Do These 5 Exercises to Build a Muscular Physique at Home

How to build a good looking muscular physique with just calisthenics? That is the number one question I get after 10 years of training calisthenics alone. And in this video, I'm going to show you my top five exercises that helped me the most to build a muscular physique just with bodyweight exercises from home going from head to toe. So that means shoulders, chest, back, arms, and the core. Starting with the best exercise for your shoulders. And that is the pike push-up. So it looks like this. You place your hands in front of you. Now you stack your shoulders above your wrists. Hips are high. You lean forward and you bring your nose forward and make a nice triangle position from your hands towards your nose. This exercise is really good because you load your shoulders and it's just pure focus on the delts, mostly the front delts and also the side delts. But to actually build muscle mass in your shoulders, you should approach this the right way. And this is where many people make big mistakes. They usually do the pike push-ups the wrong way. And it looks like this. Going down, bringing the elbows out, and doing these reps — just going up and down. If you're doing this, you're actually not really targeting your shoulders because you're not bringing the load on the shoulders. But then, in terms of reps and sets, you want to challenge yourself. So for example, in the gym, you want to increase the weights. Here, intensity. So if 10 reps feels too easy for you, you should not increase the reps, but you should increase the intensity. — So a good way to do this is actually, for example, using this elevation right here. So here, I place my hands on the edge right here. And now, as you can see, I can bring my shoulders a lot lower, which increases the range of motion like this, going all the way down, and up. So this makes it twice as hard. Aim for about eight repetitions for hypertrophy, which is muscle growth. Do this for three sets. If you start noticing this gets too easy, you're going to elevate your legs and start increasing the load from there. So, that's the first exercise, best exercise to target your shoulders. Now, for chest, the second best exercise you should do to build your chest, the almighty chest we all want to improve on when we start out with training, of course. I made a setup for myself here, so I can perform the regular push-up, but with more range of motion. Because when it comes to muscle growth, you should think about stretching the muscles as much as you can. So, doing full range of motion will help you the most for stimulating muscle growth. So, instead of doing endless push-ups on the floor, you want to think of elevating your hands so you can make the movement pattern much larger. So, how does it look like? You place your feet on a bench. You just grab two chairs from home and you place your hands on the edge, and now you want to initiate push-up going as deep as you can. Fully stretch the muscles, fully stretch the chest, and press back up. But, here's one thing, which is really important. Many people in calisthenics, they do the push-ups a bit different, which is good because they focus a lot on protraction of the scapula, which is good for planche, handstand push-ups, and that looks like this. So, they make the arms as straight as possible, protraction of the scapula, bring the chest in, and then going down, keeping the protraction, and push back up. This is super good for strength purposes, especially in calisthenics. But, this video is about stimulating the chest muscles. So, here you should use a different approach to actually target the chest. Instead, you want to retract your scapula, open up your chest, activate those chest muscles right here. You can see them working out. Of course, create a stable line from head to toe. And now, while you have your chest engaged, keep the chest open. Keep the chest open, stretch the muscles. So, you can see I'm I can go a lot further now. And then, push back up. Not all the way here, it's not needed. Just here. So, you keep the time and the tension going all the way down. Bang, push back up. So, you keep those muscles engaged during every repetition. Aim for about three sets, eight to 12 reps. If it's getting too easy, you can slightly elevate your legs. You can increase the range of motion, or you can use a weight vest to make the exercise even harder. So, now let's move on how to build your back from home. And for that, we're going to use this table right over here. Of course, if you have the opportunity to pull yourself up while training at home, maybe from a tree or like a doorframe, that is of course the best way to build your back from home. But many people don't have this equipment or opportunity at home, but almost everyone has a table, even an unstable table like this.

So, you got to be a bit careful, but it's a great way to target your back just from training at home. And just starting out with it, if you want to build your back muscles. So, you're going to lay underneath the table. What's really important is you grab it a little bit centered. So, you pull the table directly straight down, which will prevent the table from swinging. So, you grab it right here. Now, you elevate your hips. Retract your scapula, so bringing your chest forward. And bring your nose towards the table. Underneath the table like this. Hold at the top. 1 2 3 and go down. Retract again. If you find yourself doing eight reps easily, you can start playing around with paused reps like I just did. Holding the top position for 3 seconds, eight reps of 3 seconds top hold, because then you increase the time under tension, which will help you build more muscle. If that gets easy, you can do 5 seconds up to even 10 seconds. So, there's always room for improvement and challenging your muscles even if you train without any equipment just from home. So, this is a great way to build your back. So, now let's move on how to build your arms the best way from home. And for this, we're going to use the chairs again. But, a big misconception about building bigger arms is that many people tend to focus on building bigger biceps. You see all these people doing endless bicep curls in front of the mirror in the gym, only focusing on this because it's the front side of your body. But, your arm actually gets way bigger from focusing on your triceps. If you see the difference, your triceps are a lot bigger muscles actually than your biceps. So, a good hack is to focus a lot more on building bigger triceps, because that will make your arms look a lot bigger. So, that's why we first focus on the tricep exercise. And the best way to do it from home is to do deep dips. So, you grab the two chairs in a narrow position, so pretty small, so very close towards your hips, next to your hips. You step forward. If you can, try to extend your legs, because this will allow you to increase your range of motion. Now, same as with the push-up, you want to go You can go up till here. So, this is like 90° angle. But, if you go even deeper, you stretch the tricep muscles even more and push back up. You don't need to go all the way straight up until here. That's good for strength purposes in calisthenics, but just for building those tricep muscles, you want to keep the time under tension. So, keeping the triceps engaged, going all the way down and up. Right here. One more. So, do this again for eight reps. Then, if this feels too easy, you can play around with tempo dips. So, you're going to increase the time under tension during specific parts of the movement. So, for example, you can do the negative for 3 seconds. And the negative is always the part that stimulates the muscles the most. So, the negative is the downward movement. So, you go down 3 seconds. 1 2 3. All the way here. Now, you go up also 3 seconds. 1 2 3. And I can tell you, if you're going to do eight repetitions with 3 seconds down, 3 seconds up, your arms are going to be totally pumped and you're going to be super sore the next day. That's the best way how you can build your triceps from home. Now, let's focus on the biceps. Now, for biceps, we actually also going to use the chairs, but this time as resistance training. Because, let's be honest, the best way to build your muscles is isolating them. And with your biceps, the best way is simply just do curls. Even when you train with your own body weight. Of course, you can do chin-ups if you have a bar at home. That would be ideal. But, if you don't have it, just try to use something from the furniture in your home. This case, for example, the chair like this. Make sure you can grab the chair somewhere where you feel the weight is evenly balanced out. And now, try to focus on fully stretching the muscles. Oh, there we go. Like this. So, make sure you can go all the way down. Then, all the way up. Squeeze the biceps. And go down. Slow and controlled. That's one. All the way up. Two. Nice and easy. All the way down. So, try to get rid of the limiting belief of "Oh, I do have a stomach, so I cannot use like some kind of resistance training. I can only do like push-ups or pull-ups. " No, the best way to build your muscles is by isolating them as well. So, you can use a chair, you can use water bottles, but the best way would be using resistance bands if you have these because then you

can simply add the resistance. For example, you start with a lighter red band. And if this gets easy over time, you can start doing the curls with a thicker band like this. Focusing on eight repetitions, eight to 12. You can play with the time and the tension. Holding it at the top, going down. And then of course, you can increase the resistance with these bands as well. And now finally, the abs. What is the best exercise to not only strengthen your abs, but also to build those blocky abs? This is actually a hard one to choose for me. I'm combining two exercises in one. And that is the hollow body hold combined with dynamics. Because the hollow body hold, which I'll show you in a second, is the best isometric exercise to not only build your physical abs that you see on the front, but also to build those inner ab muscles that will actually build those strong abs. But research also shows that contracting your abs, both your upper abs and your lower abs, is actually better for muscle growth. So, I like to combine these two methods in one approach. So, that would look like this. You start in a tuck position. Now, you slightly extend your legs and your arms, making sure you keep the engagement of both your upper abs right here and your lower abs. So, this would normally be your hollow body hold, which is great for building and strengthening your abs. But now from here, you can even start doing small dynamics. So, bringing your doing like a crunch and a leg raise at once, like here, and going down. It also asks for a lot of coordination. So, hold this for a moment. Go back. Keep the time under tension every time. So, you can as you can see, you can just do small movements. You don't have to go all the way up here because then you will lose the tension. Just make sure you are in control. Here. Up and down. Up and down. So, from only doing like a few reps, I can already tell the burn in my upper abs and lower abs. So, here with this exercise, focus again around eight to 12 repetitions. You don't need to do a lot more like 15 or 30. If it gets too easy, you just increase the intensity. Then, you can do V-ups, which I'll show you right now, or you can slightly increase the weights by putting very heavy shoes on or ankle weights if you have them at your disposal. All right, guys. So, these are the top five exercises you should do from home to not only get a strong body, but also an athletic, good-looking muscular physique by just doing body weight exercises to target your chest, shoulders, back, arms, and your core. So, I've been thinking about actually wrapping this video into a full follow-along workout that you can simply do together with me. If you'd like to see a video of me combining all these exercises which you can do with me, let me know in the comments. And lastly, I just want to say thanks for watching this video. Make sure to download our Calisthenics Family app in which you can find many structured programs for building a good physique from home, but also — improving your strength from home, improving your mobility and flexibility, and learning calisthenics skills as you go. So, make sure to check out the first link in the description. And last but not least, actually, as with almost all our videos, let's do another weekly equipment giveaway. And in this video, I'm going to give away one set of our Calisthenics Family resistance bands to help one of you out to start building those biceps from home with the resistance bands. How to win? Make sure to like, subscribe, and comment within the first 7 days after publishing this video. The winner will be announced in next week's video. That's it for this video. I hope you like this one. Let me know if I should create a follow along video, and I'll see you in one of the next ones. Peace out.