No gym? No problem. You can still get in great shape in your own living room. Here’s how to set up a full body workout at home with little to no equipment.

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Working out at the gym is awesome … for people that enjoy working out at the gym. But what about the folks that aren’t into that sort of thing? Or don’t have the time or the money to make an expensive gym membership part of their lifestyle?

More and more fitness professionals need to understand that gym life isn’t the only way to get into fantastic shape.

However, too many of my fellow coaches really don’t have much of a clue as to how to adapt solid training programs to fit the needs of clientele that need to a full body workout at home. Instead, they cram a high intensity session down your throat on a daily basis with a ton of exercises that they expect you to perform to (almost) failure.

No one has time, nor the desire to hit up 50 push-ups and 50 squats and 37.5 burpees every single day.

Sure you’ll sweat a whole lot. Yes, it’s exhausting and it feels like you did a ton of work. But, it’s not the best use of your time, nor is it the most effective workout approach.

On the flip side, there’s the home workout DVD-inspired fitness influencers that have you bouncing around your living room doing a bunch of glorified dance routines with no real basis in strength. Again, you feel like you did something and worked up a great sweat, but you are not really getting much stronger doing these aerobic programs.

Let’s change that.

I’m here to tell you that you can get into fantastic shape with minimal equipment, or perhaps even no equipment at all. It takes some creativity and a bit of a commitment to making the correct progressions on key movements.

As a stay at home, work at home dad, I do the majority of my online coaching and working in the confines of my closet-size Brooklyn apartment. And the majority of my workouts are in my living room.

I have to navigate the tight spaces and avoid the obstacles of random Legos on the floor while I try to perform the perfect lunge.

My workouts include the same minimal equipment that I’m going to discuss in this article and my results speak for themselves.

If you’ve been stuck in neutral trying to jump start your fitness journey, but can’t afford a gym, this article is for you.

Or maybe you’ve been forced inside to train and have no idea what to do without your local weight room. That’s cool, I’m going to show a few things you can do to still get into fantastic shape.

And if you’ve been wondering if a full body workout at home can be effective, well, wonder no more, because we’re going to talk about how to make them pretty freaking hard, even if you can knock out 100 push-ups without skipping a breath.

In this guide, I’m going to break down:

• What are the benefits of working at home?
• The equipment you need for your home gym
• Can you get stronger with a full body workout at home?
• How to add more resistance to your at home workouts
• A few optional routines that promise to deliver

Let’s get into it.

But before we start, if you’re super busy or just not really into reading, feel free to go ahead and grab a FREE copy of my 52 Fat Loss Workouts, which includes a ton of workouts you can perform in your own living room, most with minimal or no equipment required at all.

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What are the benefits of working out at home?

Well the most upfront benefits are pretty obvious: You save money from expensive gym memberships and you don’t have to worry about making an extended commute to your local establishment.

In addition, there’s no longer the concern for gymtimidation, or the fear of even stepping foot in the gym. This is a real situation and is a non-starter for a lot of folks, preventing them from training.

When you workout at home, you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. Instead, you set the rules and the time to train and get after it.

You save time, money and you can workout in whatever pair of pants and tops you want without having bros ogle you while you knock out a deadlift.

It’s not all sunshine and roses, though.

Working out at home has its drawbacks:

• Motivation to clear out some room in your small space so you can train for 15 to 30 minutes can be an issue.
• Space itself is a factor, too. If you live in a big city, your cramped apartment might not be the most compatible for a full body session.
• You can get into fantastic shape without much equipment, but the most effective programming will have a few pieces of important equipment (namely something for pull-ups or rows or some kind) that you should have handy. And that costs money. More on equipment later on.

However, if you can overcome those home workout obstacles, you’ll be totally fine in creating and executing a plan to make this work for you.

The equipment you need for a great full body workout at home

Now to be clear, there are some fantastic bodyweight specialization programs available that reveal fantastic results. Follow Gold Medal Bodies (GMB Fitness) for some variations on movements that will improve flexibility and strength with no equipment.

Disclosure: I’ve used GMB Fitness programming for a variety of solutions and highly recommend their products and workouts.

Even the programs from GMB Fitness will eventually encourage you to grab at least some baseline equipment in order to truly improve musculature.

The biggest limiting factor in even the most comprehensive bodyweight-only training programs is the pulling motion and strengthening the muscles of the upper back. For that reason, if you truly wanted to commit to getting a complete workout at home with minimal equipment, the first two options in this list are the most important.

Pull-up bar –– Just what it sounds like. There is no replacement for the pull up and the chin up. You can pick up some door attachment options that won’t break the bank.

Suspension trainer –– Options like the TRX Suspension straps allow for a ton of variety in your training and utilize your bodyweight as the resistance. You can create an entire full body workout at home with an included attachment that hangs from a closed door. It’s a great option if you are not yet able to perform a full pull up or chin up since the suspension trainer allows for you to work the variations on the bodyweight row.

Dumbbell(s) –– You can grab a pretty cheap pair of dumbbells, or even one single heavy dumbbell, at most sporting goods stores or online. It’ll open up some options for added resistance.

Resistance bands –– Cheap and portable and mostly thought of as a tool for rehab and recovery, but getting creative with a group of bands can help add new stimuli to your training and programming.

Kettlebells –– You don’t need an entire arsenal of kettlebells to get a fantastic workout. Picking one kettlebell and executing 50 Swings in minimal time and with limited rest is a great way to strengthen the core and posterior chain while ramping up the heart rate for a little conditioning.

Adjustable dumbbells –– This is where things start getting a little expensive and space becomes a concern. But if you have the resources, your options become almost limitless with what you can do when you add these to your home gym.

From here, things start getting really expensive in the form of items like benches, power racks, barbells, and then cardio machines. All of which are going to jack the prices up into the hundreds or even thousands.

Now, if you’ve got those kinds of resources, that’s fantastic and you should go all out to build the home gym of your dreams.

But this article is about building the most bang for your home workout buck. So I’m going to stick with the minimum effective dose of strength training at home.

Can you get stronger by working out at home?

Working out will always come down to a few basic principles; that’s if you’re cranking out deadlifts with barbells, tossing a kettlebell swing around in a circuit or knocking out some pull-ups in a bodyweight routine.

All of this can be achieved by focusing on exercises that work multiple muscles at once and do so in a pattern that matches our most basic human movements:

• Pushes
• Pulls/Rows
• Hip hinges
• Squats
• Lunges
• Planks

A well-balanced strength-focused workout program will emphasize these patterns of movement first and foremost. In doing so, all of your muscles will get some work––and hopefully get stronger.

In addition, a well-rounded individual will toss in some of the more primal (or animal style) movement patterns:

• Climb
• Crawl
• Sprint
• Jump

There are countless variations of each movement pattern. But it all comes back to these basic core principles. With that in mind, it’s easy to see that any program that incorporates all of these pillars is a successful one and it really doesn’t matter where that program is executed.

You do not need an entire gym to replicate these movement patterns.

Many of them can be performed from your own living room with minimal equipment, or even no equipment at all.

The key is to learn how to get stronger by tossing in a dose of creativity and more knowledge on how to progress.

How to add more resistance to your full body at home workout plan

Taking a quick look through some of the bodyweight and home workout routines provided by most Instagram trainers shows a pattern of a bunch of standard movements to be cranked out at extremely high repetitions.

This is dumb. And lazy.

When some coaches get plucked from their natural habitat of the weight room and don’t have their precious squat rack and weight plates around to increase intensity and strength by increasing weights, they lose all creativity.

You see, to them, if resistance (i.e., weight) cannot be increased throughout your working sets, then the next best thing must be the only option: time to increase the number of reps. This is flawed and unnecessary.

Strength training (or resistance training) is relative to the individual, but simply means you are taxing your muscles with some form of movement that allows for what us coaches call, progressive overload (fancy science stuff for getting stronger in a specific move).

The progressive overload principle is key, though. Because without it, you are not really getting as strong as your body has the capacity to achieve.

But don’t confuse the idea of progressive overload with a one-sided view of getting stronger by simply lifting more weight or adding more weight to the bar.

Getting stronger comes in many forms. It’s the reason why your workouts at home can and will be just as effective as the ones you perform in the gym.

Here are some ways to get stronger from bodyweight workouts:

Practice tougher movement variations –– For example: moving from a bodyweight squat to a single-leg pistol squat OR moving from a push-up to a one-arm or planche push-up.

OR Increase the range of motion –– For example: switch from a push-up to a deficit push-up.

Add more weight –– This is the most common pillar of improved strength. If you are adding more resistance to the barbell (or picking up heavier dumbbells or kettlebells), you are no doubt getting stronger. But without weights, you can get creative with things like a loaded backpack full of books.

Perform more reps or sets of a given exercise –– If you can progress from nailing 10 perfect push-ups to eventually knocking out 25 reps in one set, you’ve obviously made some awesome strength gains. And on that same token, it’s probably time to progress to a hard variation of the push-up at that point (like a decline push-up).

Reduce your rest time between sets or reps –– This one is more about intensity, but it is an under looked variable in strength training. Put down the phone and actually take a rest period for one minute (instead of three) and see how much tougher it is to crank out that next set.

Adjust your lifting tempo –– You can opt to increase the speed of each individual repetition, or rather decrease the speed. Take your normal bodyweight squat and add a 5-second lowering phase on each rep and tell me again how you can crank out 100 of them in one set. More time under tension means more stimulus to the muscle and more strength.

Additional rep schemes include: pause reps (pausing at the bottom of a movement); 1.5 reps (lowering through the full range of motion, returning halfway up, lowering back down before finally returning to the starting position); pulses and constant tension (not pausing at the starting position at all and constantly moving through the set).

Escalating density –– Perform two non-competing movements in supersetting fashion with minimal rest for a given period of time. For example: Set a timer for eight minutes and perform eight reps of push-ups followed by eight reps of pull-ups and alternate between the two with minimal rest until the timer is up.

Improve the form on how you perform movements –– Better form is an indicator that you have more control of the weight. More control of the weight means you are getting stronger. If you’re struggling to move up in weight and/resistance, check your form. Make sure you’re hitting on all cylinders before trying to crank out more reps or higher weight.

Getting creative –– You can get really creative with household items like soup cans, gallon water jugs and even a spare backpack loaded with books. If you’ve got space in your backyard, tossing around cement blocks can work, too.

The bottomline: take control of your workouts.

Look, if you enjoy bouncing around the living room with your $59.99 DVD set while sweating to some dubstep, awesome … I’m never going to shame you for enjoying movement.

However, if you’re looking for a more effective routine that’s based on the principles of strength and resistance training, you have an endless array of options at your disposal.

Let’s put it all together for a few routines you can try today.

Beginner home workouts you can try right now

Bodyweight only workouts

Start with this minimalist workout that requires absolutely no equipment:

Broad Jumps
Push ups w/3-second lowering phase
Squats w/1-second pause at the bottom
Bear crawls
Lunges
Prone ITYs
Reverse Hyper w/1-seconds pause at the top

Perform each movement in a circuit fashion for 30 seconds. Rest for 30-60 seconds between movements and repeat for 3-5 rounds for a full body workout.

Next level fitness: Tossing in the pull up bar

You can go to the next level up with your workout environment by adding an attachable pull up bar that can hang in a door frame.

The most foundational workout for anyone looking to strengthen muscle includes those big three movements.

Try this minimalist routine with just three exercises:

5 Pull ups
10 Push ups
20 Squats

Or you can try this one with a bit more volume:

Prisoner Squats 3 x 20 reps
Pull ups 3 x 6-8 reps
Lunges 3 x 15 reps / side
Push ups 3 x 20 reps
Single Leg Romanian Deadlift 3 x 12 reps /side
Plank to Push up 3 x 30-60 seconds

Simple. And simple gets done.

Next level fitness: Adding in the dumbbell

If you’ve got the cash flow and the room to toss in a pair of dumbbells, then this routine will do the trick.

The full body dumbbell home workout

1) DB Deadlift – 6-8 reps
– Rest 60 seconds and repeat 3 times for 4 total sets

2A) DB Push Press – 12 reps
– Rest 60 seconds and repeat 2 times for 3 total sets

3A) DB Step Up – 10 reps / side
– No rest
3B) Decline Push up – as many reps as possible
– Rest 60 seconds and repeat 2 times for 3 total sets

4A) Single Leg Hip Thrust – 10 reps / side
– No rest
4B) Plank – 45-60 seconds
– Rest 60 seconds and repeat 2 times for 3 total sets

All of those routines are designed to work the entire body through the duration of the session. Yes, that means the core and the legs and the chest and the arms and the back.

Now, go forth and prosper.

Let me help you figure out how to get a great full body workout at home … 

Finding the right time and right workout plan can be incredibly overwhelming. But, I’m here to help you out.

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “Full Body Workout at Home” and I’ll answer any questions you have about training.

Or you can hit me up anytime on the socialz on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

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