INTRODUCTION
If you wish your home chest workout would help you to build a bigger chest without equipment but it hasn’t really been delivering the results you are hoping for, this is the video you want to see. Here I am going to show you a simple but brutally effective way to build a big chest at home without dumbbells, bench press or any equipment at all. The key to the structure of these exercises is that they are stacked in order of difficulty. You pick the one that is most challenging to you and work your way backwards from there.
HOME CHEST WORKOUT STRUCTURE
Start by identifying the chest exercise that is most challenging for you and that you can get a maximum of 3 to 8 reps on before reaching failure. This becomes your starting exercise. Perform 4 sets to failure of this movement and immediately perform a crossover isometric squeeze to fully adduct the arms across the chest and take advantage of the complete chest contraction.
Your goal is to squeeze this contraction of the pecs as hard as you possibly can for the entire 30 seconds.
As soon as you are done with this, rest 2 minutes and repeat until all 4 sets of your most difficult exercise are finished. From here, you move backwards through the alphabet 3 letters. So if you were to complete the E exercise as your first chest exercise then you would be doing a drop set of the D, C, and B exercises. The goal of your chest drop set is to not rest between the exercises and to take each one to failure.
TRAINING TO AND THROUGH FAILURE
By training to and through failure, you are eliciting a strong metabolic stimulus for overload. In the absence of the heavy weights more commonly associated with training in a gym, this home chest workout option gives you a strong alternative for taxing your chest muscles without equipment or machines. The exercises are stacked in such a way so as you should be able to continue to perform reps even after you have reached failure because they are mechanically easier than the one that preceded it.
For example, even in the beginner version of the workout you will be ending with a combination of hand release pushups from your toes, incline pushups (which takes some of the load of gravity off of the body to make them easier) and finally pushups from your knees (which further unweights your body and makes it even easier to continue). The point is, you should always be able to come up with three exercises that are sequentially slightly less difficult giving you the option to keep repping out even when you thought that you had nothing left in the tank.
WHAT IF THESE VARIATIONS ARE TOO EASY?
Don’t feel constrained by this workout on the high end either. You can always choose a few more difficult versions of the pushup (some shown in the video) that can serve as your F exercise or even a G exercise. If you were able to do this crazy G exercise then you would perform 4 sets of that supersetted with the crossover isometrics and then perform your 3-4 rounds of the giant set drop set, this time with F,E and D chest exercise comprising it.
CONCLUSION
The key is, there are no excuses when training outside the gym and performing home chest workouts for mass. You can still get results, you just have to change the stimulus that you are attempting to create on the pecs to drive that growth. In the case of chest workouts at home, the best thing you can do is know how to utilize progressive exercise difficulty to your advantage to create an overload that can help you to grow a bigger chest anywhere.
If you’re looking for a complete home workout program that builds more than just your chest, head to athleanx.com via the link below and check out the ATHLEAN XERO program. This 6 week program will help you to build ripped athletic muscle without leaving your home and includes a meal plan to help you get shredded and lean at the same time. No guesswork, just impressive muscle fast.
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Jeff Cavaliere M.S.P.T, CSCS
Jeff Cavaliere is a Physical Therapist, Strength Coach and creator of the ATHLEAN-X Training Programs and ATHLEAN-Rx Supplements. He has a Masters in Physical Therapy (MSPT) and has worked as Head Physical Therapist for the New York Mets, as well as training many elite professional athletes in Major League Baseball, NFL, MMA and professional wrestling. His programs produce “next level” achievements in muscle size, strength and performance for professional athletes and anyone looking to build a muscular athletic physique.
