What's up guys, Sean Nalewanyj, realscienceathletics.com.
Hope everyone is staying as safe and as healthy as possible during this very bizarre time
that we're living through right now, but in this video today, I want to talk about some
major problems that I keep seeing over and over again with these home quarantine workouts
that are being posted all over YouTube and Instagram.
Now, I think it's good that people are trying to provide ways for their subscribers to train
from home if they're in lockdown mode right now and they can't access a regular gym.
However, so many of these plans and exercise recommendations that I'm seeing are just not
going to get the job done, assuming your goal is to maintain as much muscle mass as possible
or even continue making new gains from home during this time.
Before I go further, I do want to mention that I have put together a free home hypertrophy
workout plan for you guys.
Okay?
It's an upper lower split, which I think is one of the very best ways to lay your weekly
program out and I've included a variety of different exercise options and suggestions
depending on your equipment availability to help you get the very best results possible,
given the current situation.
I didn't record video demonstrations for all the exercises, but they can all be easily
looked up online and this is completely free anyway.
So yeah, if you're not familiar with a certain exercise, then you'll just have to look it
up for yourself or you can also comment below on this video if you need clarifications and
I'll be happy to help out.
You can download the program by clicking up here or by using the link in the description
box below.
So onto the subject of this video.
First thing, just to be clear, I'm not saying that you must continue training full-out right
now amidst everything going on.
That's completely up to you, depending on your personal situation.
If you've decided to take some time off completely for whatever reason, then that's up to you.
Or if you do want to continue training, but just lower the intensity level down and you
understand that you'll probably regress a bit in terms of overall size and strength
and you're okay with that, then go ahead.
Again, everyone's situation is different right now.
Everyone's mentality is a bit different here, so that's totally your choice.
However, if your situation permits it and you're serious about carrying out the most
effective trading plan possible from home so that you can maintain your gains or possibly
even continue progressing, then it's critical that you structure and execute things properly
because if you are limited on equipment right now, it is going to be more challenging to
really get that proper muscle building stimulus that you need.
If you're just going through the motions and pumping out super lightweight sets on some
random body weight circuit that you found on Instagram, you're not going to be getting
much out of that from a muscle building perspective or potentially you might be getting nothing
from it at all.
Most of these home muscle building workouts that I'm seeing posted actually qualify more
as a cardio workout rather than as a hypertrophy workout.
They'll probably get your heart rate up, you'll burn a few calories, you'll get a physical
and mental boost from it and that's all well and good, but it's not going to provide anything
meaningful as far as muscle maintenance or muscle growth are concerned.
So I'm talking about things body weight squats for sets of 25 reps when you actually have
the quad strength to do 250 or taking a flimsy set of resistance tubing and doing pull downs
and rows with it, overhead presses with three pound water bottles or deadlifts using a 10
pound bag of rice.
I'm seeing this type of stuff posted quite frequently and honestly now that we're being
forced to think outside the box with things, it really goes to show how a lot of these
fitness coaches don't even really understand basic training principles and it's actually
really frustrating to watch because some of these people have hundreds of thousands or
even millions of followers who look up to them and they're just eating these workouts
up because they don't know any better, even though some of these workouts are just ridiculously
bad.
For example, I saw this guy here with 600,000 followers literally performing rows with no
resistance whatsoever.
This is just completely pointless when there are so many more exponentially better ways
to do rows from home.
It's just ridiculous.
Or this guy here with a million followers telling people to do three sets of 10 to 12
pushups.
What if you have the strength to do 30 pushups or 40 pushups?
There's no reason to give prescribed rep ranges for those types of exercises or three sets
of 10 to 12 resistance band squats when the vast majority of people are not going to have
a strong enough resistance band to where 10 to 12 reps is going to be very challenging.
And then of course we can always count on the V Shred crew to be putting out horrifically
bad advice, but that's no surprise either.
So I don't even really need to mention that here, but these are just a few examples of
many.
Look, the most important thing is this, whether you're training at the gym or from home, whether
you're doing a five reps per set or 50 reps per set, whether you're lifting barbells,
dumbbells, resistance bands, loaded backpacks, suitcases, or your family dog, the primary
factor, the underlying stimulus that triggers muscle growth is that you train your muscles
within a close enough proximity to muscular failure on each set.
If you don't challenge your muscles with a load and rep count that pushes them close
to or beyond their existing strength capacity, then your muscles are just going to have zero
incentive to adopt and to grow.
The entire basis of hypertrophy is that you threaten the existing strength resources of
the muscle.
If the strength resources it already has are sufficient to complete whatever task it is
that you're trying to do, then all is good as far as your body is concerned and there's
really no reason at all to change, and so many of these exercise variations and rep
counts or time counts as well.
That's something else I've seen.
They just don't push you anywhere near failure.
And so again, they're really just going to be sort of a cardio and conditioning workout
at best.
Now again, if you're okay with that and you just want to keep active in some capacity
for now, then that's fine.
But for those who do want to maintain or even continue building new muscle, the bottom line
is that if you're leaving any more than about five reps in the tank, then you're largely
just wasting your time and effort.
I'd say five reps is the absolute minimum.
Three reps is much better, and ideally, as I've recommended many times in the past, I
would say about one to two rep short of failure, that's the zone that you should be aiming
for on the bulk of your sets.
And what that means is that if 10 reps was your absolute maximum on a given lift, you'd
perform eight to nine reps and leave one to two reps in the tank.
So to put this all very simply, you just need to continue training hard.
The rules don't magically change just because you're in your living room rather than inside
a commercial gym.
And I don't mean training hard as in your heart rate is up and you're sweating and you're
feeling the burn and bouncing around from exercise to exercise in a HIIT circuit fashion.
I mean training hard as in you're exerting maximum effort throughout the set and taking
that set all the way to the point where even if your life depended on it, you could only
squeeze out one to two more reps in proper form.
Then after the set is done, you're taking a full rest period to recover and recharge
and then repeating.
And then furthermore, if your goal is not just to maintain muscle but to actually keep
progressing, then just as you would do in the gym, you need to continue striving for
progressive overload by increasing the workload over time.
And that's something I'll talk about in another video where I'll outline some different ways
that you can progress from home if your equipment availability is limited right now.
Which brings me to the next point, which is that yes, I totally understand that some of
us have really limited access to training equipment right now and for some muscle groups
it might be challenging to truly get close to muscular failure and to apply progressive
overload.
But the reality is that if you get creative and you'd use the right variations and the
right trading techniques, usually there is a way to make it work and usually there is
a way to put that targeted muscle under tension, get within a rep or two of failure and increase
the difficulty from week to week.
You can use variations of exercises that train one arm or one leg at a time.
You can use more challenging angles.
You can implement certain techniques like slower negatives, paused reps, pulsed reps,
rest pause, drop sets, things like that.
Again, download my free home workout plan using the link up here or in the description
box below for more information on exactly what I recommend.
And if despite all of that, if the exercise you're doing still feels a bit easy, then
you can just perform higher reps with it.
We know that even going as low as 30% of your one rep max will still produce significant
hypertrophy as long as you go close to failure.
And so even if you're doing lighter sets of 20 reps, 30 reps, maybe even a bit higher,
you can still get very good results from that.
And I'll talk more about that as well as some other topics related to home training and
nutrition in the next few videos.
We don't know how long this whole quarantine situation is going to be going on for.
It could potentially be several more months or even longer depending on where you're from.
And so for the time being, most of my content will be customized to this particular situation
that the majority of us are in.
And if you have any questions or ideas for video topics that you want me to cover, feel
free to post them in the comments below.
But bottom line guys, if you want to maintain your existing gains or continue building new
muscle with maximum effectiveness, the basic underlying training principles do not change
just because you're training at home versus training at the gym.
Low intensity body weight circuits that all these fitness coaches are posting are not
going to cut it.
You need to continue training close to muscular failure if you want to preserve as much muscle
as possible.
And if you want to keep making new gains, you need to continue striving for progressive
overload.
So thanks for watching guys.
If you found this video helpful, then make sure to hit the like button.
Quite a few people have asked and yes, RealScience Athletics, which is my fitness supplement
company, we are still operating business as usual.
You can try out our pre-workout multivitamin and fish oil over at realscienceathletics.com.
If you're new to the channel, don't forget to subscribe to stay in the loop and I will
talk to you in the next video.