Beginners Guide to Outdoor Fitness:

Jason Doggett, co-founder of Muddy Plimsolls, the outdoor personal training experts, reveals his expert tips & tricks throughout January.
See the whole mini-blog series, published daily, here >>

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The Five R’s of Strength Training

The key to successful strength training outdoors without weights is to keep pushing your body’s abilities in a systematic way.

The common way to increase strength is to add more weight to an exercise (ie: using heavier dumbbells in a squat). However, training outdoors, this approach is limited by how much equipment you may want to carry with you. Luckily, there are a number of ways of improving your strength and weights (ie ‘Resistance’) is just one of five acute variables you can use to achieve the goal of strength.

These variables are known as the five R’s: Resistance, Repetitions, Rest, Range of movement, and Rate (or speed).

Why resistance is sometimes the last variable to change

If you are new to exercise, recovering from an injury or have never truly practised good exercise technique before, then the other acute variables – other than resistance – are more likely to be beneficial for you. Repetitions and rest periods promote endurance and work capacity, range of movement helps master joint stability. And rate can improve the ability to produce power.

By working on these acute variables, one can prepare the body to take on the demands of using heavier weights more in a workout.

By changing these variables from session to session, we ensure that our clients follow a programme that continues to improve strength and conditioning, in an outdoor setting.

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If you’d like to learn more, we have a new ebook in our online shop

Beyond the Push-Up: 10 Outdoor Bodyweight Training Tips