Dislike gyms? Me too. What I use to strength train at home
Dislike gyms? Me too. What I use to strength train at home
in my dining room… these 5 small bits of kit serve all my strength training needs
Hi! This is Leyla from A Day Well Spent, a newsletter seeking pathways to more purposeful living.
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Muscle mass is a key pillar for living a long and healthy life
I’ve previously written about the likelihood you’re not ‘getting old’, you just need to stretch.
And it’s probably quite obvious to anyone reading this that regularly worked muscles mitigate the natural decline we see in the strength, volume and function of muscles as we age (the medical term for this decline is sarcopenia).
It’s a decline most of us have witnessed first hand or experienced directly.
Strong muscles mean you can continue lifting your suitcase off the airport conveyor belt and are less likely to fall over, amongst many other things.
But perhaps you’re not especially bothered about that. Because someone stronger can pick up the suitcase for you. And you can just go down the stairs a little slower.
Well, there are several other – quite surprising – reasons you might want to consider strength training:
I highly recommend listening to this short 15 minute podcast that goes into all of the above: Just One Thing: Lift Some Weights by Dr. Michael Mosely.
In other words, maintaining muscle mass by strength training is extremely important.
And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if you hope to lead a long and healthy life and you are over the age of 30, you really need to be doing it regularly in some form.
And no age is too late to start strength training.
I find it quite interesting (and great) that the importance of our gut microbiome – how what we eat affects how we feel and how well our brains function – is beginning to filter into the understanding of the wider public domain, thanks to bestselling books, TV shows and plenty of media coverage.
But the importance of maintaining muscle mass as we age? I think there is still a long way to go before people ‘get’ just how critical mitigating the natural decline of muscle mass actually is to living well. Not just for our bodies, but also for our brains.
I hope there will be a similar public awakening at some point, but we’re not there yet.
What is strength training?
Resistance training, lifting weights, strength training - whatever you want to call it – all refer to exercises that make your muscles work harder than usual. You’re basically moving something that doesn’t want to be moved. That could be your own body if you’re doing push-ups, for example. Or a heavy dumbbell.
The key part to this is that it needs to take effort. And many of us – understandably – have a natural aversion to physical effort.
Note: I will be publishing a wonderful guest post in the coming weeks written by someone who learnt to love strength training after initially thinking it was “horrible” and not for her.
An inspiring and fascinating story told through the lens of psychology - stay tuned for it!
And if you need a reminder as to why your body deserves to have its muscles worked, you may enjoy a piece I wrote called Why my body is my best friend.
As this great Guardian article on building muscle mass in your 60s states, it is alas not enough to plod away at something that’s easily within your capabilities.
If you want to build muscle you need to do something called ‘train to failure’. Which really just means, the last few repetitions (reps) of an exercise need to be hard to do. If you can do more of them, you haven’t done enough to build muscle.
If the term ‘training to failure’ is enough to put you off the whole thing entirely, remember it’s all relative. One of the great things about strength training, is that you start where you’re at.
If simply standing up from a chair (without using your arms) and then sitting back down is effort for you and you’re able to do 10 of those with the last few being challenging, you’re doing brilliantly!
The biggest motivation for staying consistent with strength training for me? Seeing and feeling the results, really very quickly indeed. For example, I started noticing my pec muscles forming after doing push-ups most days for just two weeks.
‘How amazing is that!’, I thought.
And guess what, the more you do strength training exercises, the easier they get.
Who needs to be doing strength training?
As Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, a functional medicine practitioner states in this article:
Studies have shown that for both men and women, our strength and muscle mass steadily increase from birth to around 30-35 years old. After which, muscle power and performance decline slowly and linearly at first, and then faster after age 65 for women and 70 for men (Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging).
Weight training is essential to mitigate these effects as we age. When you stimulate skeletal muscle, you maintain mobility, mental clarity, hormonal balance and improve mood.
We lose a quite alarming 1% of muscle every year from our mid-50s. Which means by the time we’re 80, the average person will have shed 8kg or about 18lb of muscle.
This makes it harder to carry a bag of groceries, of course.
But it also undermines our balance, weakens our bones and makes it more likely that we will fall over and injure ourselves. Then become scared of walking anywhere at all, in case we fall again. So you stay in the house more and move even less. And then you’re stuck in a vicious cycle of accelerated decline.
This is a quite common unfolding of events for people as they get older and my Grandmother is currently in the firm grip of said vicious cycle, falling over in her kitchen just this week.
OK I want to start strength training! But I really don’t like gyms?
That’s OK, you don’t need a gym! I really don’t like them either.
Not because I have a pathological aversion to them. But as I’ve written about before in Sometimes it’s OK to just quit, if I have to actually leave the house to exercise, there is a very slim chance the exercise will ever happen.
I know that a gym environment is exactly what some people need in order to motivate them to work out.
But I personally find it quite unnatural to expend all my energy in an artificially-lit, air-conditioned box and the clean freak in me can’t get past the fact that everyone’s sweat is all over everything — I keep my cardiovascular exercise to the outdoors with brisk walks or runs.
Plus as is my nature, I can’t really bring myself to spend money on things I know I can just do myself at home and for much less (see The power of self-reliance for more on this).
And strength training is the perfect example of this – I do all my strength training at home.
Welcome to my ‘home gym’…
I say ‘home gym’. I use the term incredibly lightly.
I am really referring to the 4ft wide space between my dining table and a chest of drawers. It’s big enough to comfortably fit a yoga mat and little more, once I wheel my office chair out of the way (that little corner desk is where I’m typing this right now, in fact it is this essay that is on the screen - meta!)
It’s here I do pretty much all my strength training that will, hopefully, set me up for a long, mobile and active life.
These are my 5 small but key bits of kit I use at home that serve all my strength training needs
And possibly more importantly, they are all discreet enough to be stored away. I store them behind sofas, under desks, under the stairs. When you have a minimal amount of space, the ability to store this equipment – as well as their effectiveness – is key.
These are my 5 bits of essential kit and how I use them at home for full body strength training, which I do in a really small space.