The 2nd National UK Lockdown could derail a lot of peoples fitness programmes. It doesn’t have to though. The key factor to bear in mind is training consistency. This is something that we bang on about all of the time. The closure of gyms certainly throws a spanner in the works but it doesn’t have to stop you in your tracks.
It’s human nature to like what we know and to stick to what we are good at. It’s not at all pleasant to do things that either ‘suck’ or we ‘suck at doing’. So lockdown 2.0 arrives and we look for the simple out. Now, as I said in my previous blog post – doing something is better than nothing. To be honest, fitness won’t actually detariorate that much in 4 weeks anyway. However, you do not have to accept any loss of gains.
Before illustrating my argument with an example, I would ask yourself one simple question… Have you come this far with your fitness, to only come this far? If the answer is no, and you still have a way to go, then you need to invest some time planning the next three weeks.
Lets illustrate things with an example. One thing that many people will struggle with is the maintenance of strength. Not many of us are blessed with lots of resistance training equipment at home. More specifically, upper body pulling strength is hard to replicate outside of the gym. If you’re used to performing heavy squats, bench press and pull ups in a gym environment, your strength doesn’t have to suffer. The worlds of calisthenics and gymnastics have plenty of variations in exercises to allow you to maintain a sufficent loading to develop strength. Or at least maintain it.
Single leg squats, incline push ups and Single Arm Rows would be enough to maintain your strength over the next 4 weeks. These movements may not be your preferred method of training consistency but they will do the job. It simply requires some additional planning and mental agility to bend your head around it.
