A Kickass Home Workout to Get You in Shape (With Minimal Equipment)

You need three types of physical fitness before you can really say that you’re in shape:

1. Flexibility
2. Cardio/Endurance
3. Strength

Flexibility is easy: just put aside 10 minutes or so, several days a week, for stretching exercises.

Same thing with your cardio or endurance training. A half hour of brisk movement, 3 days per week is all you need to be well on your way to having a healthy heart and respiratory system.

So what does that leave us with?

You got it: strength training.

Remember: This is a home workout

If you already have access to a fully-equipped gym, you wouldn’t be reading this article. Right?

So I’m going to explain to you how you can get a great workout at home, with nothing more than a doorway pullup bar (or some other place to do pullups).

Three main types of strength training exercise

Whether you realize it or not, every good strength workout consists of three main parts:

1. Legs and lower back
2. Pushing movements
3. Pulling movements

That’s right, with a combination of three basic movements, you can get a full-body workout that won’t leave any weak spots untrained. This sort of compound exercise workout is the real way to get in shape and have real-world, functional strength that won’t let you down no matter what sort of sport or physical activity you’re into.

So, without further ado, let’s examine some exercises that’ll fit the bill:

The best home workouts for your legs

The basic leg movement is the squat. Squat down until the tops of your thighs are below parallel, then come back up again. Simple, right?

The bodyweight squat is OK for beginners, but I know you don’t want to settle for something so simple. Here are a few other leg workouts you can do at home, in increasing order of intensity:

• Lunges (beginner)
• Step-ups (intermediate)
• One-legged squats (advanced)

Start with lunges until your legs get used to regular workouts and the soreness in your buttocks, hamstrings, and quadriceps goes away. You might want to stick to lunges for a few weeks if you’re especially out of shape or sedentary.

Later, you can add step-ups to your workouts. Just step up onto a sturdy chair (or perhaps something a bit lower at first), using your leg (and not your momentum) to power your way up there.

When you’re really starting to feel some strength in your leg muscles, move on to one-legged squats. It’s probably best to start out with one-legged box squats — squat down until your rear end is on a low chair or box — rather than full-range of motion squats. But if you can go all the way down, you’ll get a great workout (just be careful to keep your knee straight and even).

The best home workouts for your chest, triceps, and shoulders

Pushing movements work your chest, shoulders, and backs of arms (triceps). And as you can probably guess, the best pushing exercise you can do without equipment is the push-up.

But push-ups become easy to do, once you work at them a while. How about we come up with some other pushing moves that are more suitable for when you get in better shape:

• Pushups with feet on a chair (beginner)
• Dips (intermediate)
• Pushups with one hand on a basketball (advanced)

To add some intensity to your basic push-up or press-up, simply put your feet up on a chair. Not only will this shift some of the work from your chest to your shoulders and arms, but it’ll force you to lift a greater percentage of your total body weight, increasing the difficulty of the exercise. Who says you need a bench press to get a good chest workout?

When you get stronger, set up two kitchen chairs and, holding on to the back of each chair, try some dips. This is a fantastic exercise for your triceps, and if you lean forward during the dip, it also works the chest very heavily. Don’t be too quick to dismiss this great movement: dips will get you very strong and unlike bench presses, they’re functional.

Finally, when you’re already strong, you can do pushups with one hand up on a basketball. This is similar in “feel” to a true one-arm pushup, because your hand that’s resting on the ground will do most of the work, while the side with the basketball gets a small range of motion and very little work. Of course, don’t forget to switch sides so each side of your body gets an equal workout. Remember: the farther away from your body that you roll the basketball, the harder it becomes.

The best home workouts for your biceps and lats

Without a doubt, pull-ups or chin-ups are the best thing you can do to blast your back and biceps.

Here are some progressions that take you from easy to difficult:

• Supported pull-ups – feet on a chair (beginner)
• Regular pull-ups and chin-ups (intermediate)
• Towel pull-ups (superman)

When you start out, don’t be ashamed to do supported pull-ups. You can support the weight of your legs by keeping a leg (or two) on a chair, or you can help yourself out by actually pushing with the legs as you go through the chin-up movement. It’s up to you.

When you get stronger, there’s nothing better than regular, unsupported pull-ups to pack on the upper-body mass.

And when you need an even greater challenge, do some towel pull-ups: wrap a towel around the pull-up bar and hold it with one hand while you hold the bar as usual with the other hand. The towel side will get less of a range of motion, forcing the arm holding the bar to do more of the work. It’ll load your back and biceps (on that side of your body) even more than usual, increasing the intensity through the stratosphere!