Making Minimal Weight More Effective.
Are you working with a seemingly subpar weight collection?
Whether it's at home or at a heavy-lift hating chain gym, the dumbbell racks or free weights may not be enough to challenge you. Some consider building their own home gym, but come to the great barrier of the budget before following through. With the cost of weights being expensive for one single user, people may often be reluctant, and settle for training at any gym with sufficient weight, and maximum versatility. While world records are going to need huge stacks of plates of steel and rubber to be broken, plenty of results can be made at home alone just by training the training methods. If you want to make a minimalist weight collection more useful, try these ideas to challenge your body, and become more fit!
1. Change the speed.
The weight doesn't have to change at all, the speed could use it though. Depending on your goal, adding speed, or slowing down can amplify your performance. If you are limited to a lighter amount of weight choosing your speed can help you gain more, but you have to choose where improvement is needed. Power athletes and bodybuilders don't have the same goals. Power athletes could care less about a stage appearance, while bodybuilders ONLY care about the stage appearance. Come to the fork in the road, and make the minimal weight collection count.
Slowing down, increasing time under tension.
Take your warmup weight, and perform 20 repetitions of that exercise as if you were trying to demonstrate it to somebody trying to learn about health and wellness. Slow, steady, robotically. You'll probably notice around rep 15 that your warmup weight could actually be used for a brutal workout. If your weight stack is slacking, slow down before buying more. Time under tension is what bodybuilders seek to grow and shape their muscle mass. Even with light to moderate weight, slowly performing the exercises can push the muscles to fatigue and induce new growth. Gaining mass is not entirely about the weight on the bar. It's important to focus on performance, and even with time under tension reps, you can log and track how much weight you can lift for a higher amount of reps (15-20). You might realize that going slow, your 20rm is lighter than usual. Now, work on improving your SLOW 20 rep maximum. If you track all your lifts compulsively, you will have so much fun classifying your exercise selections by speed. Slow negatives and controlling time under tension is a hero for hypertrophy. Slow strength movements are not always the answer, as moving slowly doesn't have much carry over to athletic ability.
Speeding up, accelerating through the concentric portion.
Most sports and physical abilities are going to call upon power and faster force production. While challenging the body by slowing down for the eccentric (negative) portion of the lift can promote hypertrophy, though an athlete like a powerlifter or linebacker would not have as much reason to push any bar slowly. Their game is all about producing lots of force up and forward. When these athletes lift they should produce big forces on the concentric (positive) portion of the lift. Being able to move the bar through that concentric phase quickly demonstrates great force production. If one athlete can push 200 pounds at 1 meter per second, and one can push that same bar at 1.6 meters per second, who has better force production? The 1.6 athlete. Nothing else on the barbell had to change.
Instead of maintaining the same tempo through the whole lift, try putting some power on the lifts with lighter weight. Stand up quicker on a squat, a deadlift, an overhead press, or row. Most of the compound lifts are excellent choices to try this technique for. For creating an overall harder set with sub maximal weight, the best choice would have to be both!
Combine the two!
Build rock solid strength and stability by pushing with more speed through the concentric (up on a squat) portion, and slower eccentrics (down on a squat.) Again, this can be done on most compound movements. Slowly sit down with a squat, and try exploding up to stand. After 10 reps, not only will quad muscles be ablaze, but the entire body out of breath, and beginning to realize that this feels like cardio. Controlling the speed like this makes for an excellent anaerobic conditioning workout. Speed [and pumping the brakes] kills.
2.Add resistance bands.
Adding rubber bands somewhere to the originally considered "too-light" exercise can help you build a challenging weight stack more cost effectively. Not only does the elastic band add more strength demands, it actually can make the movement safer in some ways.
Adding a resistance band makes the concentric portion of the lift more difficult, because as a band stretches, it creates more tension. Add this to the method of fast concentric and slow eccentrics mentioned above, and you can be sure of finding exhaustion, quickly.
Seeking fatigue hardly scratches the surface of training with elastic bands. Elastic bands on a barbell/dumb bell/kettle bell can help build fast twitch muscle fibers AND better eccentric strength, if used properly.
Not only will pushing through the elastic band feel harder the closer it is towards completion, but it will also pull at its hardest at the top of the lift, forcing serious eccentric strength all the way down to the starting position.
While the method I mentioned change much, changing the device used to load it can also make it safer. An elastic band will match your force production and catch you like a mitt holder catches a fighters punches. Why is this important? Try this.
Let's say, you have a squat max of 315 or higher. Load up a barbell with 135. Do a couple squats, and when you do, stand up as fast as possible from the bottom of the squat. You might notice that the bar begins to bounce up, down, off and around your shoulders. You would never expect such a light squat to feel so risky, yet here we are, finding risk! Instead of trying to just explosively squat(bench, deadlift,overhead press) with the just the iron, add some rubber bands to "soften the edges" of the lift and prevent overpowering the bar and getting hurt from losing a safe position.
Striking athletes face the risk of hyperextension if they snap out a punch or kick with full extension without a heavy bag or mitt holder to catch it. Chains can serve the same purpose, but they don't load as clean as elastic bands will, and they defeat the purpose of being cost effective, being just as expensive as their weight would be in iron plates.
3.Pause with purpose.
Pause at the sticking point, which may vary person to person. You may recognize this point as the spot where failure is found, as it's the most difficult portion of the lift. This could be the bottom of the squat, the bottom of the bench press, the 90 degree point of a bicep curl, and other weak movement positions that break you in training. Work at taking a 3-5 second pause at that point, and then finish each rep.
Think about pressing a bench press, and stopping at the midpoint. Wait 3-5 seconds and finish the rest of the rep. You can even add that same pause on the way down, and get great isometric workouts with every rep. This can also help improve strength at weak points in the big 3, and the only adjustment needed from that example, is to move that pause to YOUR sticking point. If you can't lock out the deadlift after a tiresome battle with the weight, try some sets with a pause right before the lockout.
Add additional movements while holding a static position, and you'll build serious muscular endurance. Rowing from the glute ham developer can help you get a stronger posterior chain, and teach athletes how to properly brace their midsection during hinge type movements like a deadlift, or bent over row.
These pauses can make for great finishers as well. Finish a set of 10-20 reps with bicep curls and a 30 second pause at the top, and write off office work for the rest of the day, those biceps will be toast. Isometric exercises, or paused exercises are often the choice of athletes recovering from joint injuries. When the bicep curl, or hamstring curl is held for 30 seconds, that's a ton of time-under-tension. Growth will happen. Always consult with a doctor before involving injured areas in training.
4. Don't balance the bar.
Build some new core strength by loading bars slightly heavier on one side than the other. Try squatting 2 plates and a 25 on one side, and just 2 plates on the other side. Then switch the extra load to the other side and do the same number of reps. If that felt sloppy try only one plate on one side, and one 45 pound plate and a 10 on the other. As you get stronger, you can add more weight, and a little bit more of a gap in the difference to each side.This will require that core, and lesser touched muscles, like the obliques to get some extra demand during training sessions.
With more core stability under heavy load, a balanced load will feel like a cake walk when the load is the same on each side. Just bear in mind to move up gradually with this method. Another great way to train through less manageable loads is through hanging band training. You would keep the same weight on each side of the bar, but hang the weights from heavy duty mini-bands or very durable straps.
If can also be done with dumbbells and all you need to do is grip one side of the dumbbell handle, instead of the middle. This is great for developing wrist stability and grip strength.
These offset loads can improve the large and small groups of muscles that stabilize the load, and allow us to push 100% of the effort into the lift. Balanced, smooth movement will help optimize your output during heavy training sessions. This isn't adding a BOSU ball under your feet and risking dancing around like like you're too drunk at a wedding. This is directly targeting the muscles of the deep core that protect our spine, and prevent injury. Strengthen those deep core muscles, and become more like an iron statue than a pipe cleaner doll. Tighten up!
5.Use outside the box tools.
The fit fam has for sure seen athletes using Fat Grips, towels, globe grips, and other wild grip training tools to change the dynamic of their training. Try lifting your weights with other attachments. Try deadlifting a standard barbell with one hand like it's a suitcase. Exercises with a 50 pound dumbbell may feel easy, but try it with a single arm on a barbell, and that same 50 pounds feels unwieldy. There are plenty of ways to increase the difficulty and effectiveness of resistance training, and so many of them don't even involve adding more weight.
Just changing the grip itself can make and exercise more difficult. Try grabbing the weight by the plates with a pinch grip. Wrap the barbell with two towels and deadlift with them. Fat grips, globe grips, wrapping the bar by an Iron Bull shoulder pad will all challenge grip strength more than traditional lifting due to the change in shape and thickness of the weight. When your grip isn't an issue, you can focus on driving the crap out of any barbell or strongman exercise that involves holding heavy objects, and they won't fall out of your hands.
You can even improve on things without changing the weight at all, especially if you have bad habits. If you use the alternating deadlift grip on all deadlifts, you may begin to create strength imbalances in the muscle groups of the upper back. Step it back on the weight, and work on doing more with a double overhand, or hook grip. If your double overhand grip improves significantly , using an alternating grip will feel so much stronger that you'd think you were cheating on the platform.
Reeves deadlifts, landmine plate pinches, and plate holds or bicep curls can make simple exercises extremely difficult. With strategy, and [safe] creativity, you can build strength in uncommon ways.
If the budget doesn't permit more weight, check out some of these handy lifting accessories and methods shown on video below to change the challenge of your routine. Expose yourself to unconventional loads, and you will find new strength and growth.
Check out these grip training products for more ideas.
Written by David Corrado
Owner of Trainathlon.
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