Strength Training At Home Without Equipment for Beginners

Inside are two strength and muscle-building workouts: one for men and one for women. They are designed to get you results in 30 days without any equipment by using your own body weight and a couple of things you can find around your place, such as a backpack or tote bag. No lifting equipment is needed.

No Equipment 30-day home Workout For Men

The Goal Of The Workout

To build a masculine looking physique, that will mean building a V-Shape. Broad, muscular shoulders, with a strong back and chest, and thicker arms and neck. To look athletic (and move like an athlete) and to prevent back pain, some lower body work will be a part of a balanced program.

Download The Workout PDF

Download the PDF to get all 4 weeks for free—you don’t need to sign up.

But if you want to join our weekly Outlive newsletter, you can also get an editable Google Spreadsheet (or download as Excel), choose from a list of programmed exercise alternatives, links to our favourite videos to learn the exercises, and we’ll walk you through the beginner workouts. Just scroll down a bit to see the sign-up form.

No Equipment 30-day Home Workout For Women

The Goal Of The Workouts

Many programs treat women like smaller men and prescribe a ton of chest and arm work. But most women aren’t trying to get massive pecs or vascular, thick biceps and huge triceps. (Obviously, many women want to have nice, toned arms, but that’s something different.)

Instead, many women are looking to build up their hips (in the same way men try and build up their shoulders), tone their stomach, and develop some of the upper body strength to make their daily life easier like throwing big travelling suitcases.

The best way to build up a great butt is by working the glutes in all four jobs they do for the most. (We’ll show you how in the women’s workout but if you want to read an enormous guide on this topic, check out the building bigger hips guide on Bony to Bombshell.)

Download The Workout PDF

Click the image below and get a PDF of all 4 weeks for free—you don’t need to sign up. But should you want to join the weekly Outlive newsletter, you can also get an editable Google Spreadsheet (or download as Excel), choose from a list of programmed exercise alternatives, links to our favourite videos to learn the exercises, and we’ll walk you through the beginner workouts. Just scroll down a bit to see the sign-up form.

Tips for doing these home workouts

Push Yourself, But Keep Pristine Form

Make each exercise hard enough so that you can get close to failure (without losing good form). That means you may want to try going to failure on an exercise to test yourself to see how many reps you can do. Then once you know that, try and stay a rep or two away from failure. You don’t want to go to true failure for every single exercise and every single set. Staying one or two reps away from failure will prevent extreme soreness, and reduce the chances of injury while still being heavy enough to get results. New research is showing that going right to the edge of failure with lighter bodyweight exercises may be necessary for “full muscle recruitment” compared to traditional, heavy low-rep weight-lifting. Never lose good form as you exercise. When your form gets sloppy, stop and rest.

Use A Backpack Or Tote Bag

To make exercises heavier without buying gym equipment, try using a backpack or cotton tote bag and load it up with the heaviest things in your house. I took a small tote bag and placed 7 hardcover books inside and it weighed about 3kg / 6 pounds. I’ve successfully loaded up a cotton totebag with 80 pounds of iron plates and it still didn’t break. Another option would be to buy two 4L jugs of water. Each jug weighs around 4kg / 8lbs, which is perfect for getting started with some curls, shoulder raises, and more. With a tote bag, you should be able to stack two water jugs in there to get it up to 16 pounds. You may need to tie the handles to make the bag shorter so it doesn’t hit the ground when doing rows.

Explosive Lifting, Controlled Lowering

Do the lifting part of the exercise as fast and explosively as possible. This generates power and stimulates your central nervous system.

Go slow and control the exercise on the way down. A big part of stressing your body to adapt is being able to control weight, so don’t drop quickly, but control the lowering over 2-3 seconds. This is really important when you don’t have access to weights. Make it slow and feel the burn.

Don’t Worry About Form As Long As It’s Pain-Free

When it comes to exercise form, give yourself some grace as long as it’s pain free. Dan John, a revered strength coach, says he doesn’t worry about butt-wink until someone’s done their 10,000th squat (if you don’t know what butt wink is, that’s okay, let’s worry about after a few months!). Sometimes we don’t need to think harder about our form with our conscious minds. We just need to physically practice the movement, sleep, and let our brains rewire the movement. Go watch a video on how to do the proper form, then give it your best shot. As long as nothing hurts, you’re in a good spot. Go to sleep, and you’ll get a bit better at it. Keep repeating this, and your form will get better with time.

Have A Protein-Heavy Meal Afterwards

Try this if you’re serious about results: have a protein-heavy meal afterwards. If you can’t do this, a scoop of protein powder (whey, if you like dairy or a scoop of collagen powder) right after your workout can work. Even without tweaking much of your diet elsewhere, this will help prevent soreness by having more protein to recover properly and may help you get leaner and more muscular at the same time as a beginner.

This routine will help encourage your body to get stronger and build muscle. Then you’ll control your nutrition to either get leaner (if you’re overweight and want to burn fat) or if you want to get bigger (if you’re skinny and want to build more muscle).

How to get started working out as a beginner

Pick a day to start exercising, commit, and set consequences

We overestimate how much time and energy we have in the future. Plus, we see the future version of our self more like a stranger, and less like us. And we can use this to our advantage.

We can give them, the future self, the burden of doing the actual work of the first workout.

Your job today is to pick a day you’ll start, like this upcoming Monday, and then set consequences for your future self.

Why you need short-term consequences

The problem with not working out is that there are no real consequences—at least not today. The downsides of not exercising are way off in the future.

Plus, when you work out, it takes time, energy, and you might get sore for a couple days after until your body adapts to it. So there are a lot of short-term downsides. So you’ll need to make short-term consequences to match.

All those amazing benefits?

Getting stronger, leaner, more energetic, mentally sharper, looking better, reducing pain, living better… all of that comes once you break past the initial short-term downsides.

So, let’s say you want to start in a few days, on Monday. You want to make it as real and defined as possible. So you say you’ll do the exercises immediately once you get home at 4:00 pm.

And the consequences? If you don’t work out on Monday, you’ll owe your best buddy $20.

Ideally, you’d even set up 30 days of accountability (called the Ulysses contract). Tell your buddy you want to work out 3x a week for 4 weeks, so twelve sessions. Say you’ll allow one slip-up. So in 4 weeks, you’ll do 11 workouts. Give them $50 (or however much would hurt to lose) and have them give it back to you if you succeed.

If you’re more of a carrot person (instead of a stick motivated), then you can add in a reward. We’d still recommend setting negative consequences to ensure you hit your goal since they’re more powerful than positive reinforcement, but you could do both.

Every workout you do, you get to do something you absolutely love, like watch a movie afterward. Or maybe you allow yourself to have that third coffee as you’re working out. Think about it: what is a small thing that you love that you could link to each successful workout?

What does a good home workout look like?

Here’s what to look for in your workouts

• A routine designed for beginners. That means it uses beginner exercises that are simpler to do and harder to screw up, and it’s not an overkill amount of work (that’ll make you way sorer than you need to be).
• The routine has proper progression for a beginner (periodization). that will continue to challenge your body because your body will adapt to what you throw at it. For example, this means that week 2 could have more sets, reps, or make the exercise heavier somehow.
• The workouts trains the body in the 6 main movements:
  • There’s a push. Like a push-up, dumbbell bench, overhead shoulder press, etc. This would mainly work your chest (pecs), the back of your arms (triceps) and your shoulders (deltoids).
  • There’s a pull. This could be something like a weighted row or a chin-up. This would mainly work your back (like your lats), the front of your arms (biceps), and the back of your shoulders (deltoids)
    • There’s squat. This is when your knees do most the moving, and you drop into a squat between your legs like an air squat or goblet squat. This would mainly work your butt (glutes), and the front of your legs (quads).
  • There’s a hip hinge. This is when the hips do most the moving (less knee), and your hips shoot back. An example is the weighted Romanian deadlift. This would mainly work the back of your legs (hamstrings), your butt (glutes), and your lower back stabilizer muscles (spinal erectors, helps with posture and fix back pain.) This movement can be done at home with a tote bag and loading it up with some heavier items.
  • There’s a carry. A carry will solve many core and postural problems. They help people get back ownership in their life, making them stronger at nearly everything. It’s hard to do a proper farmer carry without heavy weights, so we have a couple of solutions in our free download.
  • There’s a front core exercise. Something that either prevents movement (isometric) will protect your back by teaching core stability and rigidness. An example of that would be a front plank. You could choose to add in an exercise where the core is moving for more ab size, like the McGill Curl-Up which is like a crunch that won’t destroy your back (we have a link to the videos if you use the free sign up.) These core exercises would mainly work the front of your core like the abs (rectus abdominis), the obliques, since the back of your core would get worked a lot with a hinge and other movements.

Here’s what to avoid in a workout

• High-risk moves with little payoff. For example, you don’t need to do two-minute long planks, crunches or sit-ups. They aren’t necessary for core strength and won’t help with burning stomach fat. (The main way to lose belly fat, love handles, and visceral fat is through aerobic work like brisk walking and overall body fat loss, mainly accomplished through nutrition.)
• Exercises that are too advanced for your strength or your coordination—this puts you at risk for injury. For example, many women don’t have the strength yet to do push-ups. They still try to do them, but with a form that will hurt their lower back. They should start with a push-up plank to get their core study first. The push-up is really a moving plank, and if you can’t hold the core tight, then the push-up isn’t going to go too well. If they want to practice the push movement, they could do kitchen counter push-ups or wall-push ups at first. Here’s a good article for women trying to get started with the push-up.
• Anything that prescribes more than 30–40 reps or extremely long holds. The first reason is that you’re in endurance/cardio territory. 50 squats are just hellish and won’t help you reach your goals, as it’s mainly working your heart. That’s fine, but if you want to get stronger, more muscular, and even leaner, you’ll want to do something that challenges your muscles—not only your heart. That means it’ll need to be heavy enough. The second reason is that injury often happen from endurance failure. You’re more apt to hurt yourself when doing 50 bodyweight squats to complete exhaustion compared to picking up a potato bag and doing 10 reps with it. (Don’t worry—you can still work your heart by doing correctly paired circuits.)

Matching Your home Workouts To Your Goals

Imagine someone who wants to get into working out. They want to get leaner, get more muscular, become healthier and feel their best. But they’re a total beginner. Often, we’ll see someone recommend incredibly advanced routines, and for a beginner, that’s terribly dangerous.

Most free at-home workouts are cardio in disguise

Often designed to improve cardio and aren’t fitting for your goals. There’s nothing wrong with cardio, it’s great to work your heart out and improve your cardiovascular health. But most beginners are looking to either burn fat or build muscle to look better and become healthier—not only give their heart a workout.

Most workouts aren’t progressively challenging you

Even if the beginner workouts are resistance-based (using gravity, weights, bands, etc.), they’re not progressive. As you do something, you get better at it (neurological gains), and if you’re eating well, you’ll be getting stronger and more muscular. So you make significant progress in the first week. But then your body adapts, and if you keep doing the same thing, you’ll stop changing. Your body already adapted after all. So you’ll need a periodized workout. Periodized training is a program that’s specifically designed to cover a period of time to help you perform your best. Sometimes it’s used to be in the top condition for athletic performance. But in the case of just becoming stronger, generally, most are designed change over time, so your body will continue to adapt optimally.

Many workouts can put you at a higher risk of injury than needed

Badly programmed and put you at risk for injury. Many programs prescribe exercises that don’t train the way the body actually moves, and so they don’t help to achieve the results you want while also putting you at risk of hurting yourself as a beginner. For example, crunches work the upper abs, but Dr Stuart McGill (professor emeritus of Spine Biomechanics at the University of Waterloo) says that repeatedly flexing the spine damages the lining of the discs in your back. Now, you might be doing 50 to 100 crunches in some random workout on the internet and not feel pain. But as you continue to do them, the disc tissue could weaken and become unstable. Then something as simple as a sneeze could throw your back out. There are other ways to work your upper abs without risking your back.

Workouts don’t teach you what to do next to progress

The routines don’t tell you what to do next to keep improving yourself. Your body weight will only take you so far. You will need to get close to failure to continue to adapt. Eventually, once you’re able to do 30 to 40 push-ups, it’ll be harder to get to close to true failure as the burning pain increase. Plus, as you start to burn fat and become more muscular, and you begin to crave the mood benefits and brain performance boosts that exercise brings, then you might not scoff at paying $500 to build a home gym. In fact, you may even be ready to go all out and invest a couple grand. We’ll outline when you should think about the next step of adding weights as progressive resistance.

We love total beginners. They don’t have a lot of incorrect things to unlearn. But the best way to help them is not to metaphorically throw them into the deep end of the pool and tell them to swim. The best way is to give them a step-by-step scientifically-based workout that will help them reach their goals, that fits real life, and that doesn’t put them at risk for injury (especially since beginners tend to be both weaker and a bit uncoordinated at first.)

What If I’m Older? Can I Still Do Home Workouts?

If you’re over 50, you’ll definitely want to get cleared to exercise. That might include a stress test. Generally, it’s pretty difficult to go through life this long without getting some injuries. Someone over the age of 50 might want to visit the sports physiotherapist and ask them what they think they’re capable of, and what they could do to rehab their body to get into good enough shape for a general program.

On a side note, those over 50 will have different nutritional concerns. It seems like getting even more protein, especially a wide variety like bone broth and organ meats, might be important since as you age your ability to digest it worsens. Also, there’s some other research that supplementing with creatine could be necessary to get the best results (study).

Lastly, older people generally have crankier joints. They may want to make an effort to consume more bone broth or bone marrow and avoid having iron-fortified white flour. They may even want to look into neat-infrared or red-light therapy for improving joint pain. On the training side, staying away from low-rep like the 1-5 rep range (very heavy) work would be best. You’ll want to stay in the medium range, closer to 10-12 (and all the way up to 30) reps to take the heavy stress off the joints a bit.

What to Eat When It Comes To Your Workouts?

I’m skinny, and I want to bulk up, get bigger and build muscle

If you’re skinny and want to bulk up, that new muscle still to be built will need to come from food outside your body. Nutrition will play a key role, and eating enough to gain weight will likely be harder than doing the beginner workouts. (There’s a great guide on eating more over at Bony to Beastly.)

The basics on the nutrition front are:

• Eat 0.8–0.1g of protein per ideal bodyweight pound every single day. This is a ton of protein, but you’ll need to eat enough protein not just to live (like you usually do), but eat even more protein so your body has an abundance and will build muscle with it. This is our “boosted” recommendation, to learn more you can read all about reaching your protein goals in our protein powder article. If you’ve tried working out before and couldn’t get stronger, not getting enough protein likely played a part in this. Try eating protein with every meal, particularly before and after you work out.
• Eat enough calories to gain weight slowly and predictably. Your body will need extra calories to help build new muscle. Going slowly reduces needless fat gains. If you’re not getting bigger and gaining weight, it is 100% a calorie issue if you’re healthy. You’ll need to either increase the amount you’re eating every day, or look at how consistent you are at hitting your goals. Using an app like MyFitnessPal will help you reach your goals. Research shows that tracking using an app like MyFitnessPal is an easy way to hit your goals (study). Try and stack most of your calorie surplus before and after you work out for even leaner gains (better nutrient partitioning.)

Then, the workouts will be mainly be focused on size called hypertrophy training. Hypertrophy training is a type of resistance training. Instead of lifting weights as a resistance though, we can use gravity and a couple tricks (down below) for a little while.

However, many skinny guys are already quite strong for how much muscle they have. So they’ll need to find new ways to challenge themselves to grow by doing size training. So that means getting into the higher rep range like doing 8–20 reps per set.

And as a beginner, you’ll want to be doing full-body workouts, not splits. This is because you’ll need to bulk up everywhere, gain co-ordination, and won’t need a ton of volume to grow, and you don’t have a lot of muscle yet that needs 3 days to recover from ultra-heavy lifting.

NOTE: if you’re skinny, take this as an encouragement—but this will be the only time that you’ll be able to get steroid-like gains naturally. You can build a lot of muscle, very very quickly (called newbie gains.)

If you’re skinny-fat, you may want to read our article about bulking without getting fatter and how to deal with belly-fat as a skinny person for some more nuanced details for your body-type.

I’m overweight want to get leaner and burn fat

If you’re overweight and want to burn fat, you’ll need to get into a calorie deficit while eating a high-protein diet and doing resistance training. A calorie deficit is a fancy way of saying that you’ll need to eat less energy from food than you use up every day by living. When people eat less food, they inevitably eat less protein too, making their muscles and their organs shrink. The slowed metabolism and weight re-gain most dieters experience is the body protecting itself from chronically low levels of protein (2020 study.)

The best way to burn fat is not through cardio, but through resistance training (study, study). This is because resistance helps to burn fat while telling your body to keep your muscle, so you don’t just “lose weight” but rather burn fat while building muscle (often called body recomposition). Keeping your muscle will keep you feeling strong and look your best as well. So why does resistance training help burn fat?:

• Resistance training burns some calories as you’re doing it.
• Resistance training causes your body to continue to burn calories after you’ve worked out by increasing your metabolism. This is because your body is burning energy trying to repair the muscles that got worked out. This is one of the main advantages over cardio training since cardio won’t have this same effect.
• Resistance training encourages muscle protein synthesis. This is a fancy way of saying that exercising tells your body to build muscle. Muscle is the kind of weight you’ll want to keep. It keeps you strong, it gives you an athletic look and having more muscle can increase your metabolism a little bit.

Then you’ll need to dial in your nutrition to burn fat:

• Eat less energy then you burn every day so your fat needs to be burnt to make up the gap. This is not easy, but there are a lot of paths to help accomplish this.
  • Eat more high-protein foods like lean meats, organs, bone broth, etc. Higher protein diets increase your metabolism through diet-induced thermogenesis.
  • Eat foods with more fibre and that are less processed (ie “clean”) foods.
    • Whole, unprocessed foods have less calories in them compared to processed since they haven’t been pre-digested by industrial cooking.
    • They fill you up more. The more fibre and the more water, the better. Think of something like eating an orange or apple.
    • They help you feel better because they’re full of vitamins and minerals. When you feel good, you’ll move more without trying, which burns calories.
  • Chew slower and ditch liquid calories. Chewing helps you feel fuller. Liquid calories, is one way people get a beer gut, since it’s pretty easy to knock back a couple hundred calories in beer without it making them feel full.
  • Drink water with your meals. This plays on the same mechanism of water filling you up a little bit without adding any calories.
    
  • Try intermittent fasting, like the 16:8 method. This means fasting for 16 hours and eating in an 8-hour window. The most popular method is to eat from 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm. That will allow you to eat to fullness for lunch and dinner and a snack before bed, but cuts out a whole meal worth of calories normally for breakfast. The only thing to be aware of is that it may make it harder to eat enough protein, so you may need a protein powder if you’re doing intermittent fasting.
  • Use an app like MyFitnessPal (free) to track calories. Research shows that using an app helps to reach your calorie goals (study). It’s possible that the reminders from notifications or some of the other features help people stay focused on their goals.
• Eat 0.8–0.1g of protein per ideal bodyweight pound every single day. This is a lot of protein, but you’ll need to eat enough protein not just to live (like you usually do), but eat even more protein, so your body doesn’t lose the muscle and proteins from its organs. You don’t want weight loss, which will make your weight rebound—you want fat loss. You want to keep the muscle and your organs healthy. Research shows that as you eat fewer calories, you’ll eat less protein (study). And that’s important because…

Eating lots of protein will:

• Increase your metabolism
• Help to control cravings since protein is extremely filling
• Help you feel more satisfied after eating
• Keep your strength, even as you get lighter, allowing you to feel better. (And not only does feeling better have its own perks, but you’ll be more likely to keep exercising, keeping the fat loss going strong.)
• Prevents yo-yo fat gain by ensuring your body has enough protein to be healthy even while cutting calories

You’ll likely want a good protein powder to help you reach your goals. This is so you can get all the benefits that protein brings without all the calories from extra carbs/fats. You can read more about protein powders in our protein powder super-guide here.

As you continue to lose weight, you’ll start to lose the love handles and tighten up everywhere.

Superficial belly fat is one of the last places to lean out and responds to more exercise and movement in general. So if you’re looking for a six-pack, you’ll need to be patient and diligent, cut calories, do ab workouts, and walk more. (And you’ll likely need to graduate to using weights to get there.)

cardiovascular fitness Workout

What Is A Cardio Workout?

Maybe you’ve heard the word aerobics tossed around. Let’s first cover some ground, so we understand what’s going on. Our body generates and then uses ATP (adenosine triphosphate) for energy. This energy is the direct currency that we spend that allows us to breathe, lift things, move, etc.

There are two ways our bodies generate this energy.

1. One way is to make energy without oxygen (anaerobic)
2. The other way energy to make it with oxygen (aerobic).

Our bodies usually make this ATP energy anaerobically. While anaerobic produces greater force, it can’t generate as much energy as aerobic, and after you use it, it turns into lactic acid (the burning feeling when you start doing higher-rep work.) (study). But if you’re doing a lot of exercises, sometimes we burn out of the stored (and slower generating) anaerobic energy in a few minutes, so our body starts to blend in more aerobic work.

Both anaerobic and aerobic exercise works out the cardiovascular system but in different ways. So if one of your goals is energy, health, and performance, it’d be good to eventually build up the ability to include both types in your life.

But in general, any exercise that is explosive in nature is anaerobic. This is because your most explosive action is 6x more powerful than the maximum amount of energy aerobics can provider. So, any exercise done with maxed out effort under 6 seconds is anaerobic. Then, exercises from 20 seconds–to 4 minutes with a high intensity is a mix of anaerobic and aerobic.

Then, endurance exercises that aren’t intense are generally aerobic. But the researchers said that any time you use intensity, that’d be the anaerobic system gradually stepping in. So if someone were running a track race, and jogged at a low intensity for 10 minutes, that’d be aerobic. And then as they came upon the final metres and started to run hard, it’d open up the anaerobic pathways for the boost of power.

So if we’re moving for a long time with a low enough intensity, our body needs more oxygen to keep moving, so we start breathing a little harder, and our heart starts to work harder to pump the blood with the oxygen to where it needs to be. This is how aerobic training plays its part in strengthening the heart.

For example, when you keep your heart rate up as you exercise, like swimming or walking briskly outside for 30 minutes, that will require lots of oxygen to generate continuous energy, meaning it’ll be an aerobic exercise and work out your heart.

The cool thing is that resistance training (lifting heavy things or using gravity with our body weight) can get our heart-rate up too. It doesn’t work quite as good as strengthening the heart as standard “cardio” exercises, but it can work out the heart well—you just need to keep your heart-rate up.

Start with resistance training, then start walking for cardio

The reason why is because of doing resistance training, you can encourage your body to build muscle because it needs to get stronger, you can tell your bones to get denser to support the weight on them, you can burn more calories by repairing those muscles, and you can still strengthen your a bit heart by keeping your heart-rate up.

Also, in your day-to-day life, you’re probably missing the “intense” part of resistance training more than you are missing the low intensity movement, like walking. Many people already walk quite a bit, so they’ve got that covered and need to do some more intense training that challenges their muscles and power.

Even if you’re quite sedentary and sit at work, you’ll find more benefits by adding in resistance training first. Then you can gradually add in some brisk walking later.

Go for a walk outside and try to see how far you can get in 15 minutes. To make sure it’s not too intense, make sure you’d still be able to hold a conversation—you shouldn’t be struggling to breathe. This is a simple way of getting your heart rate up along with getting some mental benefits of sunlight, brightness, and fresh air.

What about using HIIT (high-intensity interval training) for better fat-loss?

High-intensity interval training is when you briefly push yourself and then take a short rest. For example, you might be on a stationary bike and do 30 seconds of hard pedalling with high resistance. Then spend 2 minutes recovering. Do that 4–6 times and you’re done exercising in under 15 minutes. HIIT trains both the anaerobic and the aerobic systems.

But does it work better for fat-loss? In this 2017 meta-analysis looking at 28 studies comparing HIIT (high intensity) and LISS (low intensity like regular cardio), it found there really was no difference. So, some studies said HIIT was better for fat-loss, some studies said LISS was better, and some studies said they were both in the middle. (This is why we can’t just take one study and claim the answer is solved, we need a meta-analysis for more clarity).

Then in February 2019, a new meta-analysis came out looking at 41 studies comparing HIIT and moderately intense continuous cardio. The researchers said that the results were similar, but that people lost a bit more fat with HIIT (meta-analysis). So a lot of people do HIIT because it’s more time efficient and also because it may be better at improving VO2 max, your maximum oxygen uptake (study).

But high intensity is high stress. That means that even though it takes less time to do, it’s still really tough and so you’ll need to recover from that.

We find people do better when they build a good cardio base first as they focus on a better diet.

How long and how far can you walk at a brisk pace? Focus on being able to walk for a long period and a fast pace before moving onto HIIT training.

Once you’ve got a good cardio base, when it comes down to it—both LISS and HIIT are excellent ways to get leaner. So personal preference starts to matter more. For example, my business partner Shane likes to do low-intensity cardio for an hour while listening to a podcast. He prefers to do something more leisurely and enjoyable and doesn’t mind spending the time since he can also be learning at the same time. But for me, I’d rather do the intense but quick HIIT sessions to save time. The fact that HIIT could be better at improving VO2 max, and could be a little bit better at burning fat is a nice bonus.

Frequently asked questions at home workouts

Should I work out at home in the morning, afternoon, or night?

James Krieger is a scientist with a master’s degree in both Nutrition and Exercise Science, says that after reviewing all the research, for beginners it doesn’t really matter when you work out. (There may be a slight edge to afternoon training for advanced lifters, pay-wall review.)

What really matters is that you’re exercising and your consistency. Do what best fits your lifestyle and your preferences.

So does a morning workout fit better for you? Great. Just spend a few more minutes warming up, and eat something light with protein (we like having a banana and a protein shake.)

If the afternoon works best for you, you’re probably already warmed up and have eaten some good, solid food. You’re pretty set, and this is pretty ideal.

If the evening works best, just be sure to keep the end of your exercise at least one hour away from when you sleep. So if you go to bed at 11 pm, don’t start working out at 10 pm.

If you have total control over your schedule, try and do your workouts at home but outside in the backyard in the sunshine. For example, do your cardio workouts outside by walking or jogging outside. Some people bring their kettlebells out into the back yard, etc.

How often should a beginner do the workouts?

This is a complicated question, and the definitive answer is still being clarified by research. There have been a few notable analyses’ of the research so far with some small differences (Dr. Schoenfeld study, Stronger by Science, James Krieger Review)

When it comes to building muscle, it seems like you can build just as much muscle with as little as 2 workout sessions a week, as long as how much total work (volume) you do is the same.

However, splitting up the work over more days might help with building muscle, especially if you have bad work capacity (bad fitness.)

On top of that, it’d make your workouts more enjoyable, bearable, and spreads out the physical stress of working out over the week. You’ll probably feel better since you wouldn’t take such a beating on one day.

So, a general recommendation is to start with 3 days a week while trying to work towards doing a small workout every day. That would let you have a solid workout every couple of days, with one day of rest in between.

But if you’re up for trying it, you might even want to try working out 5 or 6 days a week. The reason why is because your actual workouts could be shorter (since the amount of work would be spread out over the week), it’d be easier to do more total work since it’s spread out, it keeps your reps “higher-quality” making your gains better, and it might help you glue down your new exercise habit since you’re making a space for it every day. (Read more about workout frequency here.)

Each person will have their own preferences when it comes to how many times they want to work out. Some people like the daily mental clarity and better memory that comes with working out.

For total beginners, we like to keep the workouts short and fun and like to help them carve out a specific time in their day to start a habit. So we recommend that they find a time where they fit 15-20 minutes into their day and do it 5 days a week (and do complete rest on the weekends).

Where should you work out at home?

For a total beginner with no equipment, you can work out in your living room or back yard.

But if you have the choice, and you live in an area with clean air, and it’s warm enough out, it’d be great to get outside in the yard in the sunshine to work out. That way you’ll also get these benefits:

• You’ll move more, and it’ll feel more natural. For example, in this study people walked faster and said it was less hard when they walked outside compared to those walking inside. (study)
• It’ll be better for your health (mentally and generally). Being outside in a green space helps you feel better. Researchers think it could be stress reducing. (study)
• You’ll feel more awake, you’ll be calmer and then sleep better at night. Bright light helps to produce melatonin, which enables you to fall asleep at night. Bright light also helps to produce serotonin, which results in a positive and calm mood (article). The amount of bright light you get inside doesn’t even come close to matching being outdoors.
• You’ll get better air quality (probably.) It’s easy for indoor air to become stale. Without fresh air circulating in, slowly the carbon dioxide will increase, lowering the relative amounts of oxygen. If you exercise outside, you’ll get fresh air with more oxygen. Obviously, you should use your judgement depending on where you live and current climate conditions. (I once got an email from an Australian saying he couldn’t get his daily steps in due to the wildfires around him lowering outdoor air quality.)
• Your body will get the other health benefits of sunlight. Infrared rays from the sun are in their highest ratio-to-UV early in the morning and later in the day helps our body get ready for the day and to recover at the end of the day. The harsher mid-day sun gives us vitamin D but some care should be taken not to burn. Sunlight has been unfairly demonized for its link to skin cancer. But as long as you don’t burn (getting more infrared early in the day helps), sunlight is more protective in fighting off numerous diseases that are much more common. (article, article) It lowers blood pressure and contributes to better cardio health as well.

Later on, many people choose to build a small but functional home garage gym (just might need a space heater in the winter.)

I love getting stronger with these workouts, what’s next?

Here’s the reality… as long as you’re consistent with these at-home workouts, and you’re eating enough protein, you’re going to get stronger and make pretty rapid progress. In fact, you may be shocked by how strong you’ll get in such a small amount of time. It won’t be long until using gravity with your bodyweight for resistance won’t be enough anymore.

Once you start getting beyond 20–30 reps in one set, you’ll find it harder to reach true failure as the high-rep sets become very painful. You’ll likely want to get real weights to help the weight get heavier again.

You’ll need to make things heavier to keep challenging your body

If you aren’t being challenged, you won’t be adapting anymore.

Doing 30 body weight push-ups? Buy some weight plates, like a 10-pound plate, and add that on top of your back. You’ll likely only be able to do 10 reps. When you can do 20 reps with that, add a 25-pound plate, and repeat the process again.

Instead of doing 30 bodyweight squats, hold a 15-pound kettlebell and do Goblet Squats close to failure. (Perhaps you get 8 reps, and slowly start building from there.)

This is how people slowly start to build a home gym.