How can I make gains with my limited home gym?

To make unusual gains with your usual equipment,you may have to act likethe type of gym newbie people secretly film for the purposes of deferred YouTube mockery. This means you need to focus on finding ways to overcome sticking points in your lift while looking at your opportunities from fresh angles.

You probably know that frustrating scenario where if you can just edge the weight past a particular point, then it’ll ease all the way up. Non-symmetrical lifting is one of the easiest ways to make sure you never get stuck during a lift. This means you’d grab a barbell and put a 15kg plate on one end and a 10kg plate on the other. It looks like a rookie mistake that welcomes an injury because one side of the bar is purposely made heavier than the other.

To kick off your experience you should start with a small percentage of differences, such as 5-10%, however as you progress you can increase the differential. This is a trick strongmen use to create full body power that translates into real world power.

Be warned, it will make you significantly more tired and you will feel your core getting taxed, but that’s natural. When you throw symmetry out you become a lot weaker, so by training in this method you become stronger while using the same equipment but using it creatively.

This means that when you return to evenly-loaded barbells or dumbbells then you’ll be more powerful because you’re building more core strength.

This isn’t the kind of method that makes you a bit more powerful – it makes you a lot more powerful. Okay, so it’s not the kind of thing that you’d want to do in a normal gym because the form police and do-gooders will love the opportunity to tell you that your weights are uneven, but that may be an annoying conversation worth having.

To execute this method, first start off really light so you’re using a third of the weight you’d normally use and stick with 6-8 reps on each side. This means you need to do an even number of sets, so that each side of your body gets a turn with the heavy end of the barbell. You can warm up with a symmetrically loaded barbell but employ this across the working sets. Use it across two exercises, positioned at the startof your workout while you’re still strong and fresh. Load them up and just hope your friends don’t walk in on you training like a kook.