How To Build Muscle At Home: Your Simple Guide

Your muscles need stimulation to grow and get bigger. The cool thing about this is that they don’t know the difference between a dumbbell, kettlebell, or the weight of your body. That means you can totally get your groove on at home with bodyweight only. And this guide will help you get there.

Not only will you learn how to build muscle at home, but you’ll learn how to do it with no expensive equipment! It doesn’t get any more convenient than that. But be aware that this doesn’t mean it will be easy – just convenient.

Muscle groups

The first thing you need is direction when it comes to working out at home. If you don’t know what direction to go out on the road in your car, you’re going to waste time and get lost. The exact same thing can happen with your body. So you need to learn what your limitations are and which muscles to work.

You’re limited only by your lack of gear and lack of creativity. The latter can be changed; not so much the former. But that’s OK, because there are plenty of bodyweight drills to go around.

As for the muscles, you want to target your chest, back, shoulders, arms, butt, legs, and abs. The more recruitment you get, the more muscle you will build. The anatomical names for these muscles are the pecs, lats, deltoids, traps, triceps, biceps, glutes, quads, and hamstrings. Simply put, you are focusing on your entire body.

Exercises

The only muscle groups you might have a hard time working are your back and your biceps. But there is a way around this, depending on the layout of your house, which we’ll get to in a bit.

You want to work your body in a way that moves from the largest muscles to the smallest. For example, go from chest to shoulders to triceps, and go from back, biceps, and legs to abs. This is hypothetical, but you get the idea.

Perform exercises like push-ups, handstand push-ups with your feet on a wall, chair dips, back extensions, squats, lunges, and bicycle crunches. These are just examples, but they work all of your major muscle groups.

Back and biceps

As for your back and biceps, it’s a little hard working these areas without any equipment. But if you happen to have a stationary object to hang from, you’ll be golden. This can be a beam in your basement, a step in an open stairway, or the ledge on your deck. If you are handy, you can even install a pull-up bar somewhere.

Then you can do exercises like pull-ups, chin-ups, hanging leg raises, and knee pull-ins. These exercises will target your biceps, lats, and abs easily, and you can vary your grip position to hit your muscles in different ways.

You’ll really start to build muscle at home if you can get yourself off the ground!

Putting it together

You don’t need to get fancy or elaborate to build muscle. Keep it as simple as doing 3 to 5 sets of 10 to 12 reps with every exercise. It’s more important to follow a routine that is regular and not threatening to your recoveries.

The most important thing is not to focus on the same muscle groups on consecutive days. If you do, you will not have adequate recovery time and you risk getting injured. A good game plan is to work three muscle groups on Monday and Thursday, three different muscle groups on Tuesday and Friday, and throw your abs in on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Use Wednesday as a cardio day, when you can run outside if you are at home. By adding dedicated cardio, you can prevent fat gain and keep your cardiovascular health up to par. Work your abs at the end of your cardio sessions.

Conclusion

Hopefully you are no longer confused about how you can build muscle at home even if you have no equipment. If you are the simply remember the basics:

• Target all of your muscle groups
• Never work the same muscles on consecutive days
• Work the largest muscles first
• Do enough training to spark muscle growth

Still hungry for more then why not read our ultimate guide on how to build muscle