How to Get Fast, Effective, and Fun Home Workouts

Well, the world is still crazy, but that doesn’t deter us from trying to give you great resources and ideas for powerful home workouts. While we are all still training from home, it is easy to get bored trying to figure out how you are going to hold those gallon jugs of water, or counting endless bodyweight squats. That is why our mission is how to show you that great home workouts doesn’t mean filing up your house with equipment or spending a lot of money when that is a major stress for you.

So, how can we use one tool and get a TON of ways to produce fun and effective home workouts? The easiest thing to do and this goes for when we aren’t in a pandemic either, is to use complexes.

Coach Troy Anderson shows that outdoor or home workouts are great ways to think about training smarter!

Yes, where we use one exercise that has multiple exercises in it! I know some people are calling them “flows” or so forth, but there are different ways to use complexes and you want to make sure to avoid some common errors that people are doing now that reduces the effectiveness of your complex. So, while I talk about these ideas I will put in some of our favorite DVRT complexes that will take your home workouts to really fun and effective heights!

What is a Complex and Why are We Using It?

Sadly, people only think of complexes as a way to get a good sweat and add some burpees into their workouts. The truth is that complexes were used by high level athletes to address better performance, adding functional muscle, and build better movement.

You will see some great DVRT complexes from DVRT UK master, Greg Perlaki, but you have to own those foundations first!

Legendary strength and weightlifting coach, Istvan Javorek, was the first to popularize these ideas in the 1960’s with Olympic athletes in the Eastern block countries. His purpose was to…

“My determination for doing this experiment with these two complex exercises it was to try and give more variation to a workout; to try and change the same day-to-day workout routines; to “shock” an athlete’s musculature after a hard competitional season and to stimulate the muscular growth or endurance in the preparatory period; to try and build up a specific endurance and cardio-vascular capacity, a specific muscle tone, a good muscular coordination, and a perfectly balanced, well-developed, harmonious musculature. “

Complexes don’t have to be complicated to be effective as I show above. The goal here was to get 10 reps of each movement (50 reps) then rest for 1-2 minutes and see if you can get 2-4 rounds. 

What A LOT of people miss is building smart complexes. They just do a lot of jumping and “stuff” without thinking about the balance as Coach Javorek refers to above.

Balance refers to seeing these movement patterns in good proportion to one another. 

For example, if you see a complex like…

-Bent Row-Deadlift-Clean-RDL well that would be tough, but that is also incredibly unbalanced! Those are all hip hinges and can wreak havoc on your low back. Complexes like the one below isn’t insane, but it is well balanced. We have a hip hinge, a lunge, a press, a row, a squat along  with something else that is really important.

The goal is to do 5 reps of each then rest 1-2 minuets and do the other side. See if you can do 2-3 rounds and that is how we get great home workouts!

Stability & Direction

One of the very important keys to more modern complexes and making them successful is understanding how we use different stances and move in different directions is an easy way to progress our home workouts without having to add more equipment or weight.

You see above that DVRT master, Cory Cripe, simply changes his body position to our sprinter stance and the workout gets all of a sudden a lot more challenging, but also allows us to build stability at the same time!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7GrStGHfHV/

Greg helps us show that it doesn’t have to be crazy, picking 3-4 exercisers is a great goal and think about the balance of movements. Aim for 4-6 reps is often a good goal with complexes so you keep the quality of work high and makes your home workouts just as smart as anything you would do in the gym!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5As8PiHv6b/

These complexes may not blow up the internet with fancy angles and jumps, but they are incredibly effective in produces results and help us think about how we can make home workouts effective and fun!

DVRT master Larisa Lotz shows how we can use a commonly misunderstood aspect of DVRT to really unlock more potential of getting the most out of one piece of equipment! That off-set position starts to open up a bigger world!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Byc0h3yH_jR/

Not only does Troy help me show how we can get so much more from our Ultimate Sandbags with our off-set grip but he shows another type of complex. That is where you perform all reps of one movement then go to the next (5 reps is typically on the high side). When you are focusing on home workouts you start to see solutions you may have not seen before.

At the end of the day we hope that this keeps you inspired and motivated. There are SO MANY ways to use our Ultimate Sandbags to make your home workouts focused, thoughtful, and engaging. We hope we can keep sharing with you these awesome ideas and if you are up for it, try to keep up with Jessica and Troy in the complexes below!

Don’t forget our holiday workout ONLY has a few days left. Save 30% on our best selling Ultimate Sandbags, our Online DVRT Certifications/Courses, and Workouts with code “holiday2020” HERE