muscle without weights

How To Build Muscle From Home

Most muscle building workouts tend to focus on lifting weights to stimulate muscle growth, with the individual progressively increasing the weight mass over time, resulting in enhanced strength and size.

Sure, this is the tried and tested way to build muscle, but it is not the only way.

This article is for people who are interested in building muscle from the comfort of their own home, without stepping one foot inside a gym.

These techniques will be great for people who are too busy to go to the gym, want to save money on gym membership, or just want an alternative form of exercise when away on holiday or a business trip with no access to a gym.

Instead of you going to the gym, the gym will come to you.

Your body will become the gym!…

Can You Gain Muscle Without Weights?

Can you gain muscle without weights? Is it possible? Yes! But you need to know how.

The reason that it is possible to gain muscle without weights is because that what is important is how hard you work the muscles. Not how much weight you lift.

You can give your muscles an excellent workout using low weights.

If you do the reps with good form and do slow reps, really focusing on contracting the muscles during each repetition, then you will be working your muscles hard and promoting growth.

Working hard with light weights is so much better than doing quick reps with poor form using heavy weights.

It is not the weights. It is how hard you work.

The same applies to trying to gain muscle without weights.

You can work the muscles perfectly hard using bodyweight exercises. Sure, it is quicker to gain muscle with weights but you can still gain muscle without weights.

The reason bodyweight exercises can be used to build muscle is that they are excellent for building muscle strength and endurance. If you were to spend a few weeks doing bodyweight workouts from home and then went back to the gym afterwards, you would find you will be able to lift heavier weights.

Bodyweight exercises put the body through multiple planes of movement. You move your body in much more directions with bodyweight exercises compared to the restriction range of movement you get with weights.

This increased range of movement results in more muscle fibres being stimulated.

And more muscle fibres being stimulated = more muscle gain.

The increased range of movement not only results in muscle gain, but also increased tone, flexibility, endurance and strength. In addition to promoting fat loss.

Bodweight exercises are a great way to build all round general fitness, not just muscle.

But in order to make sure you get some muscle gains without weights it is important to adapt the exercises for muscle building purposes.

Just doing high reps of bodyweight exercises will result in increased endurance and not much else.

You still need to do low reps. In order to do low reps you need to work extra hard so that you can not physically do more than say 10 reps.

To enable you to work harder you should do really slow reps (15-30 seconds), concentrate on pausing and contracting the muscles half way through each exercises, and also building your own make-shift weights.

Back-packs filled with books and milk-jugs filled with water and 2 examples of ways to create you own weights to make your home workouts even harder.

To learn about the secret bodyweight workout that the Navy SEALS use to build muscle using bodyweight exercises alone please check out the Tacfit Command Review.

Workout Without Equipment

Workout without equipment and gain huge muscles without ever having to go to the gym!

Lifting weights at the gym is probably the fastest way to increase muscle size.

However, you can still get a good workout and increase muscle size by doing a workout without equipment from the comfort of your own home.

The advantage of working out from home is that you save money on gym membership fees and you save the time it takes to travel to and from the gym.

Also, as far as a fitness is concerned, a workout from home using bodyweight exercises can also improve many other aspects of your fitness other than just muscle size.

Bodyweight exercises enable you to also improve strength, flexibility, tone, power, endurance and burn fat as well as gain muscles.

You can get a good workout without equipment from home by using the most basic and common bodyweight exercises.

In order to make the bodyweight exercises relevant for muscle building, however, you will need to slow the reps right down.

If you just do 25-100 reps time and time again, you will just improve endurance but this will do very little for size. (Having said that, ultra-high reps is a good way to shock the muscle into growth further down the line. This tip is discussed in the How To Build Muscle Without Weights article.

Do slow reps of around 15-30 seconds so that you reach failure (the point that you cannot do another rep) after only 6 to 10 reps.

Workout Without Equipment – The Exercises

Push-ups

Push-ups are the most basic of bodyweight exercises. But can they build muscle without weights? HELL YEAH!

Push-ups will work the chest, triceps, and shoulders.

As mentioned earlier to the push-ups with slow and low reps. (Keep it slow and low, bro).

Also, to make the push-ups harder and to ensure that every part of the chest is worked out, you should mix up the push-up.

Do push-ups with wide, narrow and medium grips. Narrow grips work the inner chest and triceps more and wider grips do the outer chest and shoulders.

Pull-ups

Pull-ups will work the back and shoulders in your workout without equipment.

There is a good chance you can do pull-ups from your home using a door frame. Or if your door frame is not sturdy enough (we don’t want it flying off the hinges now do we?!) then you can purchase a cheap bar that will fit across your door frame to do the pull ups.

Crunches

It is easy to work the abs without weights because cruches are the best ab building exercise out there and they do not require weights.

Focus on slow reps and really squeezing those abs during the crunches. Place a book on your midsection so you can really feel that squeeze.

Other good ab excercises are lying leg raises and twisting crunches.

For you ab exercises in your workout without weights, try doing:

3 sets of crunches, 3 sets of lying leg raises and 3 sets of twisting crunches.

Legs, Shoulders and Biceps

Legs, shoulders and biceps are the most hardest bodyparts to workout without weights.

With chest you have the push-ups, and the pull-ups for the back and crunches for the abs. But for legs, shoulders and biceps, it is hard to do without resistance.

In this case, lets improvise. You can create your own weights.

To create your own weights you can fill up old gallon milk-jugs with water to create your own 8.35lb dumbells.

You can then do decent dumbell style curls for the biceps and lat raises for the back with the milk-jugs. As well as shoulder presses.

You can also get a back-pack and fill it up with heavy objects such as books. Then place this back-pack on your back when you do your leg squats. Also, you can lift the back-pack as though it was a dumbell by gripping it at the straps.

Workout Without Equipment Summary

In summary you can get an excellent home workout without equipment done using the most simple bodyweight exercises.

Concentrate on slow and low reps (keep it slow and low, bro) and really squeezing those muscles.

For the muscle groups that are harder to do bodyweight exercises for then get creative and create your own weights. Filling up a milk-jug with water or a back-pack with books are good places to start.

Live Large, Bro.

Chest Exercises Without Weights

Let’s look at 3 awesome chest exercises without weights. These exercises are useful for building or maintaining chest muscle, whether as a substitute for weight training when you are away from the gym, or as a complete alternative to weight training.

It is likely that you will have already come across these exercises before. But in order to build muscle using these exercises they need to be made as intense as possible. Otherwise, you will just be improving muscular endurance and not size.

 3 Chest Exercises Without Weights

Chest Exercise Without Weights 1 – Push-ups

Yep, I am sure you have heard of the push-up before!

Push-ups are a great bodyweight exercise as they work many different muscles including the arms, shoulders, chest and midsection.

In order to get the most out of push-ups you should make them as hard as possible. Try alternating your grip from wide to narrow to emphasize which muscle groups are worked the most. Wider grips work the chest more, narrow grips the arms.

To increase the resistance of push-ups, try improvising with weights. Grab hold of some large books and place them on your back.

Another good ideas is to fill up a back-pack with heavy objects for when you do your push-ups.

Also, you can do the push-ups using chairs. Place both your feet on a single chair, and then one hand on each of the other chairs. The elevation that you get from this exercise will provide a nice deep muscle stretch.

Chest Exercises Without Weights 2 – Dips

Dips are a good bodyweight exercise for building chest muscles. You will see many bulked up guys doing this down the gym as one of their main exercises, and not just as a substitute for weights.

The aim is to only be able to do 6-10 reps of the exercise in order to encourage muscle growth.

But how can you do dips in your own home I here you ask?! Take a look at your kitchen, are there table tops and worksurface that form a right angles to each other that provide you enought room to do a dip?

If you use your imagination and take a look around your home (or hotel room when away on business) then I am sure you will come across surfaces that will enable you to do dips.

Make the dips harder by attaching make shift weights around your ankles or by doing the back-pack trick again!

Chest Bodyweight Exercise 3 – Handstand Push-ups

Handstand push-ups are a variation on regular push-ups that focus on working the shoulders and arms more, but the chest still gets a decent workout.

Place your feet against the wall and balance with your palms on the floor, as though in a handstand position. Then lower your upper body towards the floor until your head nearly touches the floor, and repeat.

The extra gravity will place additional stress on the muscles in this exercise, thus giving them a really good workout.

Summary

Give these chest exercises without weights a go in your quest to build muscle without weights. Remember to do the exercises slowly and with good form.

Make the exercises as hard as possible for yourself using the techniques described in this article.

Also look at other ways to increase the intensity, such as pre-exhausting the muscles and flexing the muscles during the exercise. These techniques are discussed in our article How To Build Muscles Without Weights.

Bodybuilding Without Weights

Bodybuilding without weights is possible, despite the fact that most workouts and programs available on the Internet involve weight training.

The reason that bodybuilding without weights is possible is because you can still stimulate the muscle fibres without needing to lift weights at the gym. Bodyweight exercises are a great way to achieve this.

Bodybuilding without weights might not achieve results as fast as bodybuilding with weights would, but you should still see good results.

The reason that lifting weights encourages fast muscle growth is that it is easy for you to progressively raise the weight each week to increase strength and growth. It is harder to keep track of this progression when not using weights.

But you can still gradually increase the intensity of bodyweight workouts to work your muscles harder each week and thus causing increased strength and size.

In order to build muscle without weights using bodyweight exercises, it is important to increase the intensity of each exercise for muscle building purposes.

Just doing 3 sets of 20 reps of a standard bodyweight exercises such as a push-up is not going to result in muscle gain. Only increased endurance.

 You need to adapt the bodyweight exercises for specific muscle growth puproses.

 Bodybuilding Without Weights – Exercise Examples

So if you want to, for example, build up chest muscles with bodyweight exercises you can peform a more complex versions of the push-up:

Example: Push-ups using chairs

Get hold of 3 chairs and arrange them in a triangle. Put your feet on one of the chairs and one hand on each of the other chairs.

By peforming a push-up when elevated by these chairs, you will be able to get a greater muscle stretch during the exercise, which will stimulate the muscle fibres more than a regular push-up.

Example: Chin-ups for biceps

If you want to build biceps without weights then you can perform chin-ups using a door frame. To increase the resistance you can attach make shift weights to your back/ankles.

Another interesting way to build biceps without weights is to fill an empty milk-jug with water and use that as your equivalent of a dumbell.

Example: Dips for triceps

To build triceps without weights you can perform tricep dips using chairs. Get 2 chairs, place you feet on one of them and you hands (behind your back) on another.

Tricep dips on chairs will give your muscle a good stretch (as with push-ups on chairs). To make the exercises harder, do each rep slower and place books in your lap to increase the resistance.

Bodybuilding Without Weights Summary

In summary, yes, bodybuilding without weights is possible and you can still gain muscle this way.

Bodyweight exercises that are specific to muscle gain are required. In addition to this, you can create your own make shift-weights (filling milk-jugs with water, placing books on your back etc.).

The important thing is to work your muscles hard. Stimulate those muscle fibres to cause muscle growth.

It is not about lifting heavy weights, it is about working the muscles as hard as possible. This can be done without equipment.