The most time-efficient home workouts for building muscle
So you are stuck at home and can’t go to the gym?
Or you don’t want to drive to the gym and just want to get a quick yet effective workout at home done?
Or maybe you just want to maintain as much muscle mass as possible until you can go back to lifting heavy weights again.
There are many overly complicated workouts out there. Here are instead some ideas for simple 80/20 workouts at home.
Endless sets of high repetition exercises?
What comes to mind when we talk about home workouts? Pushups and bodyweight squats are usually the go-to exercises. Sure, those are not bad exercises but if you usually do heavy bench pressing and squatting they will not do much for you. Doing 100 pushups is just not the same as benching two plates and more. You can not compensate for a lack of weight by increasing the volume.
The best case of course would be to have a squat rack, barbell, and loads of 45-pound plates at home. Since this is not the case for most people we will look at alternatives instead.
To save as much time as possible I also alternate between push and pull exercises. Chest and triceps can rest while back and biceps are trained and the other way around. This allows us to keep rest periods to a minimum.
How about training frequency? Same as for our gym workouts we want to make sure that we train each muscle often enough to stimulate growth as best as possible which means we will train every 48 to 72 hours. The advantage of not doing heavy squats and deadlifts is that it is a bit easier for the body to recover. Therefore training every second day should work just fine. We can also experiment with working out every day but this should be done with caution. If you feel like your joints can’t handle it take a break and decrease the frequency.
So to summarize, these are the three aspects we want to focus on:
- keeping the intensity high (heavy weights, 5-10 rep range, 2-5 sets)
- alternate between push and pull exercises
- high training frequency (3-4 days per week)
Workout with a barbell
A lot can be achieved with one barbell and a few plates. As a fitness enthusiast it is a great idea to have at least some basic equipment at home to get a workout in without any excuses.
If you don’t have a bench I would then do the next best if not better pressing compound movement available, which is the Military Press. Without a rack you have to do a clean first but that should not be an issue.
It would be best to have a weight set up which allows you to do sets with somewhere between five and ten repetitions. If you don’t have enough weights at home to do this it is still better to do 20 rep sets than not doing anything.
For back and biceps it is hard to beat pull-ups. This only applies if you either can only do up to 10 bodyweight pull-ups or have a possibility to add additional weight, for example by filling up a backpack with books.
If you only have a barbell but no pull-up bar, rows are one of the best alternatives. However, you usually can use more weight for rows than for the Military Press. This makes it more difficult to alternate between push and pull exercises. In case you don’t have enough weights to train in the 5-10 rep range for the rows you can also replace them with upright rows. Sure, they don’t do too much for the lats but are great for the rear shoulder, traps, and biceps.
We now have covered most of the upper body with a combination of only two exercises. But what about legs?
To be honest it is difficult if not impossible to make up for squats and deadlifts at home. Sure, you can do tons of bodyweight squats but this is more of a cardio workout than anything else.
The best way to still get a decent leg workout is probably to do pistol squats for the quadriceps and (single-leg) glute bridges for the hamstrings. If you also care about calves it is easy to throw in some sets of single-leg calf raises.
Make sure you are using enough weight for those exercises, again, by adding additional weight (e.g. with a backpack). For the glute bridges you can increase the difficulty by doing them on an elevated surface like a chair or your bed.
Lost but not least you can add an ab exercise of your choice. I usually go for standard crunches with an additional weight on my chest.
What if I don’t have a barbell?
If you don’t have access to a barbell you can still have a great home workout.For the push exercise you can do pushpus. Just make sure you make them difficult enough. I usually do this by:
- adding weight on my back
- doing them on two chairs to be able to go down as far as possible
- elevating the legs as much as possible (higher than the upper body)
For the pull exercise you can do inverted rows underneath your desk.
Sample workout
To wrap up, this would be a simplified but intense home workout you can finish in 30 minutes and have almost all of your body covered. You would do five to ten reps each and then repeat for as many sets as you like, somewhere between two to five.
- Military Press/push-ups (elevated, on chairs, plus backpack)
- Barbell rows/upright rows/
- Pistol squats (plus backpack)
- Single-leg glute bridge (with weight on hip)
- Sit-ups
- Calf raises (plus backpack)
Thanks for reading.
Also make sure to check out further tips about other fitness topics.
