying attention to what you’re doing.

Not Pushing Yourself Enough

Another issue when working out at home, is that a lot of people won’t push themselves hard enough. The simple reason for this is that they don’t have enough punishing equipment around. They don’t have a squat rack, a weights bench or any of the other bits – so they end up just doing press ups.

But this isn’t enough. To trigger muscle growth, you need to be feeling the burn and the pump. And this is still possible with no equipment – you just need to be a little more inventive and creative in the way you’re going to accomplish it!

Having a Gym You Need to Set Up

Perhaps the worst mistake of all is creating a home gym that you need to set up. In other words, if you have a gym that consists of things that are behind wardrobes, need constructing or are hard to reach, then there’s a good chance you won’t be as easily convinced to train.

The great thing about a home gym is that it’s right there. If you have a bench press in your front room, then that means that you can simply hop on it and start pressing the weight. This makes all the difference to your training frequency and results, so make sure that you are taking full advantage of this with a gym that’s ready to go whenever you are!

How to Make Up for a Lack of Heavy Weights When Training From Home

When you start training from home, one of the biggest challenges is making up for a lack of truly heavy weights.

As you get better and you build up your home gym, there’s a chance you might eventually be able to stock it with a bench press and load a good 100kg onto that. But this costs a lot of money and involves committing a lot of space to your new home gym. Most of us won’t have that luxury to begin with then and that means we’re going to be training with far fewer resources and much less weight.

With that in mind, the question then becomes how you can challenge your body significantly, even without having that much weight to pile onto the bar. Let’s take a look…

Speed

The good news is that as far as your muscle is concerned, there is no difference between acceleration and weight. What that means, is that in both cases the muscle fibers are required to exert force and that means they’re going to be working at maximum capacity. While the ability to create microtears might be slightly diminished, plyometric training can still create muscle damage and encourage the development of your sheer strength and explosive power. Try incorporating exercises such as box jumps, clapping push-ups etc. into your routine.

Mechanical Stress

Another thing to consider is that there are lots of ways you can make an exercise more difficult simply by changing the way it is performed and changing the angle that you’re performing it at. One of the simplest examples of this is just to take a bilateral movement (meaning that both arms are used at the same time) and turn it into a unilateral one. That means a press up becomes a one-armed press up and a squat becomes a one legged squat.

In other cases, it can mean extending the ‘lever arm’, which usually means that you’re moving the weight further away in order to make it harder. Isolating the muscle more can also make it more difficult – for example, if you use a preacher bench to perform isolation curls instead of regular curls.

Drop Sets and Pre-Exhaust

Another option is to pre-exhaust the muscles and/or to use drop sets. This means that you’re going to progress from the hardest version of the movement and gradually make it easier, thereby ensuring that your muscle is exhausted before it even starts. A pre-exhaust is similar except it uses just one exercise prior to the main exercise to make sure that the muscle you’re targeting is going to be working the very hardest.

The key thing throughout all of this is to listen to your body and to learn to recognize the signs that you are stimulating growth. This might mean being a little more creative in order to make a workout challenging with lighter weights – but it is possible if you know how! Don’t settle for ‘going through the motions’.

Why Aren’t You Seeing the Results You Want?

A lot of people mistakenly believe that they need to have a highly complex training program with an elaborate list of supplements and an iron will in order to get into shape. This is why people will spend so much money on personal trainers, on gyms, on creatine, on protein shake and on programs like ‘Insanity Workout’.

But that shouldn’t be true. In reality, as long as you stick to a relatively decent training program and you’re consistent, you should see results. Even if you are just doing a few press ups every night, this should be enough to bring about some positive change in your body. Could it be better? Sure. But it should be enough to do something.

So if that’s what you’re doing and your training is genuinely consistent… why aren’t you seeing any results? Well, there’s a few reasons…

You’re Not Giving it Your All

The first and most likely cause here is that you aren’t giving your training enough effort. It’s not enough to simply go through the motions when you lift weights or perform CV; you need to really push yourself and you need to work hard enough to feel the burn or the pump in your muscles and you need to feel the sweat forming on your body.

One big mistake you might be making then is leaving the TV on while you train! This can distract you from your workout and prevent you from really focussing on and engaging the muscles while you’re lifting or moving.

The Rest of Your Life is the Problem

If you’re training as hard as you possibly can and you just can’t seem to shift those last few pounds, then you might need to take a look at the rest of your training regime. What you’ll probably find is that you aren’t as active the rest of the time as you could be.

We are not designed to be largely stationary 24 hours a day and then to workout intensively for 30 minutes. If you really want to be healthy and fit, then you should be constantly resting or training. Take a look at your routine then and see where you could fit in more walks, more runs or perhaps an exercise class.

Your Hormones Are Getting in the Way

If you have the wrong hormone profile, then your body will be prone to burning fat and muscle for energy rather than storing it. That makes you an ectomorph. Or perhaps you’re someone who stores fat very easily and can’t lose any weight.

This could be caused by some kind of medical condition. Speak with your doctor about the possibility that you might be suffering with low testosterone, hypothyroidism or polycystic ovaries.

Even if you aren’t clinically ‘unwell’, it may still be the case that you have low testosterone, low T4, or poor insulin sensitivity. Luckily, there are normally things you can do about this situation. One of the best options is to train more regularly. Another is to eat more. Fix your hormones and you’ll make training much easier.

These THREE Basics Items Are All You Need for an Incredible Home Gym

Building a home gym does not need to be expensive and it does not need to take up a lot of space. In order to create a gym you can use to work out from home, you just need to be smart and you need to fulfil a number of specific requirements. Read on and we’ll look at some of the ways you can do this without breaking the bank. Ultimately, it comes down to just buying a few items, each of which is highly affordable and can be easily stored to avoid taking up too much space…

Pull Up Bar

The first item you’re going to need is a pull up bar. Before you get a pull up bar, you’ll be able to train almost every muscle group using only your own bodyweight. The only exceptions to this are muscles involved in pulling. That means things like your biceps and your lats, which require you have something to hang off of.

And that’s where the pull up bar comes in. With a pull up bar, you’ll be able to start performing not only pull ups but also chin ups, rows and even hanging sit-ups. This now means that you really can train every muscle group, even if you are still limited to using only bodyweight.

Dumbbells

This is where the dumbbells come in. With these, you can now start using weights and you will be able to train every single muscle group. Dumbbells simply allow you to add a weight to either hand, which means you’ll be able to perform not only curls but also tricep kickbacks, tricep extensions, dumbbell presses, shoulder presses, upward rows, shrugs, weighted squats, lunges and all manner of other exercises. Effectively, nearly anything you would normally be able to do with a barbell can be done with a pair of dumbbells – as well as a lot more besides.

What’s important for your long term success here is that you have enough weight that will allow you to up the challenge as you progress. The good news, is that you can buy dumbbells that have adjustable weight and this will allow you to add and remove weights plates as required in order to consistently keep increasing the challenge.

Bench

All that’s left is to add a bench, by which I mean a weights bench and preferably one that will allow you to alter the angle. This way, you can then perform not only dumbbell presses and flyes but also isolation curls (sitting with your back supported by the bench), decline and incline presses, shoulder presses and all manner of other things using much heavier weights.

With just these three items, you now effectively have everything you need to create a fully functional home gym. No matter how much you progress, this will offer enough challenge to keep you on your toes and keep you growing!

Of course where you expand from there is then up to you…

Some Powerful and Unique Exercises to Add to Your Home Workout This Evening

Working out and building muscle is often all about keeping things varied. You need to keep challenging your body and that means avoiding reaching a plateau at all costs.

The problem though is that finding ways to train from home can sometimes be challenging. Of course you can’t stock your home with quite as much gym equipment as the typical gym and even the sheer weight can end up costing a lot of money.

As a result, you need to get a little more creative in order to get the most from your home workouts and sometimes this will mean thinking outside of the box and trying to come up with unique ways of training.

Here are a few different exercises that you may not have come across but which can be very effective at building muscle from the comfort of your own home…

Calf Jumps

Training the calves from home can be tricky unless you have a lot of weight to pile onto your dumbbells. A good solution is to use ‘calf jumps’ which train the explosive fast twitch muscle fibers. The idea is simply to jump but while keeping your entire leg straight. That means that you’re generating all of the power from your foot and your calf and this can be a surprisingly effective workout!

Jumping Squats

While we’re at it, jumping squats are equally as useful and something a lot of people just don’t think of. Simply squat and at the top of that squat, jump up in the air!

Crawls

There are all manner of crawls which include bear crawls, Spider-Man crawls and more. These are great because they maintain a constant time under tension while also training your ‘contralateral coordination’ as you’re moving all your limbs at different times. They’re a great form of functional training and something you can do across the garden!

Drag Curls

To be performed with either dumbbells or barbells, this is an alternative way to try using your dumbbells. Simply curl the weight, but by dragging the weight upward instead. This means your hands are pointing a little more toward the ground at the start and then come directly upward but the pivot in your arm is still going to be the elbow joint. This makes curls a little easier, which in turn makes them great to round off a drop set.

Burns

One of the most deadly words in all of weight training. Burns are exercises you perform when you have nothing left to give and nothing left in the tank. Here, you are simply performing as much of the exercise as you can still do. So if you can only bob up and down on the ground after a set of press ups – that’s all you do. It’s a great way to finish off the muscle, it’s exhausting and it creates a real flood of blood and metabolites to finish you off.

And there you go – try working some of these into your next routine and that should give your muscles a bit of a wakeup call!