Poor Man’s Guide To Getting Strong
- Getting strong at home doesn’t mean that you need a fancy home gym setup.
- If You are very low on budget, you can still setup a decent piece of equipment to get strong.
- There is no replacement for big weights but, even with bootstrapped equipment you can see good results.
Recently I gave up my gym membership and decided to setup my home gym and start working out there. This saves my travelling time and then I can spend more time with my family.
I started out by watching lots of youtube videos about how to setup a home gym and grazed through thousands of articles on this topic.
Now all these articles and youtube videos had very great content and information on the topic of setting up a home gym but the reality is that all these articles and videos focus on audiences from western countries where it is a bit easier to setup a home gym.
In India signing up for a annual gym membership is much more cheaper than setting up a home gym and most of the people here lead an “apartment” life which adds up to the challenge of setting up of a hardcore lifting gym in your apartment.
I had faced all these challenges and some more when I decided to pursue this quest of mine to setup a decent “serious ” home gym and workout at home.
Through this article I want to share some tips and tricks about how I tried to overcome these challenges and how you can apply these tricks if you are low on budget but still want to get strong by working out at home.
How Much Equipment Is needed?
Not much. A barbell and a couple of weights will be enough to get you started. I myself have very few things at my home gym as of now. My home gym setup at this very moment consists of the following →
- A 5ft Olympic barbell.
- Rubber weight plates totaling 20kgs.
- A light resistance band.
- A jump rope.
I plan to add a few hundred pounds more to my weight plate collection, but my present budget allows for only this much.
Now, by no means I recommend you to stick only with 20 kg of weight at your home gym. If your budget allows and if you are strong enough then by all means go and buy more weights.
The point is that you don’t need to get fancy to get strong. Stick with the basics and have a barbell and a few poundage of weights to get started. When you save some more money then you go and buy some more weight or equipment.
The idea is to build your home gym piece by piece and sticking to minimal equipment since you may not be having a barn or a huge garage to have a state-of-art home gym.
By the way you can purchase a quality Olympic barbell at amazon.in .
How Can I Get Strong With These Puny Weights?
Well! you don’t need to lift hundreds of pounds to get big and strong. This doesn’t mean that you can ignore the importance of lifting “heavy” .
This means is that there are other ways to get big and you need to be clever about how to control your environment for your advantage.
Your body doesn’t know the poundage you are lifting, it only knows the stress the load is putting on your muscles. This means that if you can find a way to increase the stress on the muscles then the targeted muscles will have no choice but to grow.
There are three ways to stress a muscle →
- Increase the load by increasing the amount of weight you lift.
- Increasing the time under tension i.e. the time for which a muscle bears the load.
- Fatiguing the targeted muscle before the main lift.
Since this guide is for people under budget and If you are reading this then you are one of these people. This means that right now you have a shortage of weights in your home gym and you can not buy more weights but, you can definitely increase the time under tension and you can even fatigue the target muscle before the main lift.
How To Increase the Time Under Tension?
One way to increase the time under tension is to use “paused” reps. Here you need to pause during each rep of a set. Suppose you are doing squats, then a typical set of paused reps would look like this →
- Set 1 →5 reps ( pause half a way through the set for 5 secs)
- Set 2 → 5 reps (pause half a way through the set for 7 secs)
- Set 3 → 5 reps (pause half a way through the set for 10 secs)
The above scheme looks simple but try it out and you will understand how it feels. To increase the difficulty level you can increase the duration for which you pause or increase the reps per set.
How To Fatigue The Target Muscle Before The Main Lift?
Fatiguing a muscle before you perform a main lift for that muscle is not a new technique. It is a popular and age old technique employed by bodybuilders to stress a muscle and thus promote muscle growth.
Under this technique you should fatigue the target muscle with extra reps and sets or a different exercise before you perform the main lift for that target muscle.
For example, if you are trying to hit bicep with bicep curls then you should perform some sets/reps of say cable curls and then go on to perform bicep curl.
Pre-Fatiguing a muscle before the main lift makes your muscle “feel” a light weight as heavy and helps you to stress that particular muscle with light weights. If you don’t pre-fatigue a muscle then you would need more weight or sets/reps to put stress on a muscle.
For example, You can do a couple of hard sets of sissy squats and then jump to front squats.
Since your quads are already fatigued by doing sissy squats, a light load on your front squats will “feel” heavy to your quads.
A sample set of such a pre-fatigue scheme would look like this→
- Sissy squats→50,40,30
- Front squat(with light weight)→10,10,10
A Sample Workout Template
Day 1 (Lower Body)→
- Bodyweight backward lunges →50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Bodyweight squats→ 40 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Sissy squats → 30 reps in total(as many sets as required)
- Barbell Front squats (with relatively light weight) → 3 sets, 10 reps each
- Jump rope or any other conditioning that you enjoy
Day 2 (Upper Body)→
- Pike Pushups → 50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Close grip pushups → 40 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Barbell pushpress → 3 sets, 10 reps each
- Jump rope or any other conditioning that you enjoy
Day 3 (Things You Didn’t Do In First Two workout days) →
- Plate front raise → 50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Plate lateral raise → 50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Plate bicep curl → 50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Weighted setups (holding a weight plate on top of your chest)→ 50 reps in total (as many sets as required)
- Jump rope or any other conditioning that you enjoy
The above workout template is nothing which is set on stone. You can of course change or customize the workout template as per your need.
You need to keep in mind that either you need to increasing the time under tension on the target muscle or you need to pre-fatigue the target muscle.
Conclusion
When it comes to setting up a home gym, in some countries or regions buying the required equipment and finding the required space can prove to be challenging. But this shouldn’t stop you from setting up a gym at home and getting strong.
You need to be creative and find ways to use the minimal equipment that you currently have with you to get strong.
If you have setup your budget home gym or have any creative ideas of getting strong with minimal budget then do share it in the comment section.
Do give a clap or more to this post and share it across your network so that more people can discover this post and benefit from the tips that I have posted here.
