5 Pushup Variations That Will Actually Help Your Chest Gains at Home

While working out at home has swiftly become the new normal as lockdown continues, Athlean-X expert Jeff Cavaliere C.S.C.S. is aware that it’s all-too-easy to let the intensity of training slide. In his latest video, he explains how to ensure that those chest gains keep coming, even without access to the gym.

“When you’re home, the tendency is to not train hard enough,” he says. “You don’t have the benefit of a real heavy bench press to create tension. What we need to do here is create more of a metabolic overload, and take it to failure.”

Cavaliere structures his chest day workout into 5 exercises, starting with the easiest and then increasing in difficulty. They are:

The incline rotating pushup feels easy in one way, as you’re letting gravity do some of the work, but the rotational movement also creates relative adduction which contracts the chest. The hand release pushup provides a little reinforcement, as your chest actually touches the ground at the bottom of the movement. The external movement of the arms in this variation also works the rotator cuff, and the reps become more challenging the more of them you do.

The bear pushup, performed with your feet up against the wall, makes lifting your bodyweight more of a challenge. (This might be easier barefoot than in shoes.)

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This episode of “watch me turn red before your eyes” is worth a re-run in these quarantined times. This is the Bear Push-up and it’s brutally amazing. Taking the feet off the floor prevents them from pushing down in order to drive your body up. That leaves the upper body to do all the work (check out the stark red line dividing the working muscles from the rest!) Of course, the hold every few reps is just my way of making a tough Bodyweight movement…even tougher. The bottom line is this, home exercises do not have to be inferior when it comes to building muscle. They just have to be hard. Don’t come much harder than this one! Let the quarantine gains begin!! #pushup #trainhard #flex #waitforit #redlikeatomato #muscles #homeexercises #pushupworkout #workout #teamathlean #athleanx #jeffcavaliere

A post shared by ATHLEAN-X™ | Jeff Cavaliere (@athleanx) on Apr 11, 2020 at 7:37pm PDT

Similarly, the decline wall pushup works the chest harder by removing the pressure that you would usually put on your toes. The exercise that arguably makes you work the hardest, though, is the single-arm posted pushup, which maximizes the pressure and contraction on one side.

Your task is to pick the pushup variation that you find most difficult and can only manage 3 to 8 reps of, and begin the workout with that movement. Perform the exercise until failure and then follow it with a 30-second crossover isometric squeeze to create contraction in your chest. Complete 4 sets, with 2 minutes of rest in between.

Once you have finished your most difficult exercise, you then work your way back through a dropset of the remaining exercises without rest, taking each move until failure for 3 to 4 sets. By sequentially performing moves that are decreasing in difficulty, Cavaliere says you will be able to keep repping out even if you’re exhausted from the harder sets at the beginning.

“This will always scale with you,” explains Cavaliere. “You can continue to add a more difficult or explosive version of a pushup… The best option you have is to ensure that you’re training to and through failure.”

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