Many people spend hours in the gym lifting heavy weights and dropping hundreds if not thousands of dollars on memberships in a single year. In fact, I am guilty of this myself. Well, perhaps not the heavy weights part, but the rest is true. It is possible, though, to get a full-body workout at home with nothing but your own body weight. Not only is this inexpensive or even free, but it’s much safer and healthier to work out with your own body weight.
Upper Body
Your upper body can be split into two main muscle groups. Your chest and triceps are often exercised together, as are your back and biceps. Shoulders can be worked out with either or both of these groups. Starting with the first group, the best exercise possible for the pectorals and triceps is the push-up. Push-ups also indirectly work out parts of your shoulder (or deltoid) muscles. There is a reason the military uses them as both training and punishment: they work. There are many training programs out there for pushups, but one I find interesting is found at http://www.hundredpushups.com. You can also buy a product that acts as a pushup aide, one of which rotates your hands and forearms as you perform the exercise. There are apparently benefits to such products, but the push-up is effective enough itself.
For the second set of upper body muscles, the back and biceps are most effectively worked with the pull-up or chin-up. These are quite discouraging early on, as beginners cannot do too many without fatigue. If you keep at it though, you will notice results in the aforementioned muscles as well as the shoulders and forearms. A pull-up bar can be built quite easily, or you could buy a product that turns any ordinary interior doorway into a pull-up machine.
Lower Body
As for the lower body, at-home workouts are a little more difficult but not impossible. The exercise I’ve found that targets the most lower-body muscles is the lunge. The lunge is pretty simple and works out the quadriceps, hamstrings, and even parts of the gluteal muscles. I’d recommend searching online for the correct method of performing this exercise. You could also try squats or step-ups.
Moving On
The workouts in this article are great for beginners, experts, or anybody in between. If they start to get easy though, you can always add weight. A backpack or weight belt makes this simple. Workout balls are also a great way to target individual muscles, such as abdominals. Elastic bands also offer a way to add resistance without requiring weights. There are other exercises for these and other muscle groups that can be done at home, but this would be a great start for anyone.
