The Secrets Of At-Home Strength Training | Just For The Health Of It | Ronan Oliveira

If you want to develop strength and muscle mass, but you don't have access to a gym, there is a way. And I want to show you how. I am Ronan. I am the head of the health and fitness department at mindvalley. And over the past five years I work with a couple of thousands of people in their health and fitness journey. And one of the things that I know to be true is that not all exercises are made equal. If you want to get fitter, there's a myriad of things that you can do. But one of the most fundamental types of exercises is strength training. And that's because it goes beyond your muscles. When you're doing strength training, you're not only becoming stronger and developing your muscle mass, but you're also extending your longevity. You know from the book Body by Science that is written by Dr. Doug McGuffey, that when you are contracting your muscles under tension, you release a chemical compound called myokinase. And they work like messengers. They go from the muscles to other parts of the body, for example, to the bones and work with the bones to increase bone density. Or they go from the muscles to the heart and work with the heart to improve cardiac functions and protect your heart from cardiovascular diseases. And they go around the body improving and strengthening the whole body. This is how we know that, for example, someone who is over 60, the stronger their grip is, the longer their health span. The little issue here is a strength training is a bit more complicated to do at home because we think we need to go to the gym and lift weights. But there is a way to do it at home and we will need very little equipment for the exercise that I want to show you today. Everything that we are going to use are resistance bands. We are going to use two types. One of them are called loop resistance bands. You can see that they are cloth and they are rubber bands that they offer resistance when you pull them apart. The other type are open ended resistance bands. You see that they have two handles here. And if you get yourself a set of resistance bands, what you're going to see is that they have different colors and different type of resistances. So what you want to be complete is to have two sets, one of open ended and one of loop resistance bands that are light, medium and heavy resistant. With this, you are set. Then the next question is, what exercises should you do? Before you think about exercises, I want you to think about movement. Let's take a step back and if you look at your upper body, you have a horizontal plane and a vertical plane of movement. And in each one of those planes, you can do push movements or you can do pull movements. So with these four type of movements, push and pull, push and pull, you will work all your upper body and then for your lower body, if you think of the type of movement that you do when you are sitting and when you are standing up, so you squatting and push yourself up. If you use resistance for this type of exercise, then you can target the biggest muscles on the leg as well. So all we need here is five exercises and some resistance. And then the next thing that comes is how do we execute and how much of these exercises should we do? And here's what I want you to pay attention to. First, for the execution of these exercises, what we want to do is that we want to do them in a slow manner. Mostly because we want to target specific muscle fibers and put tension on them. This is how we signal to the body that the muscles need to be stronger and they need to get bigger. That is when you fatten specific muscle fibers. But if you're jerking a movement or using momentum, you are still moving, you're still lifting weight, but you're not necessarily putting that tension on the muscle fiber that you want. So if you do them in a slow manner, it's easier to control and to get the technique down. The second thing to pay attention to is until when you do these exercises, how much? If you start doing squats, for example, you see that the first repetitions will be easy. At some point you start getting tired, maybe shaky, maybe it hurts a little. You still continue. There will be a time that you cannot possibly get off the ground. Like you try to push yourself and the legs just don't go. This is when you stop. You don't stop when you think that is the end of the exercise. You stop when your muscles are showing you because that reaches a fatigue state. And when that fatigue state comes to the muscle, it gives a signal to the body that says we need to get stronger when we recover. We need to go beyond that for the next time that we do this type of exercise. So if you pair that signaling that very strong fatigue with the raw material that you offer your body with nutrition, and then time for recovery with sleep, then you have everything you need to build strength and muscle mass at home. Now I want to show you the five exercises that we are going to do using the resistance bands. If you're beginning to strength training now, all you need to do is do this routine once to twice a week. Each exercise you do for one set until you hit muscular failure. And then for this it will be important to select different types of resistance bands. For me, I got one resistance band that is open ended, but is a heavy one. I'm going to do an exercise for the back with this guy over here. And then I got two loop resistance bands. One of them is thicker for bigger muscles like the legs and the chest, and one of them that is a bit lighter for a smaller muscle like the shoulder. We're going to start with a upper body and with the horizontal push movement. And for this we are going to use push up. Now, for push up there are different levels of intensity that you can do this. And if you cannot do a full push up on the floor, your first option will be to find a surface like a table, like a couch or a chair. Just make sure that it doesn't move as you push it and you make a inclined push up first. The higher the surface is, the easiest it's going to be. So here's what I'm going to do a inclined push up that will be easier on my chest, triceps and shoulders. I'm just going to hold them more or less shoulder width apart. I'll bring my feet back and I'll lower my chest to the table. From here I push. One thing that's important to notice is that I don't open the elbows to the side. I bring my elbows to back more or less 45 degrees close to my upper body and I push up and do this slowly so that I can control the movement and focus on making the contractions with my chest. Now, if it's easy for me to do this, I can do like 30 repetitions and I still don't get tired. Then the next level of increasing the intensity of the push up is doing them with on the floor, but with your knees on the floor. So it'll be a very similar technique. But the only thing is that instead of being inclined, I'll have my knees on the floor, make sure that my lower back is straight and that my elbows are not flaring to the side, they're going behind. And I'll bring my chest and my chin to the floor. And from here I push up and go slowly as well. When this becomes easier, you can either do a full push up when your knees are not touching the floor, and if you can keep going with this guy as well, then it's when you use a heavy resistance band. So if you can do a full push up and you know you can go, you don't get tired, then what you do is that you put around your hands, bring it back behind your back. And now I have increased resistance when I'm on the top of the movement. So here at the bottom, there's almost no resistance. But as I push, the resistance band pushes me down. So I need to make more effort with my chest, with my shoulders, and with my triceps. And I'm continuing to do this slowly, bringing my elbows behind until I hit that point that I failed, that I am here on the top, and pah. And my muscles just don't go forward anymore. This is exactly when I want to finish this exercise. Now we are done with a horizontal push. We're now going to do a horizontal pull. For a horizontal pull, I'm also going to use a thick resistance band, because when I'm pulling, I'm using mostly my back muscles, and they are quite a big muscle. For this to be horizontal, what needs to happen is that the movement is perpendicular to my upper body. So I will step on the resistance band, and I will hold it close to my feet. The closer to my feet I hold, the more intense it's going to be. The closer to the top, the less intense the exercise. So this I will hold close to my feet. I will stand up. And now I lean forward. So when I bring my elbows back, it's a horizontal pull. It's perpendicular to my upper body. Here I am using my lat muscles to contract and pull my elbows behind. So when they are on top, I have peak contraction. My hands are more or less in line with my belly button. And when I lower slowly, I'm still controlling the movement with my back muscles. And from here, peak contraction. Squeeze the back muscles and slowly bring it back until I hit a point that I cannot pull anymore. This is when I hit muscle failure, and then I'm done with this exercise. Now we're done with the horizontal plane. We're gonna go for vertical. For vertical, starting with push, I will need a lighter resistance band, because when I push vertically, I take my chest off the equation and use mostly of my shoulders, which is smaller muscle, so we need less resistance. We also step on top of the resistance band. And instead of holding close your feet, now you hold close to the top. Because now I want to bring my hands to my shoulder level. And imagine that I want to punch the ceiling. From here, hands go straight up. Now I'm using mostly my shoulders and my triceps. And slowly come back down to the weight to the level of your shoulders. Make sure that your back is straight and not collapsing. So your core is engaged. And I will slowly bring it down and push it up again until I reach the point of fatigue that I try to push. But my hands go up until here. If I make all the effort that I can, they don't pass this level. This is when I reach muscle failure. So then we stop that we are done with this movement and now we go for another vertical. But now is a pull movement for this. This is when I use a open ended resistance band. And this is when we also need a help of a hook that I can find for example in a door handle. Just make sure that this is something solid that you're not gonna bring your house down when you're working out. And so if you have something solid and also use mostly you can either lock the door or use or pull it against the the position that the dart closed so it doesn't open on your face while you're pulling it. And now I use the open ended and pull them or use it around the door handle. I will take a few steps back to preload the resistance band. So I'm already giving some tension. And because it's a vertical pull, I need to lean forward. So now when I pull my elbows back, it's parallel to my upper body. Here I'm doing slowly and controlled. And instead of pushing my elbows to the front, I push my elbows to the side until they touch the side of my body. Here is peak contraction. I can squeeze my back muscles and here there is almost no resistance. If you need a bit more resistance, you can step back a bit more and it gets even harder. When you are in peak contraction, there will be a time that I'll get fatigued and I cannot pull more than here. It gets stuck. This is when I reach fatigue and this exercise is done. By now we've done vertical, horizontal and vertical planes of movement. Four exercises cover the entire upper body. Now we're going to use one of the most fundamental exercises for the lower body. That is the squats. That is going to target the biggest muscles on your leg. Because the leg is a pretty powerful muscle. I'll get a thick resistance band as well and a closed one so I can step on it. Hold more or less in the middle because I want to bring my hand up and behind my shoulders as if I was in a gym with a barbell. From here I am going to lower my body and squat down. I will see that there's almost no tension at the bottom of the movement. Here I'm just with my body weight. But as I push forward, the resistance band makes it harder. And this is when I need to contract more of my quad muscles. So this is why I do this slowly, because if I do it too fast, I can jerk the movement and not really use my legs. So here's when I control and make sure that my lower back is straight. I go as low as I can if I'm almost sitting on the floor. And from here, slowly push up. Now, this is a guy that will take some time to get fatigued. So there will be a time after multiple several repetitions that you cannot lift yourself up from here. This is when you reach failure. And now you are done with the five exercises. Now you learn these five exercises that are really basic and fundamental. You can develop a lot of strength and muscle mass just with this type of exercises, but they are not the only answer, and they may not even be the best answer. They are one that works. But there are so much more that you can learn and practice not only for strength training, but at home. You can also develop your endurance. You can develop your cardiovascular fitness. There's a lot of things that you can do. And in mindvalley, we developed a program with Bang Refuge and myself called the Longevity Blueprint. And this program gives you a whole toolbox of different routines and fitness exercises, and a lot of them that you can do at home to develop your fitness levels in a holistic way. If you want to know more about this program right now, click here and you're gonna go there straight away. Or if you want to go there after the video is done, there's a link for you in the description below. Also, make sure to subscribe to this channel. I see you there.