How can you improve your bibs? And how to do it, especially when you don’t have time to go to the gym regularly without tools? The gym is now an increasingly popular place, for a myriad of reasons: on the one hand, it is full of tools that allow us to stimulate our every muscle; on the other hand, it provides us with a fixed appointment which, given the certainly not low cost of the various cards, we cannot escape so easily.
Finally, it allows us to meet new people or bring friends with us, sharing an effort that, alone, perhaps we would not face. Not everyone, however, can afford to attend a gym for continuity: the times of work and family sometimes, in fact, prevent us from going there with a certain consistency, and therefore we think that it is not even worth spending all that money for a place where you only set foot once in a while.
And therefore, in those cases, we are convinced that perhaps we can also do it alone, at home and without tools, to develop our form and muscles to the fullest. We don’t know if this all works: it essentially depends on your willpower. But if you too find yourself in this situation and want to work on your pectorals from home, here are eight chest exercises that will surely be for you.
Pushups: A Timeless Classic
Let’s start with the most classic exercise to stimulate the muscles of the arms and pectorals: pushups. As you probably know, the important thing, in this case, is to be able to keep the body straight without arching the butt up, which would end up making the exercise almost useless.
The position, therefore, foresees lying face down and placing the hands with the palms open on the floor, exactly below the shoulders; furthermore, a straight line must be formed as much as possible between the shoulders and the heels.
At this point, you can start the push ups, in which you have to try not to go completely to the ground, but to bend the arms up to the point where the elbow forms at a 90 ° angle, and then return to stretch them and get back into the starting position. Of course, if you are a beginner at first, an exercise of this type could quickly leave you breathless: if so, try starting with your knees on the ground but still trying to keep the rest of your body as straight as possible.
Pushups With Feet Up: Similar To The Plank, But More Difficult
After you’ve (re) seen how push ups are done, we present a couple of variations that will help ease boredom and stimulate muscles more intensely. The ones we present in this and the next point are to be considered as more extreme versions of the same exercise. Therefore we suggest that you put them into practice only after becoming sufficiently skilled in pure and simple pushups.
We have already partially presented the first exercise some time ago, when we suggested methods to remedy the side of the abdominals, even if there we were not talking so much about pushups but more properly about plank, with the forearms resting on the ground and the feet that they moved on a bench.
Here only the position is similar: the arms and the upper part of the body must be placed as in normal pushups, while the tips of the feet must be positioned above a rise, which can be a bench, a sofa, a chair, or whatever. You have it at home. At this point, we start with the pushups, but you will soon realize that the weight on the arms and chest is very different in this case.
Pushups With Arms Wide Apart: If You Want To Leave Out The Biceps
Second and last variant in the field of pushups: those with wide arms. As we said at the beginning, this exercise’s correct and classic position involves keeping the hands more or less perpendicular to the shoulders. This helps develop the pectorals and affects the muscles of the arms a lot, allowing you to improve your entire upper body.
On the other hand, if you want something more intelligent right on the pectorals, you can try the variant with wide arms. As you can also see in the video that we show you below, in fact, by considerably widening the position of the hands, the pectorals are worked, instead of limiting the pure effort of the arms. On the contrary, if you neglect the chest and work on the biceps, you can bring your hands together until they touch.
Dip With The Chairs: As If You Were At The Parallels
Let’s change the type of exercise while remaining within the scope of something that can be easily done at home, and let’s move on to the so-called “dip,” a somewhat spartan version of what gymnasts usually do at the barre. First of all, to be able to try your hand, you have to find a pair of particularly stable chairs: for example, the folding ones are fine, which, as you can also see in the video below, distribute the weight well over the entire base. Then, arrange the chairs with the backs facing each other, and stand in the middle, with your hands each resting on a different backrest.
At this point, you have to raise your legs so as not to place your feet on the ground anymore and, immediately afterward, begin to bend your arms, coming to form the usual 90 ° angle with the elbow before pushing yourself upwards again to stretch the arm. The exercise is not easy if you are not trained and that the stress on the arms and pectorals is important, but if you have arrived this far after doing the previous exercises, you should be ready for the next step by now.
Various Stretching: To Loosen The Muscles
We close the first part of our presentation with something lighter, useful to stretch your limbs after each exercise session, whether traditional pushups or more demanding workouts. There are various stretching exercises that you can do to strengthen the pectorals and rest the muscles at the same time, and you can also see some of them in the video that we show you below, but we still try to list them and explain some of them to you.
In the first place, the simplest exercise consists in keeping, while standing, the arms well extended forward, with the palms touching, and then quickly bringing them backward while keeping them straight, repeating for at least ten times. Then, still standing, place your hands on your hips, push your elbows back, return to the starting position, and repeat everything for at least ten movements. Again, stretch one arm as if to scratch your back, keeping the elbow at head level, and with the other arm, push right on the elbow to stretch the muscles.
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