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When you have little time to go to the gym or simply don’t have a gym membership, that’s certainly no reason not to do strength training at home. Because with your body weight and a few dumbbells, you can do a lot of effective exercises that train your entire body. Below, we describe 1 strength training exercise per muscle group that you can easily perform at home with just your body weight or a few dumbbells. Let’s start by breaking down the muscle groups.
Training Chest at Home
Push-ups, also known as
press-ups, are one of the oldest and most well-known exercises for building strength and muscles. All you need to do push-ups is your own body weight. This makes it ideal to perform at home or on the go, but push-ups are often also part of a
fitness schedule because they target a large part of the upper body. With push-ups, you train the pectoralis, or chest muscles. In addition to the chest muscles, this exercise also targets the muscles in your shoulders, triceps, and abdominal muscles.
If you have a few dumbbells, you can also perform dumbbell bench press and dumbbell flyes at home for variation.
Training Back at Home
Pull-ups, also known as
pulling up, is a well-known exercise where you pull your entire body weight up until your chin is above a certain height. Pull-ups can be performed in multiple ways. You can do it alone on a squat rack, with a spotter, with a barbell, or with an assisted pull-up machine. How you place your hands largely determines the intensity of the exercise. Pull-ups are a challenging exercise and often cannot be fully executed by people who have just started with fitness. If you want to train your back at home with pull-ups, start with the number of repetitions you can max out. So if you can do 5 pull-ups, do your sets of 5. You will notice that the next time those 5 will be much easier.
Also read the article: learning to pull up
Training Shoulders at Home
To train the shoulders at home, you need a set of dumbbells. With this set of dumbbells, you can train the front, side, and rear deltoids of the shoulders. You can start with the
dumbbell shoulder press. With the dumbbell shoulder press, you can train the entire part of the shoulders. The Anterior, Lateral, and Posterior Deltoid. The exercise can be performed seated or standing. The execution is largely the same. Sit up straight with your back against the bench’s backrest and place your feet hip-width apart. Press the dumbbells away from your shoulders above your head and then lower them back to the starting position in a controlled manner.
If you want to focus more on the other parts of the shoulders afterward, do the dumbbell front raise to train the front of the shoulder heads and the dumbbell lateral raise to target the side and rear of the shoulders.
Training Triceps at Home
The triceps are a muscle group that is quite easy to train at home. Do you have 2 chairs? Then you can do the
triceps dips. Triceps dips are an exercise that allows you to train the triceps, shoulders, chest, and abdominal muscles with very few requirements. Triceps dips are often seen as a pure triceps exercise, but the function of the shoulders and chest muscles should not be underestimated. The primary muscle group targeted by this exercise is the triceps brachii.
You can also isolate the triceps with a set of dumbbells by doing the triceps kickback.
Training Biceps at Home
If you want to train your biceps at home, you also need a set of dumbbells. The
dumbbell curls are perhaps the best-known exercise for developing thick biceps. With dumbbell curls, you isolate two muscles of your biceps brachii, which run along the front of the humerus. You can perform dumbbell curls seated or standing. The advantage of performing the exercise seated is that you cannot use your lower back.
As a variation on dumbbell curls, you can do hammer curls. The difference between hammer curls and dumbbell curls is that during hammer curls, you keep your palms facing your body throughout the exercise. This puts the focus on the brachioradialis, which runs down to your forearms.
Training Legs at Home
To train your legs at home, there is only one exercise: the squat. If you want to perform the squat with just your body weight, do the air squat. In the
air squat, you essentially only need your body weight. Ideal for on the go, but also good for mastering the squat (knee bends) in terms of technique. With the squat, you primarily train the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves.
If you have a set of dumbbells at home, do the dumbbell squat to increase intensity with weight.
Training Abs at Home
Because many compound exercises for home already train your abdominal muscles, an extensive abdominal workout at home is not necessary in principle. If you want to train your abs at home, opt for the well-known
sit-up. The sit-up is the most famous abdominal exercise and has a fixed place in many abdominal workouts and schedules. The popularity of sit-ups is largely due to the fact that this exercise can be performed anywhere, with various variations.
