The Best At-Home Chest Workouts

As you can see, the pectoralis major has two sections or “heads:” the sternocostal head (“lower chest”) and clavicular head (“upper chest”). Thus, to develop full, proportional pecs, your chest workouts at home must include exercises that emphasize both sections.

The other noteworthy part of the pecs is the pectoralis minor. The “pec minor” lies underneath the pectoralis major and pulls the shoulder blade forward and toward the middle of your chest.

Many of the same exercises that effectively train the pec major also involve the pec minor, so it’s not necessary to use specific at-home chest exercises for the pec minor (and even if you did, it’d be hard to see whether or not your pec minor was growing). 

The Simple Science of Effective At-Home Chest Workouts

Creating an at-home chest workout is just like putting together any other chest workout, but with more constraints. 

You probably won’t have the hardware (e.g., a bench and a barbell) that most chest workout routines call for. Instead, you might only have your bodyweight, some resistance bands, and perhaps a few dumbbells or kettlebells. 

Bare-bones setups like this make it challenging to progressively increase the weights you lift. This is significant because lifting heavier weights over time (known as progressive overload) is the primary driver of muscle and strength gain.

[Read More: Is Getting Stronger Really the Best Way to Gain Muscle?]

So, how should you progress in your at-home chest workouts? You have several options: 

1. Do more reps or sets. 

High-rep sets (more than 10 reps) tend not to be much fun, but they can be just as effective for building and maintaining muscle as low-rep sets if you push close to failure. 

However, this only holds true for sets up to about 20 or 30 reps—doing 100 reps to failure isn’t as beneficial for muscle growth as doing 20 reps to failure.

Doing more sets can also be an effective strategy for goosing strength and muscle gain—even with bodyweight exercises—but it also quickly hits a point of diminishing returns. 

Doing more than 12-to-15 sets per muscle group per workout or more than 15-to-20 sets per muscle group per week usually doesn’t lead to additional gains and raises the risk of repetitive strain injuries (RSI).

2. Use more challenging exercise variations. 

For example, feet-elevated push-ups instead of regular push-ups or band push-ups instead of feet-elevated push-ups.

This can buy you a few more weeks or maybe even months of progress, but you’ll eventually run into the same problems—your workouts won’t be difficult enough to keep gaining muscle and strength.

3. Use bands or dumbbells.

Using bands or dumbbells can make your workouts significantly more challenging, enjoyable, and productive—enough to continue gaining muscle and strength even without a “real” home gym.

How effective can chest workouts at home really be, though?

If you’re a beginner weightlifter (less than a year of weightlifting experience), you can effectively gain chest muscle and strength with at-home chest workouts.

You won’t progress as quickly as you would if you were following a barbell-based training plan, but you’ll get noticeable results.

And if you’re more advanced, you can probably maintain most of your chest size and strength with pec workouts at home for at least a month or so. If you have bands, you can probably extend this by another month (or possibly more). 

And if you have a heavy enough set of dumbbells, you can maintain your physique more or less indefinitely (although you’ll likely lose some strength). 

I’m a prime example of how effective chest workouts at home can be. I used the same kinds of at-home chest workouts you’re going to learn in this article to easily maintain my muscle mass (while losing body fat) when my gym was closed for several months in early 2020. 

Here’s a pic of me in late 2019 before the Covid lockdowns (left) and one of me after several months of chest workouts at home: