Increasing the mass and visibility one’s chest in a shirt is perhaps one of the underlying goals of any workout/exercise routine.
Using weights is the most obvious way to do so in our gym-rat day and age, but your bodyweight can be nearly as effective.
There are many exercises that one can do at home that can build up your chest without the use of heavy weights… or even owning dumbbells.
The Exercises
The multiple varieties of Push-Ups are the single, best way to exercise your chest at home (variations include Incline, Spider-Man, Wide, Diamond, Fingertips, Fists, One-Handed etc. – each of these targets other muscle groups as well, i.e. doing Push-Ups on your fingertips increases the strength in your forearms and your balance/agility.
The Spider-Man, if you don’t know what that is, is when you are lowering yourself, you bring one knee up toward your elbow, and then continue doing reps, alternating which knee you bring up).
It’s important to do Push-Ups with strict form, as you’ll be wasting your time & energy if you don’t.
When doing Push-Ups, it is best to do as many reps as you can until your form starts to breakdown, then it’s time to switch exercises. Maybe you switch to Dips—with chairs—or Dumbbell Flies (if you have a pair of low weight dumbbells) followed by Dumbbell Presses.
This would be your circuit, and you won’t be resting between exercises. This is akin to a Super-Set, and it’s necessary to assault your muscles like this if you want them to grow and get chiseled.
Note, when doing Dips keep your lower back and abs as firm as possible to prevent your hips from sagging, and thereby destroying your form. Also, when executing each dip, bring yourself down to the point that your elbows are at 90-degrees, no further.
A variant on doing Dips is to stand between the two chairs, and lower yourself straight down or use three chairs, where each hand is one chair and your legs are on the third. This method works your balance and deltoids as well as your triceps and chest.
If you’ve acquired an Exercise Band, then you can do Bench Presses and Standing Cable Flies. You can situate the Band to give you a decent amount of resistance.
Chest Exercise Technique
Most people look to do a set of push-ups then rest, and then do the next set, repeating the cycle until they’ve completed the 3 or 5 set of 20 or 30 reps that they intended on doing.
Here’s a better methods to do this chest exercise at home and get the most out of it.
Since you can’t increase your individual resistance when working out at home (that much), the trick to doing chest exercises at home that effectively work the pectoral muscles are to cycle through as many exercises WITHOUT RESTING.
So your routine might look like this: 25 to 35 Push-Ups, then immediately flop on to your back and knock out your Dumbbell flies. These will be hard to do, as you go till failure, because you’ve done so much work from the Push-Ups.
To achieve muscular growth, you need to induce concentric muscular failure, and this will prove difficult to do when doing chest exercises at home (or any exercise) because you’re only using your body weight.
However, this type of hardcore circuit training will bring you to concentric muscular failure fairly quickly, and this is what you want to build strength and stamina.
Forging a rock-solid chest is paramount when seeking that sleek look in clothing, and we just discussed some quick and simple chest-sculpting exercises that you can do at home.
But if you want more insight and tips on how to craft a home workout, check out Turbulence Training Program where a host of dynamic and effective exercise techniques and tips to elevate the productiveness of exercising at home.
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