The majority of bodybuilding weight-training takes place in a gym, whether it’s your high school gym, Gold’s Gym, 24-Hour Fitness or some other training facility.
However, if you’re forced to miss a day (or even a week) of your workout schedule, there are a few key activities that you can execute at home to stay on the path of building muscles.
However, there are many things your can do at home to build muscles and get stronger.
Equipment for the Home
While you don’t want your home to look like the local Bally’s, there are a few pieces of home exercise equipment that you can buy that will make building muscle at home easy and fun.
A Chin-Up/Pull-Up Bar - it can be argued that the best ways to bulk up your back (lats and rhomboids) and your biceps is through chin-ups and pull-ups.
They are not easy to do, and you won’t be able to do a lot of them… at first. But stick with it, and you’ll see the gains in muscle size in no time. Be sure to have a correct, protein-rich diet otherwise, all the weight-lifting in the world won’t help you grow.
Here’s a bodybuilding tip for getting the most out of chin-ups and pull-ups – 5 second up and 5 seconds down; you might only get 3 or 4 reps in when you first try this tip. But the burn you’ll feel will immediately upset your body’s current homeostasis
Medicine Balls – I recommend getting at least 3 medicine balls to augment how you do push-ups, which are an excellent and overlooked means of building mass.
You place one hand on the floor and the other on the ball, do a push-up, then switch to placing both hands on one ball, do a push-up, rotate over and place your other hand on the ball and do a push-up.
This is a surefire technique to build muscle at home, it’s simple, practical and extremely efficient.
Dumbbells – There are numerous “home friendly” varieties of dumbbells that you can get so you can work out at home. One of the best is the BowFlex Select Tech dumbbells (search online or at your local sporting goods store for other examples), because the system is small and can fit nearly anywhere.
Yet the remarkable technology enables your to start off at 10 lbs dumbbells and work your way up to 90 lbs dumbbells. Other kind of traditional dumbbells are available, and if you have to choose only a few weights (because of space considerations), get 15 lbs, 25 lbs, and 45 lbs dumbbells.
Those weights are versatile enough to do augment the home exercises that you can do.
Exercise to do at Home to Build Muscles
Push-Ups – obviously, as it’s great exercise to work your chest and triceps
Crunches, Bicycle, Reverse Crunches – these are abs exercises that you can do at a gym and/or at home, because you don’t need any equipment to target your entire core.
Lunges – working your legs is the most difficult body part to workout without the heavy equipment available at a gym. However, if you have dumbbells (like 25 lbs or 45 lbs) then you can do lunges to work your quads.
Squats – as we stated regarding lunges and the difficulty of working your legs at home, with 45 lbs dumbbells you can effectively do squats at home.
You can do them without weights, too, by doing the Jump Squat; do this effectively, you place your palms on your opposite shoulders and lower your body until your thighs are parallel to the floor.
Then push up with as much force as your can must to jump up into the air (what kind of hang-time do you have?) and then you land and continue doing this. This will strengthen your calves, quads and ligaments in your knees.
Chin-Ups/Pull-Ups – If you have the chin-up bar, there’s arguably no better exercise to work your lats and biceps that doing these exercise; especially at a slow pace (i.e. 5 seconds up and 5 seconds down).
If you want to find out more tips, secrets and techniques to increase your results with building muscles at home, pick up Vince Delmonte’s “No-Nonsense Muscle Building” eBook. It’s chock full of information, insight and coaching on how to specifically reach your bodybuilding goals.
Related posts:
