Tried and true at home workout?

Question

I am a 24 year old male in decent shape, and I want to include workouts in my weekly schedule as a part of my life. Currently my goal is to gain strength, and I'm not interested in gaining muscle mass or losing fat outside of what comes with strength gains.

The issue is that I work overtime on a regular basis, and going to a gym is not an option because of the extra time it involves beside the actual workout.

I'm interested in getting the best results I can with what I have available, so I'm searching for a workout that I could do at home. I live in an appartment and have adjustable dumbbells, a pull up bar, a quality jump rope, and am willing to buy whatever other equipment would be needed that can fit and be stored in my home, even punching a hook through my ceiling and buying TRX bands if it's suggested.

On my own I've found several commercial workout programs or rom various websites, but I thought I'd see what suggestions I would get from posting here, relative to my objectives, since there is no real way to review such programs without actually truing them.

Answer 1

With your goal of everyday strength, bodyweight exercises are sufficient, provided that you work the right muscles with the right exercises. Here is what i would suggest:

Upper body: Buy a set of resistance tubes, they are very affordable and help you work muscles such as the biceps, triceps. Then of course all variations of the pushup, with and without inclination, use furniture or a bed to achieve the desired inclination. Dips for the triceps.

Core: core musles comprise of all the muscles between your chest and hip. Core muscles are often ignored but are very important for overall strength, if your core is strong, you have more stability and hence reduced risk for injury due to heavy lifting. I would recommend planks, and various ab workouts.

Legs:many people believe that legs cant be workout out without hitting the gym, but there are ways by which you can boost their strength tremendously. Apart from the usual squats and calf raises, Incorporate plyometric exercises, where you jump hard and then jump again as soon as you touch back down... All the variations of the above can give you very satisfactory results.

Stay motivated and enjoy your home workouts!

Answer 2

In order to make appreciable strength gains, you need to add weight incrementally. Without a barbell, or machines (eek!), this is difficult. Your adjustable dumbells will stop generating training adaptations in a very short amount of time.

In my opinion, the best thing you could do is go to a gym. Just make it a priority.

The next best thing would be to buy a barbell and a squat rack, and do a program like Starting Strength.

If you cannot fit a squat rack into your apartment, maybe you could still do an Olympic lifting program, using a light enough weight that you do not have to ever drop the barbell.

Without a barbell it will be very difficult to train your lower body. You can still gain quite a bit of upper body strength just by doing weighted pull ups and dips. These two exercises alone give a fairly complete upper body strength program. I would recommend increasing reps until you can do 3 sets of 8, then increasing the weight by 2.5 pounds and do 3 sets of 5. Work your way back up and repeat the process.

Another option is bodyweight training, where instead of adding weight you put yourself into increasingly mechanically disadvantageous positions. For instance, to train your chest, anterior delts, and triceps you can do pushups. To make pushups harder, you can do psuedo planche pushups, then the planche, then planche pushups. You may also gain considerable satisfaction from the mastery of cool skills like this, in addition to the increase in strength. This still has the problem of not effectively training the low body. I recommend the bodyweight fitness subreddit as a source of information.