CBCG’s strength at home routine
Stuck at home, gym closed, or on the road and can’t get access to your normal equipment? Follow the videos and plan below (and click here to download the the accompanying guide) for a full five-day routine to keep things sharp while you’re away from your regularly scheduled program.
This is a bodyweight and one-piece-of-equipment program for a triathlete or endurance athlete who needs to do strength work from home. The best program for any athlete is one designed according to his or her individual needs, but some times you need a program that will be good enough for the circumstances at hand. This is a performance program that can be done at home, with only a backpack loaded with 5 to 30 pounds, depending on the athlete’s ability.
Following the program
I believe that a basic understanding of WHY we are doing things is pivotal to an athlete’s success. We don’t need a physiology lesson, but to follow a strength program correctly, understanding some basics is key.
Rule number one: everything is a core exercise. Make sure you are focusing on posture, posture, posture the whole way through every exercise. Overall, we are hugely independent in our posture, which means there isn’t any one “correct posture.” When moving with load or speed, however, a general rule of thumb is that you want motion to come from your extremities, while everything from your head to your pelvis stays stable as you move through space.
Rule number two: forget your definition of hard. In working with a lot of endurance athletes over the years, one fundamental error is that people use the same gauge for their strength workouts as they do with their endurance workouts. For example, I often see people start too light on exercises, rest too little, and treat their session like a run, ride, or swim, which often start quite easy and get difficult by attempting to maintain a certain effort as you fatigue. Strength and power training is the opposite. Strength training needs to be hard enough right off the bat—you are focusing and working hard enough to need that rest by the end of the set.
Rule number three: a good gauge for adding reps or weight is that if you feel like you could have gotten more than two reps past the required amount, you should add some weight.
Day One
Minus the glute bridge, all of these are tempo controlled. The purpose of this is to specifically target the slow twitch muscle fibers, helping add to their ability to build mitochondria and other positive attributes for endurance. If we go too fast, we don’t isolate; if we lock out our joints and pause, we let blood flow into the muscle, and lose some of the intent. The time length of these sets is also great for complementing the development of our tendons and ligaments, as these need a little more time under tension to adapt. I personally recommend looking at a watch and not trusting yourself to count.
Day Two (and Four)
Active mobility, injury prevention, blood flow, and general recovery from a slightly harder session are our goals for the day. We often injure ourselves in ranges of motion not trained by traditional strength exercises. Most of the exercises on day two put us in those positions to make the tissue more resilient at its most vulnerable point.
Day Four
Think of this as radioactive half life. Our best benefits come from doubling up on the same workout, but without doing too much, so you will cut a set on this day.
Day Three
Power is our focus today, and is a day where rest is of paramount importance. We are training purely neuromuscular qualities with our power training, which means we want an incredibly low amount of high quality work, in a non-fatigued state. Today should be a little fun, and feel like you’re doing virtually nothing and wasting your time. Trust me: you aren’t.
Day Five
Core endurance. This one will be more up your alley, endurance athletes: move in a circuit, resting enough so you can keep good form in the exercises, but not more.