This post covers all about a beginner home workout routine that requires no equipment. It will be all bodyweight and leverage. As the new year rolls in, more and more people are sharing their intent to start things off healthy. Yes, again, this year… like last year.
Before we get started, jump on the newsletter below:
What happened last year? For most people…nothing. So what’s going to be different this year? Why might some people succeed this year when last year started off good but then sputtered and died. Again without attaining that energy and better working body.
To be honest, I have no idea. Some people make it stick and others don’t. As long as something else like a donut seems like a lot more fun, people will probably take the donut. Most people come to me as a personal trainer for motivation but motivation comes from inside. Instruction though, I can help with.
So let’s do that…
There are a couple logistical things that perhaps I can help you with. They are time constraints and finances and the solution is a home workout routine using your bodyweight as the gym.
First I’ll explain some concepts and then put it together into a complete no equipment home workout routine at the end of the article.
When ever you talk about how to do a home workout with only your bodyweight the first thing most people suggest are push-ups and that’s a great place to start but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. (See the video below on getting your first pushup)
If you are just getting started working out at home then you’ll want to do the static bodyweight Squat for your lower body. For the one, you bend your knees and try to get your thighs parallel to the floor in the bottom position for a couple of seconds or as long as you can take it. The goal is to get up to 10 minutes in the very bottom position. Break up the time however you want. The same position you would be in if you were reading a magazine in the bottom shelf at the store. Being able to hold the bottom position of the squat or simply the act of working up to it will increase your hip and leg flexibility and greatly improve your quality of life when doing simple every day moments.
A home workout for the backs of your arms, the triceps, can include the reverse dip. Use the side of your bed or a low surface, palms down and lower your full body down using your arms until your bum touches the floor then lift yourself up again and repeat. Great exercises you can do almost anywhere.
A lot of people have trouble getting a back workout at home but if you can get a high railing, post, back of stair case or ceiling beam you can do chin-ups for your back. If not than isometric or dynamic tension sort of exercises will work as well. Simply grab something that will not move and pull on it as hard as you can with one arm to work the back.
For a cardio home workout using only your body weight you can’t go wrong with Jumping jacks, where you jump while clapping your hands in the air or skipping. You can get a skipping rope for about $5 in most places.
Another fantastic full body exercise to get the heart racing and get tons of cardio is Burpees.
Burpees are one of those exercises that you can throw into any home workout routine to fill in the gaps. Heck, Burpees are a workout in themselves. They hit the whole body and increase endurance, flexibility and explosive power.
They are great for home workouts as well as when you are on the road travelling.
Here is how they are done. (See Also This Burpee Tutorial For More)
1) The start of the Burpee begins by bending over and putting your hands on the floor.
2) The second part is to semi-squat and thrust your legs back so that now you are in the push-up position.
3) The third part of the Burpee has you reversing the movement to pull yourself back into the “hands on the floor, low squat position”.
4) Lastly, power out of the low squat position and jump into the air and your done!
During my army time we would also use a ruck sack a lot. It’s basically a very strong back pack. Filling it and wearing it will help gives you the extra resistance you need to go beyond the body weight level and start adding even more muscle. Remember the cheapest and one of the most natural exercises you could ever do is walking.
Let’s recap what you can do to exercise using your own body weight without buying expensive equipment. You have chin ups, push ups, squats, Burpees, sit ups, running, skipping, walking, bed dips and all types of stretching exercises just to start.
I’ve noticed that a lot of times, people just don’t know where to start. So they spend a lot of time researching the best workouts and methods and techniques but never actually move. So a good thing to remember is that an hour of crappy moving is better than the best workout not done. Just do anything and you’ve gone a step beyond yesterday.
Let’s Put Them Into A No Equipment Required Beginner Home Workout Routine
Let’s take what we have above and maybe a touch more to make a complete routine with sets and reps included.
Do this three non-consecutive days per week:
Work up to slight fatigue or a maximum of 3 sets of 15 repetitions at which time you’ll need a harder exercise variation
- 5 minutes of rope skipping (this may be all some people need!)
- Squats
- Chin ups (you can also hang for time, hold the top position for time, or do scapular contractions at the bottom if you can’t do a full chinup)
- Door way rows (see the video tutorial below for progressions of chins and doorway rows)
- Push ups
- Sit ups
- Burpees
- Tricep dips (or close grip pushups)
- Rope face curls (same as rows in video with rope but curl to face)
The Chin and Bodyweight Row Tutorial Mentioned Above:
How To Make A Bodyweight Workout Plan More Effective
There are always ways that you can make the best bodyweight workout plan even more effective. I’ll show you a couple of these in a moment so that if you reach a point with your workout program where you need to tweak it to build more strength or mass you can do that. If it’s fat loss your after instead of a bodyweight workout routine to build mass, then eat less crap and move more often!
The three biggest hits you can make so your bodyweight workout is more effective would be to:
1) Do more work in less time.
2) Increase the resistance
3) Change the grip, stance or time under tension.
Do more work in less time. Your bodyweight workout can be made more effective by doing more work in less time by running a stop watch on either the total volume of the workout or by exercise, or bodypart. So what I mean is you can see how quickly you can get your whole body done while keeping the variable of resistance the same or you can see how quickly you can get just chest or chin-ups done for example. So you would try to beat 45 minutes for your whole bodyweight workout. You could also try to beat 20 minutes to get all of your chest exercises done. Perhaps time how long it takes you to get 50 chin-ups done.
Increase the resistance. Pretty simple concept. If you were doing 12 normal pushups and then you raised your feet off the ground and tried it, you would be working your chest harder. Decreasing the number of limbs double the effective weight on an exercise. Going from air squats to pistol squats is a huge jump. There are also back packs, weighted vests and my personal favorite, weighted necklaces (I’ll save that one for another time).
Change the grip, stance or time under tension. I’ll stick with bodyweight chest exercises since I’ve already jumped on that ship. Going from normal pushups to closer grip or even extremely wide grip pushups not only disadvantages the exercise making more challenging but the actual change itself from the unexpected new stressor perspective will create new changes in muscle growth. Stance is just grip but for the lower body so no need to elaborate there. Time under tension can be the exact opposite of trying to get more work done in less time. What it really is though is a way to measure how long the muscle is stressed either per rep or in each set. Doing this and knowing the time under tension, allows you to change it to better suit whatever goal you are after. For example, if you time under tension for the whole set starts climbing up to 60 plus seconds and you want to build more muscle mass with your bodyweight workout then you know something needs to change to get that time under tension back down in the 20 to 30 second range where the most muscle growth stimulation will occur.
Conclusion
That should get you well started on a beginner home workout routine with no equipment required. If you have any questions, let me know below and I’ll answer them there or on youtube.
Here to help,
Raymond Burton
http://RaymondBurton.com