The problem with working out at home
Align Fitness
You've been doing Barre Fitness Anytime workouts for a few months now and you're ready to progress to more difficult workouts.
That's a tall order. How do you do it? There's no one there watching you, telling you that you're arching your back during glute work at the barre. How do you know if you're swinging your weights in bicep curls, using momentum unless someone's there to tell you?
You must take time and patience to know your own body - its abilities and its limits. Your body awareness, your proprioception, your knowledge of your own body's limits and abilities become exponentially more important when you're working out at home, alone.
Listening to the cues I give - what to feel, what to focus on, what not to do - sinks in over time. You may have to hear something 43 times before a light bulb goes off, but it will!
Use a mirror once in a while or for every workout. Seeing what your body is doing is a different way of experiencing it neurologically. As this strengthens, stop using a mirror and feel what your body looks like as you do each exercise. This proprioceptive ability and body awareness will strengthen over time as well! And you've created some new pathways in your brain!
What do you do in the mean time? Stop when something hurts and figure out how you can do the movement safely by decreasing your range of motion (make the move smaller), change position of your moving body part (laterally rotate when we're in parallel may help knee pain), and last but not least, engage your deep core and keep your collar bones open to stabilize your hips and your shoulders (two pesky problem areas for many of us!). And really last but not least, stay focused on your workout. Don't multi task. When you're working out, you're working out. Not planning your dinner party for Saturday night.
And really, really last but not least, have fun with your workouts! Whatever modifications you have to do at this moment, be grateful your body is talking to you and keeping you from getting injured. You just have to listen to it. :)