Russ' Fitness Advice For Lockdown • Russ Howe PTI

Lockdown 2020 (and now 2021) is a real bitch for gym lovers like me.

Instead of banging and clanging in the weights room, I’m banging my head against a brick wall wondering how school teachers don’t punch more teenagers in the face.

So today I’m going to show you exactly how I’ve been staying in shape during lockdown (it’s way easier than you think), and I also want to address this e-mail which I received from Stephanie, as it presents some serious issues:

“Hey Russ, lockdown isn’t going well for me.

The fitness pages I follow all seem to be saying that you should be training harder than ever because there are no distractions, but honestly I’ve found my motivation at an all-time low since the gym closed.

I see many of my friends sharing memes across social media like “If you don’t come out of lockdown with a new skill or a new business then you never lacked time, you lacked discipline!”

I’ve never felt so busy. I’m snowed under with my kids being at home all day long and I don’t know how other people are doing all this “stuff” because by the end of the day I’m exhausted. I feel like I’m not good enough.

This has been getting me down, and I know I can always rely on you to pull no punches, so I wanted to ask you for a bit of advice. Is it just me finding lockdown really hard?”

– Stephanie

It’s important to remember that we’re going through a pandemic.

This is serious stuff.

Heck, it’s the type of thing you’ll tell your kids (and your grandkids) about in years to come.

And I guarantee that when they’re sat there listening to your story they won’t give a flying fuck whether you had abs or not.

They’ll mainly be bothered that you got through it.

That’s why it#s not worth piling pressure on yourself about being unable to train as hard as you normally would.

Most of this bullshit pressure is being generated by uneducated social media “influencers” (a.k.a. someone who wants to be a coach but has never actually trained anybody or earned any qualifications).

These orange personality vacuums are regularly putting out the message that “You should be training even harder now, bro, because you don’t have any distractions!”

What utter nonsense!

Honestly, I’ve been a fitness professional for more than 22 years and I’ll happily admit that the first three months of lockdown were the most unproductive of my career.

I got barely any work done.

A trip to the shops felt like an expedition.

And yes, my three kids seemed to be every-fucking-where!

On top of that, I was also dealing with the eternal suck of switching from gym-based workouts to home workouts.

Trust me, they’re not the same.

You might be able to psyche yourself up for a huge deadlift whilst the Rocky IV soundtrack is blasting at 1000 decibels, but it takes another level of drive and determination to conjure up the same level of motivation before a set of burpees while Peppa Pig resonates through your skull and another big pile of washing is staring right at you.

So yeah, you’re not alone!

Russ Says: “Listen To Jon Bon Jovi!”

Check out this corker of a line:

“When you can’t do what you do… you do what you can.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

Yep, not content with being the only man in history to have had three great hairstyles, the ever-beautiful Jon Bon Jovi is now teaching us all how to cope with the clusterfuck that is “lockdown”.

And he hit the nail on the head, didn’t he?

Stop stressing.

Stop beating yourself up.

Stop worrying about whether you’re gonna lose all of those results you worked so hard for in the gym.

For this fucktacular shitnado of ass will eventually reach a conclusion, and when that time comes we can go smash the gym like never before.

But for now?

Just focus on embracing this weird as fuck era we’re stumbling through.

That means doing whatever you can to be healthy and unlock the benefits of exercise. I don’t care how simple it is, or how much of a step down it may be from your usual workout program, just make it work.

Here’s My Own Lockdown Fitness Program

I took things right back to basics.

My diet plan was as simple as staying within my total calorie budget (no thoughts about tracking macros), and my workout program was a circuit workout which I did 3-4 times per week inthe back garden.

Oh, and I also did plenty of walking.

The kids and I downloaded Pokemon GO to our phones, which turned out to be a great idea.

We spent hours trying to catch those annoying little fuckers, and it became a useful fitness-related hobby for our family at a time when there was very little else to do.

Here’s the “Simple Circuits” structure:

Set a timer on your phone for 30-minutes.
Warm up for the first 5-minutes.
Select any 4 exercises (just make sure they hit several different muscles, e.g. don’t pick four abs exercises).
Perform x15 reps of each exercise, then x14 reps of each, then x13 reps, and so on until the time runs out.

Bosh!

I created a program in this framework earlier this year.

It’s called “Home Workout Hero”.

I’d love to say I had the foresight to see the pandemic on the horizon, but no, I was caught off-guard like all of you.

Instead, this program is just something which I had been working on for a while as a means to provide website members with a way of shredding fat at home, and it just so happens that it became one of the most used programs I’ve ever made during lockdown.

I’ve left it on the site, and you can find it in your members area.

Finally, I fixed that annoying meme for you: