Frequency
Training at home needs to be like training at your gym. You need a schedule and you need to stick to it. Your body does not know the difference in exercise variations from home or gym, if you know how to execute properly, so don’t count out what gains you can make at home!
Because the intensity might be lower at home due to not having any weights to machines to use, increasing your frequency might be beneficial at this time. Especially with the decrease in movement throughout the day due to being stuck at home more than not.
It really is about quality over quantity, though. Whether you are at the gym or at home. So you are still wanting to plan your workouts out according to your goals and hit all the muscle groups you can, how you can. Every muscle group needs around 10-20 sets per week of work to make progress. Being at home does not change how much work you need to make gains, so planning out your exercises and routine is important with frequency.
Intensity
The word intensity can be used in a variety of different ways. It can mean speed, weight or load, cardiovascular, etc. The issue with a lot of home workouts is the lack of many of those variations of intensity. Many people and trainers doing home workouts choose exercises that are very cardiovascularly intense since they do not have any heavy weights at home. They fail to add in other types of intensity due to either lack of knowledge of training or imagination into their workouts. This can result in a plateau or digression in muscle and could lead to an increase in stored fat.
Intensity can be targeted towards strength and muscle, even with minimal amounts of equipment. Changing tempos, adding pauses, increasing weight, varying between bands and free weights and decreasing rest periods can all be ways to change your intensity levels to give your body a different stimuli. If you want a different result, you need to increase your intensity in more ways than one.
Progression
Everyone wants to train the exercises they enjoy most and only those exercises, forever. Unfortunately, that will only get you so far. The more experience you get, the more planned and thought out your training will need to be. To continuously see progress in muscle or strength or fat loss, you need progression in your training. you need to vary the exercise selection and vary what your goals are for that particular time frame of training.
Setting up a program doesn’t need to be rocket science, but there are some things you need to take into account while planning one. The longer you make a program cycle or routine, the less effective it becomes. Your body is very smart. It wants to adapt to what you are doing so that you can do it better. Eventually, it can’t get any further and plateaus in progress. Once you hit that stage of training, it is only a matter of time before it begins to go the opposite and you create unhealthy movement patterns, muscle imbalances and injuries.
A good program should only be as long as it needs to be. For most people, 3-4 weeks of doing the same things every session is enough stimuli to create progress but not enough to plateau on.