How to Maintain Your Gains at Home

Submitted by RonnyT on Fri, 2021-03-12 10:11

In some areas, access to regular gyms can still be extremely limited. Perhaps you’ve started working out at home or in a smaller environment to keep up with your goals. But are your workouts as effective as they can be? Have you been only maintaining or even losing some lean muscle mass? Here are a few techniques you can incorporate to maximize and maintain your gains- even when you don’t have access to the gym. You can incorporate these methods using only bodyweight (yes, it is possible to maintain muscle with bodyweight exercises if you do it correctly and with intention), bands, or any weights you do have access to.

Plyometrics

Incorporate jumps and increase explosiveness to your exercises to increase the tension put on your muscles. Plyometrics increase muscular power, strength, balance, agility, and even growth. Plyometric training has a similar effect on muscle growth compared to resistance training, particularly in the lower extremities.

Volume

For lifters, volume refers to the total amount of work done in a specific period, which means our Sets x Reps x Weight. Increasing volume can be crazy-good for your muscles, but don’t go too crazy with it. While more is better, there is still a threshold for each person before your body has difficulty recovering. You can sneak in volume throughout your day by doing things like doing walking lunges to get to the kitchen for water or setting a timer a few times a day to pump out an extra couple sets of bodyweight exercises.

Target Different Angles

Once you’ve mastered the basic lifts, to continue growing in strength and mass, changing angles of your lifts can increase the microtraumas in the muscle fibers, leading to hypertrophy (muscle growth). You might be asking - how do I do this? It’s easy - just make a few adjustments like these:

- Elevate your heels in squats to increase the range of motion
- Try out wide-stance squats
- Incorporate different stances of deadlifts
- Elevate your toes slightly while doing deadlifts to increase the anterior stretch
- Try out a high incline bench press
- Shoulders can be hit differently by holding onto a post and lean away then doing raises
- Try out different angles, heights, and hand positioning for pulling motions

Tempo

Increase time under tension (TUT) by incorporating pauses or holds at the bottom of an

exercise. This causes the desired traumas to the slow-twitch muscle fibers, in turn leading to muscle hypertrophy. Tempo training helps you control and manipulate the different actions of the muscle during the lift. Basically, you are just adding in another factor of timing into your lifts. Here’s a breakdown of how tempo is written: Eccentric phase (lower the weight)/Isometric Pause (stretch down)/Concentric Phase (lifting the weight)/Isometric Pause (contracted up). Exercises like pullups (or deadlifts) start concentrically and end eccentrically.