Maintaining your lifting with no weights... Can it be done?

After you’ve got over the initial panic and realised that at some point gyms WILL reopen…again… you are likely in one of two camps. Those who bought kit in the early phases of Lockdown 1 and are now smugly squatting and snatching in their living rooms, or one of the many who missed out on stock and believed Boris cared about our gains anyway. Group 2 are now crying into their badly set up home offices each morning thinking about their dwindling leg strength and ever worsening posture…

Ok, maybe not crying and I’m here to give you some good news. Whilst it’s true that maximal strength is BEST trained with heavy loads, there are (thank goodness) some simple hacks we can use to maintain as much strength, speed and power as possible. However long this current set of restrictions last, if all you have is body weight and some everyday items I’ll give you some ideas about keeping in weightlifting shape.

What you will need:

1. A broomstick

2. A back-pack

3. Some heavy-ish stuff like books or water bottles etc

4. Some space to ‘train’

5. A towel or two and a smooth floor

6. A desire to train. Yes, really. I know how hard it is to stay motivated when all you really want to do is throw a barbell around, but come spring you will be glad you did something.

What would be great to have but isn’t a deal breaker…

1. Resistance bands (whatever you can get)

2. Sliders if you don’t have a wooden/tiled floor to use

3. A kettlebell or a dumbbell (as we are assuming you don’t have a barbell etc)

During the first lockdown I ran 60 minutes sessions online, four days a week with some people only having a broomstick and body weight. Each session began with a warm up specific to the lift we were going to focus on. For example on a day that centred around the full snatch, we performed body weight mobility drills aiming to improve the overhead squat, progressed to stick drills in order to rehearse key positions and then performed bodyweight exercises that had a high level of transfer to the things that make us snatch well. The session would end with some conditioning and trunk strength work but rarely did we need much load.

Here is the session:

• Mobility flow x 5 (a series of yoga positions performed dynamically)

• Broomstick mobility work - dislocates, snatch Sotts press, duck walks

• Snatch receive drills: press under, snatch balance, drop snatch (broomstick)

• Snatch pull drills: pull to knee, pull to mid-thigh, pull, high pull (broomstick)

• Snatch technical drill: Slow snatch (broomstick)

• Squat jumps: 5 x 5 body weight / body weight + back pack w load (up to 20% body weight)

• Leg strength work: 4-5 x 6 EL of pistol squats (scaled to eccentric only if needed) superset with hamstring sliders (single or double leg depending on strength level)

• Trunk circuit: body saw planks, dead-bugs, side plank hip raises, lying leg raises

This is just one example of around 30 different sessions we went through, each a little different and always progressing in some manner. Lockdowns may have changed how you train but they don’t stop you.

Tools in your lockdown programmes

1. Single leg and single arm (unilateral) exercises make use of having less external load to hand. See your body-weight as probably the heaviest thing you have to lift.

2. Trunk training will carry over to almost everything. Most torso exercises work on strength endurance (longer in duration and lower in load) and this is still beneficial for weightlifting. There are also some fairly simple changes to traditional trunk exercises that hugely increase the intensity. Give ‘star side planks’ a go…

3. Isometrics (static holds) can be useful for both learning positions in the lifts and to create large amounts of muscular tension.

4. Methods of progressing when you don’t have more weight to put on a bar can be tough. Escalating density (EDT) simply means doing more in the same or less time and thus provides an increased stimulus to the body. Don’t get stuck doing exactly the same thing each time you train, we still want to overload whatever we can.

It’s worth noting that the lifters who did this stuff, and just this stuff for weeks, went back into the gym with improved awareness of the key positions. Although maximal strength wasn’t exactly where it had been pre-lockdown nearly everyone went back to snatching, cleaning and jerking respectable weights very shortly after being back in the gyms. Most going on to hit PB’s not long after.

Learning weightlifting as an adult is largely about using the strength you have to master a skill based on speed and timing. Spend some time on the skill development regardless of load and you should still get better.