If you’ve been regularly going to the gym 1x per week and now you’re asking or panicking about what workouts you can do at home, calm the fuck down. You weren’t dedicating a large amount of time to your training before, so stop kidding yourself that you will now. Instead, I suggest focusing on calorie intake.
What has your weight been doing the last few months? Holding steady or slowly increasing? Either way, if the goal is body fat loss, you need to get yourself into a calorie deficit. I suggest getting a bathroom scale, and every morning for a full week, check your weight first thing in the morning after you’ve been to the bathroom and before you eat anything. We are doing this to identify a trend in your body weight. If your weight has been holding steady, congratulations, just by losing a couple of calories each day, you can start to see some results on the scale. Now if your weight has been going up steadily, then unfortunately for you your gonna have to cut out a lot more calories to get into your own calorie deficit.
Using an online TDEE calculator, work out what your maintenance calories would be (the amount of calories each day to keep you the same weight) and then subtract anywhere from 200-400 cals from that. The reason being you’re probably going to be moving less now that you’re stuck at home, so in order to account for this we want to start with a slightly larger calorie deficit than usual.
Now it’s all well and good saying “put yourself into a calorie deficit”, but if you have no idea what you’re putting into your mouth each day (major pause) then this all going to be a waste of time. What you want to do is download the MyFitnessPal app on your phone and start using that to find out how many calories are in all the foods you eat on a consistent basis. The simple fact is this: if you never learn what foods contain what, you’re never gonna realistically make much progress, let alone maintain it if you ever do. It will all be one big guessing game, day to day, which will eventually drive you fucking nuts. It won’t take you more than 2-3 days to learn how to use the app and track your food intake. You’re stuck at home now so really what’s the excuse?
Once you master calorie intake, we can go one step further and now focus on your individual macros. Ideally we want protein to make up the majority of our daily calorie intake. If you multiply your weight in kg x 2.0-2.2g, you will get the exact number of grams of protein you want to reach each day. Now the part most people haven’t figured out. THE REST OF YOUR REMAINING CALORIES WILL BE MADE UP OF CARBS AND FATS. Let’s say you have 1000 calories remaining, you could choose to have carbs make up 80% and fats 20&, or you could go carbs 50% and fat 50%. It’s entirely up to you. Some people need more carbs so they don’t feel like a zombie all day, others actually enjoy being on low carb. As long as at the end of the day you don’t go over your calorie limit and you stay in a deficit, you will lose weight and drop body fat.
The final step would be to incorporate some effective training that you can do at home. Im not going to waste time sending out videos of me performing squats wearing a fucking backpack or bicep curls with Watsons distilled water bottles, there’s enough of that corny shit online already, but if you are interested in what pieces of equipment you can purchase to setup an effective home gym, contact me below and I can help you get started. There is also a full PDF guide on all things nutrition, how to track calories and use the MyFitnessPal app if you need anymore assistance.