How to Improve Your Home Workout

Looking to get the most out of your time at home? Our mate Celebrity Trainer Luke Milton has the tips you need.

09 Apr, 2020

Fitness

Tips & Tricks

Wellness

With every person or business in the fitness industry, us included, jumping at the opportunity to help the millions of people being ordered to stay home, there’s been no shortage of recommendations, advice and demonstrations for how to get your sweat on with a home workout.

While the endless supply of advice is probably more tiring than the workouts themselves, how much of it is accurate? And are they leading to safer and more enjoyable workouts?

Our mate Luke Milton, Celebrity Trainer and myDNA Ambassador, has shared the following definitive list of tips to get the most out of your home workout regime. Nothing here is rocket science, but they are your best bet at ensuring you make time for exercise while following the proper techniques.

a woman and her young child doing yoga in her apartment
Create a designated space

First you need to plan a space for your workouts. Choose a place that can be easily transformed and fits your exercising needs. Whether that be your living room or your backyard, make it manageable for you. Some things to include are allowing for as much natural light as possible, as well as airflow. While de-cluttering can help with the feng shui along with  removing gadgets and gizmos form your view to minimise distractions and improve focus. If you can, try to incorporate plants to help with oxygen levels and purification (if not outside). It’s time to tap into your fitness feng shui and design a space that works for you.

Correct your form

This is one of the most important tips for your physical health. Doing exercises incorrectly can lead to activating the incorrect muscle groups or even worse, injury. Our recommendation is setting a mirror up so you can inspect your form while completing your workout. Alternatively, you can set up a camera to record your form, this allows you to review the footage and see where exactly what you’re doing right and wrong.

One benefit of the increase in fitness content is the  wide variety of genuinely reputable information and trainers you can now access online to cross check any advice you receive. Check out this blog post or our Instagram  for instructions directly from Luke.

If you still have questions, or need extra advice for your workouts, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via Facebook or Instagram.

One bonus of working out in the privacy and safety of your home is that you can work out without a single person peering over, this means it’s time to get creative! So, it’s time to perfect those exercises you’ve been too nervous to in front of a crowd. Or set yourself some challenges you may have otherwise not attempted – more on this shortly.

One of the biggest hurdles (or excuses) we hear , is that people don’t have access to equipment at home. While it may be getting harder to find the right equipment, some of our customers’ favorite alternatives include cans of baked beans, milk jugs, bricks, water bottles or sandbags to add some weight and resistance to their exercises. Get creative and utilize what’s around you.

Check out Melbourne footballer, Jake Melksham’s, creative alternatives for weights. Although we do want to mention that myDNA doesn’t recommend using your children as weights. ?

Also remember to take advantage of the technology at your fingertips. Record and track your workouts, use workout livestreams, follow along with video tutorials or jump on social media challenges, such as the see 10, do 10, give 10, which is a push up challenge circulating the internet.

Hungry for more home workouts?
Check out more of our free home workouts here.

Most effective exercises

Our customers have also been asking us about the most effective workout they can do at home. Our usual recommendation is to incorporate the 5 elements of fitness.

  1. Warmup
  2. Cardiovascular (aerobic) workout
  3. Resistance (strength-building) exercises
  4. Flexibility moves, and
  5. Cool down

Use these elements to achieve a holistic workout that touches on all functions of your body.

As for specific exercises that are most effective at burning calories, here are a couple of our favorites.

Schedule your home workout like an appointment

While many more competing priorities have just entered our lives, one benefit of working from home is a reduction in time spent commuting to work and back. If you’re one of the lucky ones who have banked this time, then it’s perfect to now reinvest in a 30-minute workout!

For the rest of us, it will come down to “finding the time” versus “making the time”. Finding the time indicates that your workout is of low priority. So, we recommend scheduling your workout into your work or personal calendar, which means you’re actually making time and therefore a commitment to yourself. It might seem trivial, but these little actions help build routines and train behaviors, which are then easier to stick to.

Reward yourself

We mentioned challenging yourself earlier. Setting challenges is all about getting better, fitter, healthier, happier, or simply closer to your goals. But it also helps motivate you and keep things interesting!. Whether it be setting a number of reps in a row or completing the exercises in a certain amount of time, you should choose challenges that align with your goals and level of fitness and that challenge you without putting you at risk of injury.

A most important part of setting challenges is remembering to appropriately reward yourself as you succeed! It might be difficult to find appropriate rewards while in isolation, but a nice long, uninterrupted, bath with one of those expensive bottles of red seems fitting!

Lastly, don’t be too hard on yourself

There’s been no shortage of change to our  lives of late and you need to remember your mental wellbeing is just as, if not more, important than your physical. So, while taking care of yourself and your family should be high on your priority list, it’s not worth beating yourself up over skipping a session or breaking your routines. Rather, you should reward yourself for what you do achieve and take enjoyment in finding new routines.

We know it’s hard to have consistency and discipline with any workout goal, so if you’ve managed to maintain your routines into ‘iso’ then you should be proud. If, like most of us, you haven’t been so lucky, then we hope some of these tips give your workouts the improvement they deserve, which ultimately lead to the results you want.

Over to you. You were made for this.

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