In all likelihood, the bench press will always remain the most popular exercise for male weight trainers. It’s not every guys favorite, but nobody’s skipping chest day either, are they? Unfortunately, in our current times most of us can’t go to a gym due to Covid-19 here in the spring of 2020. This means that unless we have a home gym setup that includes a bench and weights, we aren’t able to do heavy bench presses for chest workouts. Fortunately, there are plenty of other options.
Do Push-ups
If you have to do home chest workouts with light weights, or no weight at all, you need to reintroduce yourself to the classic push-up. Do them with your feet on the floor or up on a chair, or even with your feet flat up on a wall. You can play with hand placement as well to hit the chest from different angles.
Dumbbell Bench Presses
In my case, I have a couple of 30 pound dumbbells I was lucky enough to find at a store not long ago. I also have a mat that can emulate a bench when folded up. Admittedly, 30 pounds isn’t very much weight to use for dumbbell bench presses, so I go for very high repetition sets. You can also try performing supersets of dumbbell flyes followed immediately with dumbbell bench presses with light or medium weights.
Going Heavier on Push-ups
I’ve found that to get the most out of the weights I have during my home chest workouts, it’s best to use them on push-ups. This means getting dumbbells onto my back before performing push-ups. It’s definitely possible to get two dumbbells on your back if you want to use a decent amount of weight. One dumbbell can be placed in the middle of your upper back between your shoulder blades. The other one can be placed on the lower back facing to the sides. I can get this done without assistance for push-ups down with 60 pounds on my back, which is going to be much tougher than dumbbell benches with 30 pounds in each hand.
Adding Intensity to Your Home Chest Workouts
When you get to failure on weighted push-ups, you can take a short rest and continue doing reps. I like to take about 10 seconds between sets before continuing through another set. You can focus on reaching a certain amount of total reps like this. Once I get to the point where I can only perform 3 or 4 reps on my weight push-ups with short rest between sets, I’ll drop the weights off of my back and start doing regular push-ups. You can even get to the point where you go to push-ups from your knees once you can’t any more standard push-ups to really finish your home chest workouts off.
Dips For Chest
Dips can be a great exercise for the chest if you focus the resistance on your pecs more than your triceps. You’ll need a set of dips bars to do the chest version of dips, though it is possible to create a dip setup with furniture – provided it’s safe. You can then use a dumbbell between your lower legs for a tougher workout.
There is plenty more you can do for chest workouts at home. It all depends on what you have to work with. There is no reason not to continue hitting your chest hard, even at home without much equipment available. A little creativity can go a long way. Just keep at it. You can also try Critical Bench to really get big gains in bench press strength.