How to Lift Heavier Without Heavier Weights

This episode follows up on last week's discussion about lifting heavy by providing practical strategies to increase workout intensity without purchasing expensive equipment. We'll address the common problem of having lighter weights (typically 10-15 lb dumbbells) but wanting to progress beyond their current capacity. 

Listen to that first episode here

Topics covered in today's episode:

•  The Cost Reality of Home Weights 
•  Tempo Variations - Slowing Down Movement 
•  Concentric vs Eccentric Motion 
•  Time Under Tension 
•  Range of Motion and Position Changes 
•  Volume Strategies (Supersets) 
•  Creative Alternatives 

Links Discussed:

Get on the waitlist to be notified when Strong and Vibrant is live:

https://www.gracedhealth.com/waitlist

What does “Lifting Heavy” mean for women over 40?

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30+ Non-Gym Ways to Improve Your Health (free download)

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YouTube: @AmyConnell

Transcript

Graced Health Podcast for Christian Women Over 40

by Amy Connell

How to Lift Heavier Without Heavier Weights -

What size weights do you have at home? Do you have any? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Not everybody does. But often people will have some sort of weights that either have been given to them or they've picked up along the way. Or there are a lot of people who have leftover weights from COVID when all of the gyms shut down and they thought, "Oh my goodness, I need to do something. I can't go to the gym, so I'm gonna get some weights." And maybe now your weights are not used as much at home because you're using them somewhere else.

I wanted to follow up to last week's episode on lifting heavy and talk about how to lift heavier if you don't have heavier weights.

Purchasing weights, particularly dumbbells, are not inexpensive. I remember they used to be about 50 cents a pound, and now if I'm just looking at Academy or a big box store, it is almost about a dollar and a half per pound. If you are wanting to lift heavy, but you don't have heavy weights, this can become an expensive venture.

Now, I will tell you that I do have clients who are always on the lookout at places like HomeGoods or TJ Maxx or some other places that will offer discounted products. So that is always an option, but it may be that you have your weights at home, you want to lift heavier because of last week's discussion, or just because of general messaging online, but you're not really sure where to go or what to do.

Today, I want to give you some options. Maybe we don't actually need to buy more dumbbells or heavier weights. There are actually some other alternatives that you can do to increase your intensity and make it feel heavier for your muscles rather than having heavier weights.

I also have to just pause and give a shout out to my neighborhood. We call it a primetime 40 plus group, so it's all women in my neighborhood. I have shared before that I live in this enormous master plan community in the Houston area. And yes, we do have our own Facebook group that is full of a lot of just fantastic women. So I did a little crowdsourcing on this Facebook group, and I said, "Hey, do you have weights lying around your house that you used to work out? And what size do you have?"

The general response was a lot of women have like tens and fifteens. Some of them will go up to forties. One girl said for her 50th birthday, she actually was gifted a full set. So obviously it's a large range. But first of all, for those who are listening, thank you. Thank you for responding and that gives me a good idea.

So let's, for the sake of this conversation, let's just assume that you use tens and fifteens, which are great size weights. But if we're wanting to kick it up a notch, and that's your choice if you want to or not, then there may be a time that that's not enough, especially with those functional compound movements. So those are your pushing, like a chest press, or maybe it's your squatting or your RDLs. Look, our lower body has a lot of muscle and you may come to a point where 15 pound dumbbells or a total of 30 pounds is not enough for you.

So I've got some ideas on how to make things harder or more intense. I have a few categories for you, so let's just jump into some of these categories.

Tempo Variations

One of the categories is what I'm gonna call tempo variations, and basically that is playing with how fast or more likely, how slow you are moving your weight. For the sake of simplicity, let's do this. Let's assume that I am talking about dumbbells because this is what we more than likely have laying around our house. Maybe you've got 'em in the corner of your bedroom or a game room or something like that, and these are what you use when you strength train at home. So rather than talking about all of the different modalities and different types of resistance, including these resistance bands that, you know, I'm such a huge fan of, I'm just going to assume for today's conversation that we are holding dumbbells and we're holding 10 to 15 pound dumbbells because that seems to be what is the most popular size that people have.

So with the tempo variations, what we're going to do is slow things down. It's funny, I have a client who did what was called a max challenge years ago, and I'm not super familiar with exactly what it entailed, but it was basically like banging out as many reps as possible and doing as much as you can in the shortest amount of time. And that's a fine approach. However, it may be that that approach is not going to be giving you the resistance that you need. And we'll get into time under tension in a minute because that kind of falls under the time under tension.

But the reason I tell you this right now in tempo variations is when we first started working together, she moved so fast and I was constantly saying, "Slow it down, slow it down, slow it down" because number one, I want a slower pace so we are ensuring better form or good form, and two, that will challenge our muscles more, specifically when we are in what's called the eccentric motion.

So when your muscles are being challenged, you have a concentric motion and an eccentric motion. This was always confusing to me until I started putting a visual to it. So a concentric motion—I want you to imagine pulling your hand in like you're doing a bicep curl. When the muscle shortens, that is concentric. When it lengthens, that is eccentric. So your eccentric is actually where that muscle will start to have those little micro tears. Think about it, your muscle is not going to have the micro tears that it needs to later rebuild and repair and get bigger when your muscle is shortening. So it's when your muscle lengthens—sometimes this is also called the negative if you've heard that. So it's whenever your muscle is lengthening, and the way I remember it is in a bicep curl because you can very visually see that muscle shortening on the concentric is when you bring your arm in. It kind of, you gotta be a little creative here, but it kind of makes a C. So that's C for concentric and then eccentric. When it lengthens when it is going out, it's that negative that some people talk about. Whatever muscle you are working, the eccentric is kind of the secret sauce to that.

So when we're talking about tempo variations, slow down the eccentric. So here's a couple examples. You're doing chest press. It is when your hands are coming toward your chest, that is when those pectorals are lengthening. And then when your hands go back up, that is the concentric. When you're doing a squat, we use three primary muscles: your quads, your hamstrings, and your glutes. So it kind of varies, but let's just take your hamstrings for example. When you are squatting down, your hamstrings are lengthening and when you come up, then that is more of the concentric. When you are pulling and you know, I'm a huge fan of pulling, when you are pulling, more than likely your back muscles are going into that concentric when you are pulling back, and then when you are releasing, that is more of an eccentric.

In my Strong and Vibrant at Home program, we use resistance bands. And one thing I say over and over is do not let those bands bungee you back up, because that is where your challenge is. You want to make sure that you maintain control even with those resistance bands.

So what do we do to make things heavier if we don't have heavy weights? And I say lift heavier. I also mean like intensity wise, like how to increase the intensity if you don't have heavier weights. We slow things down. We slow down the eccentric, we slow down our counts. In general, maybe instead of—if you're on a [snapping sound]—but if it's instead of down, up, down, up, which admittedly is a really fast pace, don't do things that fast. But then maybe we go down to three, four, up to three, four. And if you're listening on 1.5 speed like I am, that was really, really fast. But just think about how you normally count and then slow things down.

You can also hold at the bottom of a movement. So you take your weights down in a chest press, you hold the bottom of a squat. Hold it for a couple seconds and then come back up. So basically before you transition from going one way to going the other, hold that for a few seconds while maintaining control, while still activating and controlling all of the muscles that need to be held for that particular movement. You are holding that for two to three seconds.

You can also do what's called like a 1.5 rep or one and a half rep. So you do a full rep and then a half rep, and then go back down and then back up. So how does that work? So in a squat, so you go all the way down to your full squat, you come up halfway, you go all the way back down and then come back up so that again is changing and playing around with that tempo and how fast you do that.

And then you can also add some pulses in. So maybe you do eight, since we talked about eight last week. You do eight squats and then you pulse for eight. This was something that I did a lot in group fitness because I would play around with the music and so we would go with that. But adding some pulsing is another great way for those tempo variations. You know, it's faster, it's more intense, and it increases your time under tension.

Time Under Tension

So let's talk about time under tension. And what I mean by that, basically this is the total amount of time that your muscles are working during an exercise set. So if you are doing eight squats, and I'm gonna use kind of the same examples throughout our time here together today, just so we can all stay on the same page. So if you are doing eight squats and you're down, and up and down and up, well, if you slow that down and say even you go down for one, but then you come up for four, it's gonna take you longer to do eight reps of that than if you were just going down, up, down, up. Does that—I hope that makes sense. Does that make sense? So you're counting, not necessarily reps, but also how long your muscles are contracting and under stress. This is especially good if you have weights that are too light and you're like, "This just isn't doing anything for me." So that kind of goes along with this tempo because you are trying to keep those muscles contracting and under stress for a longer period of time. And it should be harder to do for a longer period of time.

It reminds me of this time we went to Disney. I think we went in 2014, 2015, something like that. And my sister-in-law had three babies, just bam, bam, bam, all back to back, really, really close together. It was the end of the day at Disney. We had had like the magical show. We'd had a very magical day, like magic, magic, magic. And then the kids were magicked out and they were all tired. And I don't remember, you know, it was our whole family there. So I don't remember the full situation, but I think she was carrying one, her husband was carrying another, and then my husband was carrying another one. They were all tired. They were all beat, and they were all like falling asleep.

My husband was out of practice with carrying littles. I mean, by that time I think my kids were like third and fifth grade, and he hadn't carried babies in a while. And he's a strong guy. He works out, but he turned to our brother-in-law, and he was like, "Dude, this is hard. I don't know how you do this," because he was—he can absolutely carry that weight, those kids, I don't know how much they were, 60 pounds, I don't know. That wasn't a problem. The problem was the time under tension and carrying them for such a long time. And of course you get out of shape with that. So anyway, that's a great example of your time under tension. Sure, you can pick up your 4-year-old very easily and carry her around, but do you want to carry her a mile? Probably not, because that's a really long time to carry. That's a lot of time under tension.

So that's kind of that time under tension. Now in terms of working out specifically, how do we do that and how do we increase that time under tension? So we already talked some about the tempo, but you can play around with this and I'm just gonna say, you know what? You have permission to play and to experiment with ways that you can increase your time under tension. I'm gonna give you a couple examples, but let's not worry so much about doing everything precisely right, and instead think about the long game of, "Okay, is this challenging my muscle in that contracted state, or just working for a longer period of time?"

So things you can do, you can, like if you're, again, going back to squats, you're going, you're doing a squat, you go halfway down, you hold it for about three to five seconds, and then you finish going down, and then you come back up. Maybe you go down, hold it for three to five seconds, you finish the set, you come back up halfway, hold it for three to five seconds, or you know, count for three to five counts, whatever you wanna call it. You can obviously do things like that with a pushup. You can do this with RDLs. You can do this with chest press. You can do this with band pullbacks. I mean, there's the—you just basically in the middle of a repetition, then pause for a little bit and then continue going on. So that's a great way to increase that time under tension.

You can also hold things at the end of the position. So maybe you are like doing a glute bridge. I'm a huge fan of glute bridges. If you didn't know that about me already, I think they're so great. Not only for our glutes and our smaller muscles, but also our pelvic floor. If you're doing them correctly, you do your glute bridges, you take it up, you hold it for five to 10 seconds. Maybe you are doing some lateral raises with some dumbbells, and you're just taking your hands to the outside with straight arms like you're making that T position. You hold that for a few seconds. So when you are at the end of that repetition, or I guess technically that's like halfway, but like end of the position, then you're holding that for a while.

And those pulsing that we talked about a second ago with the tempo variations, that is another way to increase that time under tension. You can do that with your chest press. You can do that with your pullbacks. You can do that with your squats. I wouldn't—I don't love those for RDLs personally, but I'm also super protective of my lower back. So I feel like that one in particular might lend itself to causing some strain or, you know, minor injury, but if you've got someone with their eyes on you, then that is fine. I just don't, and I don't have a mirror where I work out. So I don't know. That's, I'm just protective of some things and that's one thing I'm protective of.

So anyway, that's your time under tension. I think you get that.

Range of Motion and Position Changes

Now, another thing to do is increase your range of motion and also what we'll call position changes. So with your range of motion, we all have a very natural point at which we will stop. And some of that may just be because that's where we've always done it. It may be because we've had an injury and we just have stopped at a certain point because we don't wanna take it too far. It may be that, you know, what we learned and how we originally did a movement is somewhat outdated. Just like last week when I was talking about the knees over the toes for squats and now we know that, oh no, we can go into deeper squats.

It's funny, I went to the stretch lab a while ago and one of the things that they do at stretch lab, if you aren't familiar with it, basically you go and they just stretch you for like 25 or 50 minutes and it's glorious. And I loved it. And the only reason I stopped going was because I just didn't wanna take the time to do that anymore, but it's great. It's great. Well, one thing that they do when you first join is they do a movement assessment, which is a great idea because they wanna see how your body's moving. I have a natural point at which I stop with squats. So we get in there, we do all of this movement assessment, and they come back and they're like, "Oh, well, your squats aren't going very far. You could use some more mobility on that." And I didn't argue, but in my head I was like, "But wait, I can go lower. Do you want me to go lower? I can go lower." I just didn't, I just didn't hear. I just went to where I normally did because I didn't know what they were looking for.

So sometimes we just get used to doing things a certain way and we don't think, like, "Oh, I can actually squat lower if I need to. It's okay if I take my butt down. It's okay if my knees are going slightly over my toes as long as the weight is in the heels." Think about like, what's your normal range of motion? Maybe you take your squat further down. Maybe if you are doing a pushup, you go down deeper, you have a fuller pushup range, and yes, this can mean that instead of doing it on your toes, maybe you take it down to one knee and one toe, or both knees. If you've done my Strong and Vibrant at Home program, you have heard me say like, I am fine with whatever you need to do. I think a fuller pushup range is a greater way to get stronger and to feel accomplished than doing it on your toes and just going down half an inch. That's my personal professional opinion. There are absolutely professionals who disagree with me, and that's okay, but that's just how I am.

So think about how far, how deep your range of motion is going. Now, of course, you don't wanna take it like so far that it's not safe again, great idea to get another set of eyes on and just make sure and pay attention to your body. If you are doing a movement and it hurts, then back off. I'm not telling you to like push through the pain. No, no, no, no, no, no pain, no gain is no good. What I'm saying is can you take what you normally do and take it down a little further and maybe the answer's no. You may have a full range of motion and that's okay. That's where some of these other ideas are going to come into play.

The position changes I talked about a second ago. These are basically, instead of centering your body and doing a movement, so I want you to think about if you're on a bench and you are doing a chest press, or if you are holding dumbbells in your hands and you are doing squats. What we do is instead of doing two arms or two legs, we go more into single arm. So this is also called unilateral. So single arm, single leg, but basically just doing everything with one on one side, then the other. There's a lot of benefits to that, including working on your core. Boy, I tell you what, there is nothing like getting on a bench and getting a weight that you normally use, like for a chest press, and then just doing one arm. You're gonna notice how much your core and your torso is contracting and adjusting and trying to keep you stable, or you're gonna notice that you're really rocking a lot. And if you're rocking a lot, then you need to go down and get that stable first. But doing unilateral work with either your arms or your legs is a great way to increase that intensity to quote "lift heavier" if you don't have heavier weights.

The other thing you can do is go into what's called deficit positions. So if you are to the point, you're like, "Pushups are a breeze. I can do so many pushups," then first of all, good for you. But what you can do is you can take your feet up, so elevate your feet, so that way the body weight is shifting down and that's going into more of your arms for your pushups. If you were doing deadlifts, maybe you can stand on a platform. You can elevate yourself three to four to five inches and put those weights down so that way that allows you to go further. Again, safety is key. You know, my lower back, you guys, I have just fought that so much. I would only advise doing that if you are 100% confident that you have great form. That's just my own personal thing. So you do what works for you. But be careful with something like that if you want to do that.

Volume Strategies

You can also play around with something called volume strategies. So that is another term for like supersets. Supersets are great because what it does is it works the same muscle with two different exercises. So again, I'm going back to the same examples for this whole episode, but a superset might be that you do a chest press where you take that up to and you're, maybe you're getting to 15 reps, because again, we're talking about lifting heavier if you don't have heavy weights, so you do your 15 chest press with your 15 pound dumbbells, you immediately get off, you go to the ground and you do some pushups and you go to the point of fatigue for that. That my friend, that'll get you, trust me on this. But with supersets, you are using the same muscle group, but you're doing two different exercises. Maybe that is something like you do squats, and then you go into a split stance squat. So that's one foot forward, one foot back, and you go down and up like that, or you're doing squats, and then you lift one foot up and put it on a chair and do more of a Bulgarian squat. Doing those two exercises back to back will really tax those muscles and that'll be its own special kind of fun that you can do.

Be sure to take a break in between those. So maybe you do a superset with a different muscle group. So maybe you do an upper body and then a lower body, and then repeat that three times. But make sure that you're giving those muscles a break—a good two to three minutes. But that would be a great way to lift heavier, increase the intensity if you don't have heavier weights.

Get Creative

And finally, get creative. It's funny on this Facebook group someone said, "You know what, I don't have a lot of weights, but I keep jugs, milk jugs around like full of water, and I'll just lift those up." One gallon size milk jug filled with water. That's about eight pounds. It's a little more than eight pounds. So that is absolutely something that you can do. You know, get creative, play around with what's available to you and lift that.

It also, it kind of reminds me too, I think, I can't remember if I've used this example or not, but I have a client who her son just did an Ironman and so my client went with her son's wife and their three kids, like five and under to watch him cross the finish line, and she was, I was so proud of her. Because they were manhandling all these kids and then she was like getting on a bus to like go from the hotel to the finish line or something like that. And they had a double stroller and she took this double stroller, lifted it over her head and walked down an aisle. Now why someone didn't offer to help her? I don't know. We were both kind like, "What is wrong with people? Like help people?" But anyway, like get something heavy and lift it up over your head if your shoulders are fine with that. So get creative with that kinda stuff.

The other thing too that I think that we forget is we can actually add a different kind of resistance. My hairstylist last time I was in getting my hair done—because, you know, the grays and all of that business—she said, "Hey, I wanna show you these loops that I just got." And, well, she called 'em bands, but I was like, "Oh, well I call 'em loops, but that doesn't really matter." But she had gotten these real thick what I call resistance loops, which are like, you know, I think they were probably—hers were a little bit bigger, but probably 16 inches in diameter, maybe a little bit more than that. And hers were thick and heavy and we were talking about different things that she could do to use them. And I said, "Well, you know, you can also use like your 15 pound dumbbell. If she's doing biceps curls, then you can put, like if you're sitting down and you've got that loop, put it underneath your foot and then put the dumbbell on the other end of the loop and you can curl in." So you've got your 15 pounds of resistance plus the resistance of your loop.

You can also add in some resistance bands if you have participated in my Strong and Vibrant at Home, you should have some bands laying around, grab some bands and you can use those with dumbbells. So maybe you do a chest press on the ground with your bands and your dumbbells. Of course, if you have the bands that I love and I'll put those in the show notes, then you probably, that doesn't apply to you because the particular ones that I like from Amazon, they're like 40 bucks. You can loop 'em all together and you can really increase your resistance and lift heavier with heavier resistance with those bands. But the point is, if you have a band lying around, or maybe you've been to physical therapy and you have one of those therapy bands or something, like, play around with that. Think about like, "How can I make this more challenging?"

Maybe you put a band in between your feet and then put a dumbbell underneath that band, and you do some RDLs, so you're hinging with that and you've got your one dumbbell plus the resistance band, so you're doubling up and you're getting some more resistance. I hope that makes sense. But these are just different things that you can use if you add some more inexpensive weights, like resistance bands or resistance loops to your dumbbells that you already have. It's a lot cheaper to buy a five pack of resistance loops or your $40 bands that I love so much that are again in the show notes if you want 'em, than to buy another set of weights. I am looking on academy.com and you can get one 20 pound weight for $35, or you can go over and you can get a full set of the resistance bands I think for $35. So those are a more economical way. And also they're gonna take up less space too. So those bands and loops are a great way to start playing around and getting creative on how you can add more resistance, how to lift heavier if you don't have those heavier weights.

I hope that gives you some ideas about how to do that. If last week's episode got your wheels spinning, you're like, "Okay, I'm ready to lift heavier. I understand the benefits." If you didn't listen to that episode, I encourage you to go back and listen to it, and maybe you're ready to kind of kick it up a notch or maybe you're ready to do something different.

You've heard me talk about Strong and Vibrant at Home the last couple weeks, and I will be launching that in early September. If you would like to get on the wait list, which will notify you when that opens up because Strong and Vibrant starts on a particular week and ends on a particular week because of the nature of the program and because I do offer a lot of individualized support and we have office hours, and I can't do that every Friday in perpetuity, but I can do it every Friday for seven weeks. If you wanna be on the wait list, go to gracedhealth.com/waitlist and I will make sure that you are notified when I start putting information out about Strong and Vibrant at Home. This is strength training and wellness for Christian women in perimenopause and beyond. It is a seven week program of strength training. It also has things that we need to do that we don't always take the time to do. So that's like core and balance and stretching. We do a lot of mobility type stuff. We strengthen the smaller muscles that we don't think about doing. It offers about 12 different wellness modules on sleep and stress and nutrition strategies in this phase of life. It's all diet culture free, but it really pulls in all of the science that I have learned over the last many, many years as I have been walking through this as well. Each workout ends in a prayer. You get a devotional every week, so it's, I've really tried to make it a comprehensive program that you can start and feel accomplished in, even if you're just doing the strength training workouts that are two to three times a week. So go to gracedhealth.com/waitlist to be notified.

If you already get my newsletter, you will be notified there, so don't worry about signing up if you already get my newsletter and, you know, if you get my newsletter because every other Friday I send you my Friday Five. And I'm just telling you, if you don't get that, you wanna get that because I get a lot of good feedback on it. It's fun. Like, I'm not in there selling, selling, selling, I promise. It's like these are the things that I'm loving and I'm digging, and I think you will too. So it's workouts, it's recipes, all of that kind of stuff. Anyway, go to gracedhealth.com/waitlist and sign up if you want to be notified.

And don't forget, I always love receiving feedback. So you can go to your episode, your show notes or episode description, however your podcast player defines it, and there's something at the very top that says, "Have a question, click here." You can click that. It'll text me. It doesn't sign you up for anything. It's anonymous. But if you're like, "Amy, I don't get what you said about this," then send me a note 'cause that's really good for me to know. Like, I wanna know when I'm missing the mark. I wanna know when something's confusing to you because that will only help me and it will help me explain things in the future.

Okay, that is all for today. Go out there and have a graced day.