Its a relevant question for anyone who doesnt have access to a weight room. If youre a regular gym-goer, bench presses, flies, and dumbbell moves are likely hardwired into your chest training, and thats because theyre such great pec-builders. Whether youre mixing heavy weights or high reps, doing those moves correctly almost always fuels a great chest pump.

But that doesnt mean you cant pump up your pecs away from the gym and thats where this workout comes in. Whether youre training at home or working out on the road in your hotel room, ideally, you still want to be able to train hard, and you want to the able to continue your gains. And if youre chasing major chest size, that means doing more than a few sets of basic pushups.

Heres the thing with standard bodyweight exercises: Theyre great, up until a point. To really add to your muscle and strength, at some point in your training journey, you need to overload a muscle, lifting more than is comfortable or easy. When you start doing pushups, sure, theyre hard, but after awhile, they become simple. Tempo and pulses can add to the challenge, but are they really overloading your body?

Thankfully, you can overload your body with creative pushup variations that attack and load your chest from multiple angles. And that means that even if you can bench a house, you can still build your chest with mere bodyweight.

How To Push Your Chest With Bodyweight

Two main principles let you attack your chest with mere bodyweight, and both work because they're essentially challenging your chest to lift more than it does in a standard pushup.

Elevation

Ever notice that, if you touch the bar to your chest on an incline bench press, it's harder than a standard flat bench press. There's a reason for that. The incline forces you to open your upper arm angle relative to your torso position, and overall, that means the bar has to travel a greater distance from chest to straightened-arm-position. Decline presses, meanwhile, have the bar traveling a smaller distance.

Opening your upper arm angle forces chest and triceps to continue "pressing" upwards for longer during bench presses. That, of course, also works with pushups, too, so if you can create a more open angle, you'll make your pushup more challenging. How do you do that with a pushup? Elevate your feet, using a box or chair at home.

Unilateral Loading

Why are one-arm pushups so brutal? Because you're pressing up the majority of your bodyweight with one arm, essentially nearly doubling the load you're moving with that arm. You also have to deal with balance challenges from the offset loading setup, perfect for building core strength, too.

That doesn't mean you need to do one-arm pushups to reap the benefits of unilateral loading. Archer pushups and post pushups, two favorites of fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. , also deliver the same benefits.

The Workout

Now you understand you have weapons for chest training with only bodyweight, so you're ready to attack. You can do this workout as often as three days a week, resting at least one day between each session. You'll only use bodyweight here, but you will be pushing yourself. On days you don't do this workout, aim to train your back, doing pullups, chinups, and dumbbell rows, or work your legs with squats and lunges.

Do the exercises in order. Complete all sets of each exercise before moving onto the next.

Post Pushup Dropset

Do 4 sets of this dropset per side, focusing on keeping your hips and shoulders completely square to the ground (yes, that means your abs will fire up too).