Don't be fooled into thinking you can only build upper body muscle with a large selection of weights and various upper body exercise machines at the gym. Using your body weight is quite enough and is an effective way to build chest muscle at home with the right kind of exercise.
Amongst our own roundup of the best home chest workouts, the push-up is ranked number one. The standard push-up is pretty much universal but popular online fitness trainer, Chris Heria, has taken this well-known chest exercise to whole other level.
By following this home-friendly workout, you'll complete six variations of the push-up in just 10 minutes. The THENX YouTube channel, which has over 7 million subscribers, is where Heria posts all of his calisthenic style workouts and this routine is all about building strength and muscle in your chest, using no weights.
This body weight workout will have you build muscle in your upper body the same way you would with weights, by creating progressive overload. Forming progressive overload means you will need to increase your reps, decrease the amount of rest time or move on to harder more challenging exercises. According to Heria, this will 'create a greater resistance on your muscles over time'.
So working for 40 seconds on each exercise and taking 20 seconds to rest you will really focus on mastering the quality of each rep, rather than get caught up in how many reps you do and making it less about reaching a number.
WATCH CHRIS HERIA'S 10-MINUTE CHEST WORKOUT
The muscles in your chest are made up of your pectoralis major and your pectoralis minor. As you engage both during each exercise you will recruit the assistance of your chest, shoulders and triceps. This means as well as building bigger chest muscles with this short routine you will also be building and strengthening other key areas of your upper body.
If you find the typical push up boring, you will finish this workout with a wide selection of push up variations. This chest session also finishes with some dips but you can view a full list of each exercise below.
Chest workout exercises:
- Incline diamond squeeze pushups
- Diamond pushups (feet raised/ 20sec each)
- Assisted fingertip pushups (20sec each)
- Archer push ups(40sec)
- Pseudo push ups(40sec)
- Decline push ups(40sec)
- Dips(40sec)
Heria says that spending 40 seconds on each exercise will increase your time under tension, which will have you reach your hypertrophy and build even more strength and muscle. It also will allow you to burn more calories.
If building muscle at home is a large part of your fitness goal right now then do make sure you are consuming sufficient volumes of protein daily. If you struggle to fit high amounts of protein into your meals then you should consider adding a best protein powder for weight loss into your diet.
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