The Best Upper-Body Home Workouts You Can Do Without Weights

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Gyms across the globe may have once again opened their doors as the COVID-19 pandemic slowly quells, but that doesn’t mean you have to get yourself a public membership if you want to get (or stay) in good shape. 

Whether it’s a one-off session or is your preferred training method, it’s highly likely that you’ll find yourself performing an at-home workout at some point. Stepping into your own basement or garage gym can be a dream come true if you hate commuting to the gym, but there’s a chance you might be a little short on training equipment

home workout abs
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Fret not. It’s still possible to get a great workout without fancy machines or free weights, but it will probably take a bit more creativity than you’re used to.

Here’s how to clock some serious time pumping iron without the long lines, noisy distractions, or unruly company of a big box gym. These are five upper body home workouts you can bang out without ever picking up a weight.

Best Upper-Body Home Workouts Without Weights

Best Home Arm Workout Without Weights

Training your arms might be one of the more challenging muscle groups to fatigue at home. Without machines or free weights to help you isolate your arms, you’ll be targeting them primarily with more compound-style exercises. Chin-ups can help bias more biceps activation and push-ups can help target the triceps, but be prepared for a more taxing experience than your normal preacher curl can provide. 

The Workout

All you’ll need here is a chin-up bar, or, in a pinch, some exposed ceiling beams in an unfinished basement. Given the full-body nature of these exercises, performing them for as many repetitions as possible (AMRAP) is your best bet here.

It’s worth pointing out that you should only perform these exercises on stable surfaces and with secure anchor points — safety first!

Best Home Chest Workout Without Weights

Blasting your chest from home can be a lot more similar to your gym workouts than you might think. Emulating most pressing exercises can be accomplished with a variety of push-up variations tailored to your strength or structure. You can also use some floor sliders to help create the perfect at-home version of a pec flye. Prepare for a grueling chest workout but be careful not to fall on your face. 

The Workout

Challenging your chest without weights means you should employ a number of different training techniques. This means employing strategies such as tempo, pauses, or manipulating how much of your own body weight is involved in each exercise to challenge yourself appropriately.

The goal of assigning these techniques is to keep the tension on your chest, stimulating your pecs with enough volume before you find it too hard to hold the right positions to make those gains you’re after. 

Best Home Shoulder Workout Without Weights

Your shoulders are particularly challenging to train without weights. Hitting them properly will require some pretty dynamic movements to roast them without leaning on the usual tools like cables or dumbbells. Still, you should be able to accomplish a good shoulder workout with just what you can find in your own home.

push-up at home
Credit: Halfpoint / Shutterstock

Taking advantage of different angles of attack to fatigue all three heads of the deltoid will be a huge asset here.

The Workout

Scaling shoulder work without weights requires you have a trusty wall or staircase nearby. With that in mind, your core will also get a strong blast of work to keep you stable during your inverted positions. Throwing some pauses and tempo work in the right places are easy ways to add some serious (and safe) intensity to your workout. 

Best Home Back Workout Without Weights

Emulating all of the standard issue back exercises without a gym may require a bit more thought and planning than usual. Your back as a muscle group is very difficult to isolate with just bodyweight due to how impactful small changes in grip can be.

However, with something as simple as a towel, you can still attack your back from various angles and imitate different gym-based exercises. 

The Workout

Using pull-ups and chin-ups will help hit your lats and mid back, and bringing in a chair or box to support your legs can help you perform bodyweight rows. The addition of a towel will dramatically alter the muscle emphasis of each exercise by changing your grip orientation.

Lastly, some prone Y-raises can help finish off your upper back without a single dumbbell in sight.

Best Home Core Workout Without Weights

Training your core from home is likely one of the easier transitions to make if you’re used to the gym. Plenty of the (if not all) exercises that you can find in the gym are easily replicable in the comfort of your own home. Don’t mistake that comfort for ease, however.

If anything, this will be one of the harder workouts you can perform in your living room.

The Workout

In a pinch, a simple variety of planks can provide the foundation of your at-home core routine. However, the default plank isn’t the start and end of your ab workout.

Spice things up with abdominal pikes, dynamic planking variations, and high-intensity body saws. Grab a yoga mat and a towel, this one will be sweaty.

  • Abdominal Pike: 3×15
  • Thread-The-Needle: 3×10 per direction
  • Plank Medley: 3×30 seconds per position
  • Body Saw: 3×20 seconds

Note: The plank medley calls for a side plank, a front plank, and finally the opposing side plank all performed back-to-back with no rest. 

How to Progress At-Home Workouts

While having access to machines and free weights makes overloading each muscle a bit more straightforward, training from home with a minimal setup can still be productive if you utilize many of the same tips and tricks you’d use at the gym.

Employing one (or several) of these suggestions can help bring your at home workouts up to par without the addition of costly, space-consuming free weights.

Intensifiers

Drops sets are a great tool to help reach a high intensity for each muscle group by the end of your set. One particular drop set style combines two different exercises for the same muscle group. For example, try performing a set of bodyweight skull crushers followed immediately by incline push-ups to annihilate your arms.

Further, you can create an artificial drop set on movements like the push-up. Once you find yourself reaching failure, simply drop to your knees and keep banging out reps with the added support. 

Unilateral Training

Without a ton of weight to make use of, performing unilateral exercises is a great way to immediately add intensity to your workout. Unilateral exercises assign the tension to one specific limb, for example, training one arm in isolation from the other with a single-arm curl.

Single-arm push-up variations, while quite advanced, are a great example of how to greatly tax your pecs without touching a barbell.

Tempo

Another super-effective tool when you don’t have a ton of load to work with is assigning a slow tempo to your exercises. You can make your workout immediately more challenging by adding slower eccentrics and pauses in the hardest positions of an exercise to create fatigue.

You can also try adding a peak isometric contraction can help ensure good repetition quality when you don’t have weights. Aim for a maximum voluntary contraction, squeezing your muscle as hard as you can for at least one full second second during each repetition.

AMRAPs

AMRAPs are also likely going to be a mainstay element of your home training. How many reps you perform in the gym usually depends on the amount of external weight you’re using.

Properly-loaded resistance exercises can help you achieve muscle failure comfortably in the 8 to 12-rep range. However, without weights you will likely need to perform as many repetitions as possible to comparably tax your muscles.

Rest Intervals

Finally, minimizing how long you’re resting between sets can help increase your workout intensity dramatically. Not allowing a muscle to fully recover before hitting it again can really double up on the metabolic burn, speeding the rate at which you’ll experience muscle failure with each subsequent set.

Instead of going for 2-3 minutes of rest like you would in a gym, try limiting your downtime to 30-45 seconds when training at home.

Benefits of Training at Home 

Training from home may seem like a bigger challenge than working out in a gym, but there are plenty of valuable perks to offset the lack of a barbell. Completely controlling your training environment, getting creative, and emphasizing the fundamentals are all huge benefits that you shouldn’t overlook.

Control Over Your Training Environment

Sometimes, you’re just not in the mood to fight over equipment or maneuver the hustle and bustle of a commercial gym. Having the option to train in the privacy of your own home, with full control over music selection, rest times, and cleanliness to your satisfaction can be hard to beat.

Not only that, but having your own private space can seriously boost the efficiency of your workouts.

Forced Creativity

There are definite pros and cons of working out from home without weights. A gym can help you target all the small muscle groups of the upper body with specific machines. Without these options, you will need to have a deeper understanding of your anatomy and much more creativity to get the job done.

In the long run, spending some time creating at-home workouts can ensure you’re able to make gains under any circumstances.

Master Your Mechanics

One of the biggest benefits of working out from home is how much time you’ll have to spend on calisthenics

Without machines or free weights, you will likely have to make exercises such as push-ups or pull-ups staples of your upper-body workouts. These exercises target many muscles of the upper body to varying degrees.

Moreover, bodyweight movements teach you to work as one synchronous unit. When or if you return to the weight room, you should notice your lat pulldowns feel much stronger after you’ve banged out a few (thousand) pull-ups.  

Get After It at Home 

Training from home is something you’re destined to tangle with at some point or another, either by necessity or just out of plain preference. Although it might be a bit more challenging to get a good workout at home than in a gym, using sound training principles at home can bridge the gap.

Being creative and making subtle adjustments to your usual exercises can have a huge impact on your ability to effectively target each muscle group of the upper body. Master your calisthenics, embrace the high-repetition grind, and you can make some serious upper body gains from the comfort of your own home.

Featured Image: antoniodiaz / Shutterstock

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