How to make light weight go a long way
One of the best fit father hacks is working out at home.
But not all of us have a home gym stocked with hundreds of pounds. Which means you might need some strategies to help you make the most of the weight you do have.
Candidly, you will make better progress if you’re able to invest in more weight (whatever that means to you — more dumbbells, plates, kettlebells, etc.).
But if you don’t, that’s ok. Your progress won’t stop thanks to these 3 strategies.
1️⃣ Tempo
The slower you go, the harder it gets. Strategic pauses also increase difficulty.
The best way to start is with increasing the eccentric portion of the rep. Eccentric is known as the non-working part of the rep, often the lowering.
In a squat, it’s when your sitting down. A deadlift, when you’re lowering the weight to the floor. And a bench press, when you bring the weight down to your chest.
Start with a 3 second eccentric and progress from there. As that gets easier, go to 4 seconds, then 5, and so on.
After that, pauses work wonders. Hold the bottom of a squat or bench press, or the top of a chin up. Hold and squeeze.
When you take momentum out of the movement, it makes it a lot harder.
Lastly, you can changed the concentric tempo. Concentric is the working part: standing up from a squat, lifting the weight off the floor in a deadlift, and pulling yourself to the bar in a chin up.
We want to use concentric manipulation sparingly as faster movements lead to more muscle fiber activation.
So when adding tempo, the order of operations is eccentric —> pauses —> concentric.
2️⃣ More reps
Arguably the most critical piece of strength training is proximity to failure.
This means in order to stimulate gains, we have to get reeeaaally close to mechanical or muscular failure (form breaking down or not being able to do another rep).
When you don’t have enough weight, lower reps won’t be able to provide this stimulus.
So you need to add more.
Which does sacrifice raw strength gains, as those are made in the 1-5 rep range, but by not adding more reps you sacrifice all gains because you don’t get close enough to failure.
The solution is to keep going. Go until you can only do 1 or 2 more reps at most, whatever number of reps that is.
3️⃣ Unilateral work
Don’t share the load between two legs or arms when you don’t have enough load to begin with.
Focus your training on single-side movements to, for all intents and purposes, double the weight you have.
As a bonus, you’ll feel stronger, more stable, and experience less aches and pains. Unilateral works helps create better symmetry in the body which helps all those things, and definitely helps build more muscle.
Emphasize movements like Bulgarian split squats, single leg deadlifts, lunges, single-arm rows, single-arm lat pulldowns, and single-arm presses.
These 3 strategies are listed in order of how I would tell you to integrate them.
So if, for example, you’ve got 3 sets of 5 reps of back squats but don’t have enough weight to make 5 reps hard, here’s what I would have you do:
Slow down the tempo. 3 seconds to lower to start, adding a second any time you need to make it harder. I’d cap at 7 seconds here because anything more than that is kinda ridiculous.
Add a pause. You’ve already slowed down the rep, now pause at the bottom. Start with a 1 second pause, adding a second any time you need to make it harder. I’d cap at 5 seconds here because any more would be torturous.
Do more reps. Now that you’ve added tempo and pauses, if you still need to increase difficulty, start doing more reps. go to 6, then 7, then… you get the point. I’d prefer staying under 8 reps, but up to 12 is ok.
Switch to Bulgarian split squats or lunges. If you make this switch and 5 reps is challenging enough, perfect. If it’s not, go back to the beginning and start with adding tempo.
