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If you don’t have the time to go to the gym but want to build a chest, you can try at-home chest exercises.
While they'll not be volume focused the way you can with barbells and dumbbells, you can definitely work on the pectoral muscles with a few exercises that can be done at home.
Chest Exercises You Can Do at Home
Here's a look at five such exercises, which are push-ups or variations of them:
1) Push-up
The bodyweight exercises that help with defining the chest are push-ups. Therefore, ideally, you need to do push-up variations to ensure your chest is developing.
Push-ups work on the chest and help boost strength and muscle endurance in the body.
You need to keep your palms at shoulder-width or slightly wider. When you lower your body, try not to flare your elbows too much. When you push yourself up, the focus should be on using the chest muscles and not the triceps.
2) Incline Push-up
Another variation of chest exercise is incline push-ups. This variation focuses on the upper and lower pectoral muscles.
You need to place your palms on an elevated platform but not too elevated so that the pressure diminishes from the chest. Incline push-ups are a slightly more advanced version, so it’s advised that you exercise caution when doing the exercise.
3) Decline Push-up
The next variation is the decline push-up. It requires you to place your feet on an elevated platform while your palms are on the floor and your arms completely extended.
As you lower yourself, make sure your hips and back are stable. If you elevate your hips, the pressure will move from your chest to your shoulders.
4) Wide Push-up
This variation of chest exercise is a good way to warm up your pectoral muscles before a chest routine at the gym. At home, you can use a wide push-up as a variation to define your chest muscles.
You need to keep your palms quite apart, and make sure thatwhen you lower yourself, your arms can withstand the resistance. To make the exercise simpler, you can go on your knees, and start with knee push ups before advancing to more advanced versions.
5) Explosive Push-up
An explosive push-up is muscle blasting chest exercise. In this exercise, you need to slowly lower your body while controlling the negative, and push yourself back up with strength, force and explosive speed.
This exercise is one of the best chest poses to do at home, especially if you want to add intensity to your routine.
Bottom Line
There's no doubt chest exercises at home can help define the pectoral muscles. However, that may not be enough to grow the chest and add muscle mass.
If you want to grow your muscles, you have to hit the iron. It doesn’t have to be every day of the week, but you need to work the muscles using some resistance other than your bodyweight.
Moreover, you need to have a diet that helps you achieve your objective. To add muscles, you need to be in a calorie surplus, so your diet must have adequate protein.
