In this instructional video, the presenter explains how to add resistance to at‑home workouts using everyday household objects, allowing progressive overload without traditional gym equipment. He begins by emphasizing the need for resistance to avoid excessive repetitions and to keep workouts challenging. He then showcases five categories of improvised weights: (1) laundry detergent or bleach bottles for shoulder isolation moves (lateral raises, front raises, rear delt flies); (2) a backpack filled with books, water bottles, or cans that functions as a weighted vest for squats, lunges, step‑ups, and split squats, illustrating how to incrementally increase load; (3) a laundry basket loaded with the same items to perform sumo‑stance deadlifts or Romanian deadlifts, with tips on balancing the load; (4) kitchen items such as a flour bag for goblet or overhead squats, single‑leg glute bridges, and weighted pikes; and (5) a cast‑iron skillet for triceps extensions. Throughout, he provides form cues, safety reminders, and the concept of mind‑muscle connection. The video concludes with a full‑body workout that strings together step‑ups, lateral raises, rear delt flies, single‑leg glute bridges, sumo RDLs, and pulse squats, each using the described household weights, along with rep‑range guidance and encouragement to adjust load as needed.
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Hello, friends. In today's video, I'm going to show you five different ways you can add resistance to your at home workouts so you can still challenge yourself. So just because most of us don't have access to a gym anymore and therefore don't have weights and that normal option to like progressively overload doesn't mean that suddenly all structure and knowledge should just go out the window. You still want to be focusing on progressing in some type of way and still challenging yourself in your workouts. Because picture yourself doing say 20 body weight squats. That's, that's, I mean, unless you're a beginner, that's probably going to feel quite easy. So in order to challenge yourself, you'd have to keep adding more and more and more reps. So, so what would you rather do, like three sets of 200 squats or three sets of 20 squats with a weight to make it feel equally challenging? Do you get what I'm saying? So that is the benefit in adding resistance to your workouts. It basically speeds them up because you don't have to do a million reps in order to feel challenged. You have a little bit of resistance. So at the end of this video, I'm going to include a workout that includes all of these little household items and obviously you can follow along, try it out. So I'm gonna have list rep ranges and you can go above these rep ranges if you do them and you don't feel challenged. So I'll give you more info on that during the workout. But for now, let's go and look at our weights, our at home materials for weights. Okay, so our first item is laundry detergent. So there's a couple different options for things you can do with laundry detergent. So it's a good shoulder exercise because it's, it's not super heavy, like not heavy enough that if you were doing squats it would feel heavy, but it does feel decent for smaller isolation type moves. So you could do lateral raises. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You could do front raises. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You could also do like rear flies. Watch this, watch this. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Get that squeeze. It's a good weight there. Yeah. So then obviously if you want to be creative, you could do like little bicep things, but that doesn't feel as right. And then if you have like other things where you want to make sure, like if you're doing a double arm movement, you obviously want to make sure that, that you're using the same amount of weight in both hands. Like, I wouldn't want to do one like this because this is heavier than this. But obviously you can use other types of containers as well. Like, what is this? This is bleach. So we can lateral raise bleach. This is a decent weight here. You like. I just don't even think, oh, no. Well, that's all right too. So yeah, that is one thing you can use. You can use your laundry detergent or bleach or any large things to work with, like a gallon jug as well. You could use this for high rep, lower body as well. So if you wanted to do step ups, you could hold it and then step up. It's not super heavy. Like, I don't feel like it's a ton of resistance, but of course it's always better than nothing. Ooh. And as. As I'm talking right now, my brain just gave me another one. It gave me another one. Split squats, that is another one. Because like, they're fairly challenging to begin with, right? So if you have a little bit of resistance, you're gonna feel a little bit of burn. You're gonna feel a little bit of burn. Okay, so this next one is a super easy one. And you can implement progressive overload. So, so let me explain. So you get a backpack, obviously, and you can use it as like a weighted vest. So you could do squats, you could also do lunges, And you could do what I mentioned before, the step ups and you could also do the split squat. So a lot of leg options with this. Now what you do is pretty self explanatory. You put heavy stuff in the backpack. And I feel like all of us just do this, have done this before. Like, have you ever had an extremely heavy bag and you're like, oh, my God. So now you can replicate that, but use it for your workout. So the first thing, I mean, you can put whatever, really. So I'm going to take this big ass heavy book. You could just grab, grab a bunch of books, put it in there. Bam. You have got a heavy weight. It's gonna break my back. And obviously you could just keep adding books. You can add books, you can add a water bottle. It's gonna be heavy. Yeah, see, like this is decently heavy. And you know what, too? You could also add the detergent bottles in it as well. And then that's just like a heavy ass bag. So what you want to keep in mind is pay attention to what you're putting in because you can kind of make that, you can use that to give yourself some Consistency. And you can use that as like progressive overload. So this time I knew I had like six little books and the one big book and the half full water bottle. So maybe next time I would have more books and an even fuller water bottle. Something else you could fill your backpack with is cans, like soup cans, whatever, beans. And then you could do the exact same thing. And if anything, it would be even a little bit easier to look at that in a progressive overload type way, because you could be like, okay, I'm gonna use six cans. And then you're gonna be like, you know what, this is getting kind of easy. This week we're gonna progress to eight pounds. Bam. Progressive overload. Now we can do deadlifts. So you can use a laundry basket. And then, then you can put the previous items, like everything that we discussed so far in the laundry basket. So we've got our heavy bag. And then what you want to do is make sure that it's even. So I was trying this out and at first I had it like this. You don't want that. That's not even like this side is so much heavier. So you want to just make sure it's distributed as nicely as possible and voila. So you could obviously put anything. So I like if you have pop can type things, any type of box, just anything to weigh it down, that's going to be relatively even. Then what you want to do is take. It's kind of like basically you would do sumo stance, hold the basket and then you do your deadlift. So try to keep the basket as close to you as possible. It's just like when you do a normal deadlift, you don't want the weight all the way out here because that's not going to be good on the back. So keep it as close to you as possible and then deadlift. And honestly, because it's not a bar that like lowers nicely, you could kind of do more of like an rdl. Basically right now I'm doing like a sumo stance rdl. So we're not fully dropping. Just feels a bit better given the circumstances. And that is a laundry basket. Sumo stance already. Okay, now up to the kitchen. Welcome to the kitchen. We are not cooking, we are finding more weighted items. So if you have a bigger bag, that's, that's good too, cuz it's heavier. But flour, you can use it as a weight. So obviously you could like, you could do like a goblet squat. So holding it in front of you and squat, squat, not super heavy. So you'd got to go. You'd have to go pretty high rep now to up the challenge. If you don't have more flour, you could do, like, an overhead squat. Just make sure it's sealed. I swear, if I just dumped flour on my head right now, it would make for a great video and not for a great mass. Yeah, that's definitely quite a bit more challenging. That's kind of a good suggestion I have. If your weight. I just saw some flower flying. If your weight doesn't feel that challenging, do, like, an overhead squat. Cause that's so much harder. And then. So I don't know how well this is gonna work, but let's just try it. We're gonna use this. Oh, shit. To do a glute bridge. Keep it upright. I want to do, like, a single leg one. So. It's pretty. It's pretty tough. This flower is really giving me a good workout. But actually, because. Wait, let me actually just test out the difference. Oh, no, I can feel a difference. So, yeah, you did a little. Little. Little bit of extra resistance here. You could also maybe put that backpack on your hips. I'm not sure how well that would go, but there's some very light single leg glute bridges. Oh, oh, oh. You could do weighted pikes. This is gonna froo. That's a good one too. See, you guys. All you need is a little bit of creativity, and you can get a good workout. Okay, so if you. This is not a cast iron skillet, obviously, but if you have a cast iron skillet, you can use it for, like, triceps, maybe. I'll do it with one arm. This is no weight, so this is not good. But if you had a heavy enough one, this could work. And you can spin around. Don't spin around in circles either. So, yeah, that is some good little kitchen items that you can use for weights. I'm gonna make pancakes with this instead. And now it's time for the workout. We. So this is chair step ups with a backpack. Now, as you can see, when I step down, I'm kind of almost stepping into, like, a mini lunge. And it's not supposed to be a lunge, but the only reason I'm doing that is to make this step up feel like a bigger range of motion just to increase the difficulty. So you can kind of test out doing something like that as well. And when you're stepping up, you always want to make sure you're using your front leg as much as possible and your back leg as little as possible. So Think about pushing all of your weight into your front heel, really squeezing up with your glutes. And that is how you will get the most out of this movement and also really control on the way down. Okay, so now here we're doing our bleach lateral raises. You could also use a lighter thing like a tide laundry thingy, thing like that, you know, so, and you, so you could also do single, single arm. And then we're moving on to rear delt flies. Now this was actually pretty heavy. I almost like if I was doing this with these items, I would probably move on to something a touch lighter for the bleach. And then we're doing single leg glute bridges. So you, I, I have us doing these before the sumo rdls just to kind of like tire out the glutes slash hamstrings a little bit. So that way the laundry basket feels a little bit heavier than it actually. So as you can see here, I've loaded it up differently. Now instead of the backpack, I've just put the, the bottles, the Pepsi cans, and it just kind of sits a little bit nicer. So yeah, we got that. Very lovely, very lovely. Now we're taking our wide stance, grabbing the basket and standing up. So this movement, it kind of takes a little bit of practice, especially when you're not using normal equipment. So kind of just play around with it and see what feels right for you. Maybe it feels better to completely lower the basket down on the floor with every rep. Maybe it feels better to do like an RDL type thing where you don't lower it all the way. Just test it out. And of course make sure you're. Just make sure you're maintaining proper form so you don't hurt your back. Really squeeze your glutes and hamstrings like a crazy person. And then we move on to pulse squats with the weighted backpack. Woo. So the pulse is just to add an extra little burn to the movement. Since we aren't really lifting that heavy, we want to do everything we can just to step up the difficulty. And like every other exercise in this workout, you just really want to focus on that mind muscle connection and squeezing like crazy since we don't have as much weight to really make us feel the movements. So you gotta squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
