Best Upper Body Workouts With Bodyweight

This workout focusses on utilizing bodyweight exercises to enhance upper body strength and endurance.

Bodyweight exercises rely on your own mass as resistance without the need for additional equipment, allowing for effective training at home.

The upper body consists of muscle groups such as the chest, back, shoulders, arms, and core.

This workout incorporates techniques to target these areas, promoting balanced development and functional capacity.

You don’t need a gym, or even any equipment, to have a great workout.

While you might think that strength training requires heavy weights to get results, the reality is that just by using the weight of your body you can create enough resistance to build muscle and burn fat. All you need is an effective workout plan.

In this article, I’ll provide three upper body workouts to build muscle that you can do at home, with or without dumbbells. After each of the workouts, you can download them to the Fitbod app (for free), where you can get step-by-step exercise demos and track your progress over time.

Rules To Follow When Doing At-Home Workouts

An effective at-home workout plan requires well thought out movements and technique to ensure you are getting the most out of your efforts.

Some rules to keep in mind when doing at-home workouts are:

1. FOCUS ON COMPOUND MOVEMENTS

Compound movements are exercises that work multiple muscle groups at the same time.

For example, a pushup is a compound exercise that works the chest, shoulders, arms and core. You can also do compound exercises that combine two exercises into one move to target even more muscles (for example, a front squat to push press combo).

Compound movements recruit more muscle than isolation movements which gives more stimulus for muscle growth.

2. FOCUS ON PUSHING AT LEAST ONE SET TO FATIGUE

In order to build muscle mass, you must fatigue the muscle. This is because muscle growth happens after the muscle breaks down, which happens as a result of muscular failure during a set.

Learn more about whether you can do bodyweight exercises every day.

3. FOCUS ON KEEPING REST PERIODS SHORT

For example, on the first set of an exercise, you'd perform your maximum number of repetitions until you reach fatigue. Say for example, 20 reps. Normally you'd wait 60-90 seconds to rest and then perform another 15-20 on set 2. With shoulder rest periods of 10-30 seconds between sets you make sure that you fatigue within a low rep range of about 6-10.

4. FOCUS ON PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD

The best way to progressively overload your muscles to ensure growth is to add load by way of weight or resistance. However, if you are limited with the amount of equipment you have to achieve this, you must consider other methods of overloading.

You can achieve this by:

Increasing the total number of reps you perform with each exercise week to week

Increasing the total number of sets you perform each workout

Adding tempo work to increase time under tension. Time under tension relates to the amount of time that your muscle is put to work. This can be achieved by increasing the length of time that you put the muscle under stress while you work through each phase of the movement.

Building Muscle With Bodyweight Workouts

In order to build muscle, we need to apply stress to our muscles through progressive resistance. For example, making sure that each week you progress the total volume of weight lifted or resistance used by way of more reps, sets or load.

With bodyweight workouts, you are limited with what you have available for adding load, and simply repeating the same exercise plan week after week will only get you so far. Therefore, you need to make sure you are using other methods of progression, which can be challenging.

Studies show that bodyweight training does not increase absolute strength, specifically in the same way that weight training does. Absolute strength means the ability of an individual to move a certain external load (for example, a barbell or dumbbell).

However, bodyweight training is shown to develop relative strength as opposed to absolute strength. Relative strength means the ability of an individual to move a load that is defined as a percentage of their bodyweight. This is because bodyweight training exercises use bodyweight as the resistance, as opposed to adding an external load.

Bodyweight training not only progresses relative strength, but it can also significantly improve core and joint stability as it relates to the individual’s bodyweight.

What does this mean for muscle growth?

For someone who is new to strength training, they will be able to build muscle through bodyweight training. However, once they’ve exhausted their progressions of overall volume (reps and sets), resistance and time under tension, there is no longer sufficient stimulus for muscle growth.

This is not to say that there aren’t still many benefits to bodyweight training for anyone regardless of training age.

Maintain Muscle Mass

Bodyweight workouts can be beneficial in helping maintain muscle mass during a period of time when you can’t go to the gym. Bodyweight workouts can provide a continuous stimulus for your muscles to maintain their mass while you recover from an injury, go on vacation or during a gym closure.

Joint and Core Stability

As we mentioned earlier, bodyweight training as a means of improving relative strength does so in such a way that incorporates a lot more joint and core stabilization.

The compound movements that are typically incorporated into bodyweight training regimens require a significant amount of stability in order to reach failure or almost failure maintaining good form.

For example, if someone who is used to bench pressing 200+lbs was challenged to complete a high rep set of pushups using good form, they would need to use a lot more core and shoulder stability than they are likely used to.

Rehab and Injury Prevention

Strength training with weights commonly leads to injuries that are in part due to muscular weakness, imbalance or lack of stability.

This is where bodyweight training can come into play and complement a weight training program as either a means of prevention or rehabilitation because of the increased emphasis on core engagement, balance and targeting specific muscle groups.

For example, the glute med is an important muscle involved in the squat and deadlift, and if it is weak or if there is an imbalance or compensation, this can cause knee, hip or lower back pain. Research shows that implementing bodyweight exercises that specifically target the glute med can help rehabilitation efforts and injury prevention in those who lift heavy weights.

Final Thoughts

While bodyweight training or at-home workouts with light dumbbells cannot provide the same stimulus for muscle growth that lifting heavy weights can, it can still be a very effective method of training for beginners, people who are injured, weight lifters who want to be proactive in preventing injury and to maintain muscle mass when you can’t get to the gym.

However, to be effective, an at-home workout plan requires well thought out movements and technique to ensure you are getting the most out of your efforts. Make sure you’re finding ways to progressively overload the resistance, shorten rest periods, increase time under tension and integrate compound movements.