2020 was challenging for all of us with all the craziness that the virus brought into the world. We were all locked in our houses, till the situation normalises. So, with everything being shut, the gyms being closed, most of us did lose some of our progress towards our respective fitness goals.

Personally, I was training at home. Atleast, I didn’t just give up and sit back, waiting for things to normalise again. At the beginning, I was doing some bodyweight training and kind of stuff, then I got a bit creative to use empty gas cylinders as my resistance and luckily I got my hands on a 5 kgs pair of dumbbells and I tried to do the most with it.

As the lockdown became a bit lenient, I ordered myself few resistance bands and resistance tubes and this was perhaps one of my best investments in the lockdown phase. Now, the resistance bands are not a replacement for a fully equipped gym but they can definitely give you a decent workout. The linear variable resistance of the resistance bands just gave a better peak contraction and improved my mind-muscle connection to a great extent. My mind-muscle connection and muscle activation improvements while training with bands were so amazing that I would recommend everyone for using bands along with free weights, even if the gyms are now reopened.

Coming to diet side of things, I absolutely lost control over my diet. I wasn’t into binge eating but I can surely say I went for typical Indian Homemade Food, which are calorie dense foods in general and I am someone who easily stores fat, in short, not the best choice to go for. I am still continuing with my homemade food. I don’t track my calories and macros now. I began tracking my weight as soon as I returned back to the gym recently and I am trying to maintain at the weight for sometime before I go for a cutting phase.

The next thing is returning back to the gyms. We are gonna talk about what should be our approach and similar stuff. Now, personally I took things slower for two weeks. The first two weeks basically were 60 minutes Full Body Split Workouts for 3 days a week. I was trying to relearn all the exercise movements after a break of 9 months and just feeling all the muscles in general. I was training easy and stopping at 3 to 4 reps before failure. The reason why I decided to go easy and not go super hard was because firstly, my focus was relearning all proper forms again, not be super sore after a workout day and miss the next training day.

The 3rd week is where I decided to add in a few more exercises into my workouts. The training split was still a 3 days Full Body Split but for 90 minutes. I was still not going for failure and was stopping with 1 to 2 reps left in the tank.

So, for the first 3 weeks I actually went for Full Body Splits for 3 days and 4 rest days, out of which 3 were active rest days where I included 40 minutes of moderate intensity cardio.

The 4th week is where I changed the split, training the full body in 2 separate days, upper body on a day and lower body on another. I was training both the lower and upper halves twice a week, so our training days have now increased to 4 days and rest days have reduced to 3 days of which 2 days were active rest days where we included 40 minutes of cardio. The 4th week is the time where I go to failure in our top sets. So, as the weeks passed, the training became harder.

After a month into training, I changed the split again to go for a 60 minutes Push, Pull and Legs Training Split. Things became really interesting now because I was now pushing really hard. We are now going beyond failure in our top sets and I am going to continue with the split for 2 months now. This is basically my simple approach to get back to training again.

Now, there were couple of things that I learned in the lockdown. I actually learned that dieting is a lifelong process and there’s no going on and off it. So, the diet should be something that we enjoy. So, the lockdown was majorly dedicated to search for all low calorie alternatives for my daily use condiments. I also searched for low calorie high volume food options.

The next thing that I learned was consistency is key when we are trying to make progress in our fitness journey. The lockdown has specially taught me to train in a much safer way for injury prevention and training for longer time being injury free. To explain this, I have actually substituted my Dumbbell or Barbell Shoulder Press with Shoulder Press Machines, substituted all my rowing movements for back to chest-supported rowing machines that are equally effective and more safe.

In term of training, I have been emphasising more on full range of motion and proper form in the excercise and not just moving heavier weights. Time under Tension, this is something that I learned just because of the lockdown. I have been putting in more time under tension during my isolation exercise, really focusing on negative part of the exercises.

Now, warming up before workouts is something that has become a lot more important for me lately. I have actually seen better muscle activation and more strength in my lifts on days I am properly warmed up. Currently, I go for moderate intensity cardio for 10 mins before the workout and one or two warm-up sets before going for my real sets.