I’m a big advocate of home workouts, but many that I see are imbalanced, because one of their biggest strengths is also one of their biggest drawbacks.
As long as you have access to a floor, you can get a workout. There are lots of exercises that you can do by pushing your body against the resistance of gravity such as press ups and dips. These exercises are great for building the muscles of the chest, front shoulders and triceps, but you can encounter problems if you train this way for too long.
As great as it is that you can get a good workout by pushing yourself away from the floor, what you can’t do is pull the floor towards you, which means that the muscles on the back of the body get neglected. As the muscles on the front get stronger, without balancing the strength of the muscles on the back, they will distort your posture by pulling your shoulders forward. This will eventually cause shoulder pain in most people.
This can often be exacerbated by the fact that we live in a forward reaching world. We almost always have our hands in front of us on keyboards, phones or steering wheels, which shortens and tightens our chest muscles and lengthens and weakens our upper back muscles, which again, will cause sore shoulders eventually in most people.
Balancing your pushing and pulling exercises at home:
So what’s the solution? If you’re going to train at home, you should invest in some equipment which allows you to train the muscles on the back of your body. Some people will like to invest in some weights, but for others a simple resistance band kit will suffice. A good resistance band kit will come with a door anchor, so you can attach the bands to a door frame and replicate many exercises you could do in a gym. This allows you to do many types of pulling and rowing exercises which will balance the strength of your upper back and rear shoulder muscles. A good resistance band set also allows bands to be combined so that you can increase your training resistance over time.
This principle works the same way for your legs too. Many routines focus on lower body pushing exercises and not enough lower body pulling exercises. Done for too long, this will create imbalances which will cause knee discomfort or other problems. When I’m working with clients in any setting their lower body exercises are always balanced up to keep their knees and hips healthy.
Some lower body pulling exercises can be done with body weight only, but they eventually get too easy and some resistance is needed to make them more challenging. Just like the upper body, some weights or a good resistance band kit will normally suffice for this, as long as you can progress your resistance over time.
Training should leave you healthier and pain free, so it’s important to sure you’re able to train everything in balance and that you have all that you need to keep your joints healthy.
Steve Shreeve