Build a Big Chest at Home Using Only Resistance Bands

what's up guys so welcome to my backyard for any of you that want to be able to do a real chess workout I know I'm not talking about some sort of like kind of get it in workout because I can't make it to the gym no I'm talking about a real workout that you can do anytime anyplace that means if you're at home you want to do it in the backyard like I am now you want to do it in the house you want to do it in the office you're traveling you want to do in the hotel this is that workout for you so we're gonna go through I'm gonna share with you some of my favorite chest exercises using only resistance bands this is the bag that I travel with so I can throw this in my suitcase throw it in my backpack take it with me wherever I go so I've been training with resistance bands exclusively for the last year and a half so I'm going to share with you my favorite out of all of them that I do and there's all kinds of exercises you can do with resistance bands anything that I can do in a gym I can mimic that same movement with resistance bands if you've ever trained with loop style resistance bands you want to make sure that you wear gloves in all my years of weight training I never trained with gloves but there's something about resistance bands that just the friction it will take the skin right off your hands so make sure that you use gloves I like full finger gloves because a lot of times you are getting a lot of contact with your fingers in my bag I also have this guy right here this is a door anchor so on the end so it's not a soft spongy foam and on the other end is a loop this is a super awesome tool for being able being able to Train wherever you want to Train I'm going to show you how I use it for our anchored exercises so I'm going to show you some unanchored exercises meaning we just use our body to anchor the bands and then some are anchored now if I was in a park and I had a pull-up bar I could go ahead and I can anchor the bands to that but with a door anchor anywhere that you've got a door you can use this as an anchor point so I'm going to show you some of those exercises so let's jump into this I'm gonna get started here dump all my bands on the floor we're going to start with an unanchored exercise and this one's a really simple one you can be like god it's so simple that's too easy huh think again we're gonna be doing push-ups using the bands now if you do these the right way you think oh there's no way a push-up compares to say doing a bench press you'd be surprised so just like all my other routines that I do I do four sets of every exercise so we're gonna follow my traditional rep structure which is a twenty ten ten fifteen meaning twenty reps the first time moving into set two which is 10 reps set three ten reps again and then finishing off with fifteen reps but we're doing them explosively which is something you can do with resistance bands which is a little more challenging with free weights because you have momentum stripping the resistance so you can't do that with free weights or with bands so that's one of the advantages so we're gonna take advantage of that I with that being said set number one is not a warm-up set a lot of people think oh you're doing 20 reps that must be a warm-up no this is not a warm-up this is a working set why do I do 20 reps one this is to set the tempo for the rest of the workout when you go just a little bit lighter you can focus on good solid form meaning peak contractions I actually did a video recently talking about the importance of peak contractions getting constant tension through the range of motion which also leads into another conversation which is time under tension so make sure you check out some of those videos but what I see is a lot of people rushing through the reps and they don't get peak contractions they don't really work the isometric contraction they're not even really working they're eccentric contractions so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna focus on 20 hard reps in other words by 10 you should already be tired and you're gonna squeeze out ten more of them so now a lot of people struggle getting into position with a band they kind of do this maneuver right here it's actually a whole lot easier than that so you want to bring the band across your back not too high because then it's going to come off you don't want to go too low so I like to just get it right across my shoulder blades just like that put your hands down in position then kick your feet out so here we go 20 good reps chest all the way to the ground full extension so good solid concentric and I squeeze at the top your isometric and then a good controlled eccentric one more oh I'll tell you what if you do those the right way they're so much harder than you think now how do you choose the right level resistance common question you get with bands well one you got to learn to train by feel don't worry about how much weight it is to me people get focused on the numbers on the dumbbell or how much something weighs how much is the bar way don't worry about the weight worry about how it feels worry about getting good contractions every single rep you should get to the end of your set and be really righted that edge of almost hitting failure so even if you're training with weights you need to adopt that same philosophy the best physique athletes in the world don't train by numbers they train by feel so I said number one whoo even if I stuck to this same band sets two in sets three for ten reps each still gonna be hard but what I'm gonna do put a challenge myself here add a little bit we'll see how this goes I may have to make some adjustments so this right here is the extra-heavy band so I'm going to do that in combination with the medium band just like you stack weights you could stack bands just like that oh yeah I can already tell this gonna be hard I gained about 90 seconds rest that's what I like keeps the intensity up through my workout keeps my total workout time shorter remember the more you rests the longer your workout is but if you also have less rest time you're keeping your heart rate up more then theoretically you're also burning more calories in your workout as well because I hate doing cardio okay here we go ten reps all right now like I said per set you're setting the stage for the quality of reps and the quality of contraction so I want you to focus on the same thing just because we're going heavier now doesn't mean that we get sloppy so you see I couldn't even get the tenth one there that was that was nine and a half what I'm going to do here for this next set since I didn't get ten and that is my goal I'm going to drop from this medium to this guy right here which is the light band so I'm going to do the extra-heavy plus the light now the big thing here when doing push-ups what do most people do when they do push-ups they think about how many can I do how many pushups and they'll do it at all cost meaning sloppy form so they're not going all the way down it also means that they're not squeezing all the way up and what I want you to do as says you get to the top don't just press it here I want you to think about squeezing your chest together almost think about bringing your hands together obviously you're not going to because they're planted firmly on the ground but imagine if you could squeeze your hands closer together because that's what your chest does has helped bring your arm across your body when we're doing bench press or even push-ups you can see that even at the top of the range of motion we're not getting all the way across our body so you can at least get a peak contraction by squeezing together getting a good isometric squeeze at the top now keep in mind you're not gonna be able to do as many pushups as you could if you just rep them out so it's not about numbers not about how many you can do not about how fast you can do it's about the quality of every single rep those 90 seconds jump in and set three all the way down all the way up a nice isometric contraction oh man oh yeah five more six okay here's a cool little trick couldn't get the seventh right what do I do get rid of the Bandit just like doing a drop set if you ever do drop sets with dumbbells that's all you do is you drop the weight a little bit so we're at six oh I got four more seven oh man I was a crappy eight so what are we gonna do same thing I'm gonna go from the extra-heavy right here to the heavy finish off those two reps fill my chest already here we go nine ah there's ten just think this is just exercise one but hey bands are easy right can't build muscle with bands if you have doubts that bands can build muscle make sure to check out some of the other videos that I do on the subject comparing free weights to resistance bands but also what the triggers for muscle hypertrophy or muscle building what they really are because it's not just about lifting heavier so just know you can build the same kind of muscle with bands you can with free weights alright here's what we're gonna do the last set this one's hard we're going back to our original weight or in this case original resistance level which is the extra heavy band here and we're gonna do 15 reps but we're going to do these explosively we're really going to fire those fast twitch muscle fibers and remember your fast twitch muscle fibers are also the ones that make you run faster and jump higher but also are the ones that get bigger they're the ones that grow so who same set up what I want you to do though is control these just because we're doing them fast don't do them sloppy but we're gonna do them roughly double time this is gonna pump a lot of blood into the muscle and again that's a trigger in itself for muscle hypertrophy they call that metabolic stress well it starts to happen here is you switch over into anaerobic metabolism and your body starts to build up lactate and other metabolites in the muscle and then of course a lot of blood comes in to flush out those metabolites and this is what we call the pump and the pump is a trigger for muscle growth so this it's gonna give you a good pump here we go psych yourself up fifteen explosive one what working Oh yep that's this exercise one it's good time to take a drink of water gather your composure and get ready for the next exercise now with resistance bands we're not reinventing the wheel here we're not really training any different than we would train with weights or machines same concept here same kind of split same kind of exercise variety with that being said we're gonna be doing two compound movements so we just did one of them so remember a push-up is a compound movement we're not just using our chest we're also using our anterior delts and our triceps as well we're gonna move into another compound movement which is another press before we move into some of our isolation exercises to really target our chest so this next one is a single arm incline press and we're gonna use our door anchor here now just like you'd approach in the gym doing bench press and then you'd move to incline to target upper chest we're going to do the exact same thing so first let me show you how to use this guy all you need is any door it doesn't have to be a door like this any kind of door open the door take the soft foam end put it through the door make sure that the strap is flat against the door simply close it that's it now because we're gonna be doing a incline press that means I want my angle of pull to be going up so what I'm gonna do is go lower with this and that's one of the cool things is we can anchor this at all sorts of positions I could anchor it really low if I want to do some back movements let's say I want to do straight arm push I could incur it up high so we're gonna anchor it down here just about hip height maybe a little bit lower I'm gonna take this extra heavy band and the way you do this run it right through the loop and the anchor just a little bit just enough where you create a loop here and then you're running the band through itself just like that normally I like to do this the opposite way so when I close the door when I'm doing the exercise it's pulling the door closed not the opportunity for the door to open so this door swings out so if I pull on it and it wasn't latched it would open you don't want that you don't want the door anchor smacking you in the back of the head so make sure your door is actually shut okay loop your hand right through what we're gonna do the foot that's on the same side as your hand that one's gonna go back step far enough forward where you start to get a good stretch on your chest don't turn your body this way I want you to square up your body and by doing so you're gonna feel that tension on your chest so the key to resistance band training is you need resistance all the way through the range of motion people say yeah but there's not enough at the bottom I'm doing curls it's too easy well that's because you're not stretching the band enough so in an anchored exercise like this you just step further away you have linear variable resistance meaning the more I stretch this the harder I get or the harder it gets so if I want more resistance I set further away if it's a little too hard I can step a little bit closer and it'll be easier so you're gonna have to kind of feel this out set one ten reps or not ten reps sorry already spacing out here the push-ups wore me out twenty ten ten fifteen so we got twenty reps here we'll see how this feels with the extra heavy I might have to drop down to the heavy all right so square up your chest you can place your other hand right on your thigh here embrace yourself there's one thing that people aren't used to with resistance bands you have to stabilize yourself and this is why it's great functional strength it's because you have to transfer all that power from the ground up through your legs and through your poor I have to stabilize here all right that's what its gonna look like so we're coming up to about this height right here full extension for step forward a little bit a little more tension fine you want to feel enough resistance at the very back if you don't just step forward a little bit stretch the band a little bit you'll get more resistance you got to feel tension at the back you want to stretch here adjust your foot position to get the right tension and then make sure you really get that isometric squeeze in other words don't just push forward here I want you to think about pushing towards your midline see the difference between pushing here versus pushing here remember again our chest brings our arm across our body so if we want to really get that peak contraction think about pushing towards your midline just like our push-ups now we're going to bump up the resistance set number two we're going to do 10 reps same thing with set number three now here's the thing I got a couple options here again remember that bands have linear variable resistance so this isn't just constant resistance level meaning the same amount of resistance no matter what linear variable resistance - the more I stretch it the harder it is so if I want to make this harder I can just step further away use this exact same band and step-up in resistance and get my 10 reps so I'm going to try that first now here's where it gets a little bit tricky I'm going to share with you something that most people don't talk about with resistance bands the Morais pre-stretch this the more I'm taking the variable resistance out of it so at the beginning of the range of motion it's almost as hard as at the end so I've got two options here I can pre stretch it more and then I'm taking out that linear variable resistance and it's going to be hard all the way at the back here all the way through or if I want more linear variable resistance I'm just gonna go ahead and add another band to it and not pre-stretch it as much so that's kind of a whole video in itself so I'll probably tackle that subject to another day so this is about where I started before my feet I can feel that tension right huh maybe not only see yeah this is my starting point from before it doesn't take much so I'm going to creep up a half a step and I can already feel the difference here we go oh yeah oh come all the way back get that stretch so you can see by stretching it just a little bit more created a whole lot more resistance one of the challenging things about doing presses like this with bands is that you have to stabilize yourself and that's the thing that a lot of people aren't familiar with they're used to having the luxury of bracing themselves on a bench somehow you know laying down or sitting down so you have nothing to brace yourself with so that's what makes it a challenge the flipside is like we talked about you're developing that core strength and that stability now you can take all this strength and apply it to things think about if you're a martial artist where do they tell you all your punching power comes from right so it's it's in your lower body and it's in your core so now we're developing functional strength so if you're an athlete this is especially important that's why the best athletes in the world incorporate resistance bands into their training yeah all right I want you to remember every single rep counts it's not just about your set it's about every rep take advantage of the three kinds of contractions your concentric but then get that isometric squeeze really get a peak contraction then a nice controlled eccentric so kid get all three of those a lot of times what people do is they rush it boom boom so there's the concentric but there's no isometric squeeze and there's no control the eccentric so it's not just about controlling it you got to think about time under tension that's the other major variable there so if I go out and it's one second and one second back that's two seconds per rep multiplied by ten reps that's only twenty seconds a time under tension you need about thirty to seventy seconds of time under tension per set for maximum muscle hypertrophy so change it up ten reps one second a second hold on your isometric and a two-second eccentric you just doubled your time under tension there two four seconds per rep times ten now you're at 40 seconds so that falls right in that thirty to seventy seconds so it's not just about controlling your eccentric just for the sake of controlling it for good form there's a reason you want to do it with that being said we're moving in to kicking our water bottle we are moving into our fourth set of these just like our pushup we're gonna make these explosive now think about time under tension again we're going back to fifteen reps but think about time under tension here because we're doing them faster just because we're doing fifteen doesn't mean that this is muscular endurance no we're still falling in that thirty to seventy seconds of total time under attention so there's still muscle building benefits here not to mention metabolic stress which is what we talked about that pump doing these reps gonna give you that pump gonna be a trigger for muscle growth so we're gonna strip off this light band we're gonna go back to just the extra heavy band and we're gonna blast out fifteen explosive presses all right maybe doing them fast but remember good form here we go keep holding on to the band Oh keep you from falling over other side I don't want you coming all the way back I want you to cut it short just a little bit so full squeeze come back 3/4 of the way why want to keep nice constant tension you don't want that band going tight and slack tight and slack we want tension throughout the whole thing so almost think about like pumping these out constant tension the whole time that is our two compound movements so now we're moving into our isolation exercises so instead of presses where we're using our triceps and our delts we're gonna try to focus just on our chest and that means movements where we're bringing our arm more across our body think about when you look at someone bench press and you look at the contraction in their chest versus when they do cable fly's think about the difference when they do cable flyes that's when you see all the muscle striations and the veins are popping out it's just a much stronger contraction now a lot of people are confused when it comes to muscle contractions there's a bit of truth that gets distorted which is people say well you can only contract your muscle all at the same time well yeah you can't contract just part of your chest you're gonna contract the whole thing as far as the length but that doesn't mean that you're activating all of those motor units you have to have peak contractions in order to activate as many of those muscle fibers as possible think about it this is what allows us to do fine motor skills like drawing or putting a spoon into our mouth without jabbing ourselves in the eye right we have the ability to do smaller movements with those muscles or explosive stronger movements basically our brain and the electrical system which is our nervous system can fire different muscle fibers at different times and so our goal is to fire as many of those as possible to activate as many of those as possible in order to do that you want to get full range of motion you want to get maximum resistance at that peak contraction so that's what we're gonna focus on here I'm gonna open the door and I'm gonna anchor this right at chest height here and we're gonna start off with let's try this small one to start now I'm showing you exercises that you can do with just one anchor point and with just one band now it flies if I were say in a pull-up bar I could anchor separate bands on both sides step through and do flies but we're going to do a single arm fly here one anchor point the reason I went with the small band is I've got a lot of options here one I can just step further away to create more resistance or I've got another option which is just simply shortening the length of the band so I'm going to do a combination of both I'm going to take a little bit of this slack out we want to make sure that we have good tension here at the beginning so you should feel this band pulling against you at this point it shouldn't be slack like this it's too easy here in the beginning of the movement so tension here in the very beginning chest you want to stick it out keep your chin up and we're gonna squeeze all the way across the middle of our body notice I got my hand here on my chest I want to feel that peak contraction get that mind-muscle connection 20 reps oh man it's 20 now if I were doing say cable crossovers I am coming more across the middle but usually what ends up happening your arms hit each other you've got limited range of motion here what I like about doing singles is I can come much further across my body get more of a peak action there do the other side now whether you use in bands free weights common mistake that I see people making when doing any kind of fly with cables or a crossover because it starts to look like this right here this is not chest this is all triceps right here anytime you see this if you get a lot of movement at the elbow that's triceps so you want to go ahead and try to keep your arms in a fixed position they don't have to be perfectly straight just a slight Bend so again if you're doing any kind of flier crossover it shouldn't look like this you really want to get that peak contraction there really squeeze your chest it's almost like you see bodybuilders do a most muscular that's what they're doing trying to get that peak contraction again two different options to adjust your resistance either I can step further away step closer or grab it closer to the anchor point and the nice thing is you can do it right in the middle of your set let's say I start here and I do a couple revs I'm like oh my god it's too heavy all I have to do is just let a little bit of the band out and adjust it so you can adjust your resistance on the fly if they're dumbbells you'd have to go set the dumbbells down and get another set here you just make those small adjustments or same thing with your feet you want to feel every muscle that you train you shouldn't go through a workout and just feel tired you should actually feel the fatigue in the pump within that muscle that's the difference between like strength building powerlifting versus what we call body building with body building you're sculpting you're putting muscle where you want to put muscle which means it requires like I said that my muscle connection and that focus being able to really target muscles I always tell people all the time that if you're pushing your car if you ran out of gas would you rather push the car by yourself or would you have three friends help you of course you'd rather have three friends help you it's gonna be easier to do where your body's the same way if you do a movement your body wants to recruit as many muscles as possible for the movement so it requires a lot of discipline a lot of focus to override that and to just really focus on the one muscle that you're trying to train not recruit other muscles so when we talk about isolation that's what we're talking about it's almost it's that mind-muscle connection / discipline we're gonna do our third set 10 reps each side just like set two before moving on to our fourth and final set which you already know what it is it's gonna be 15 explosive reps alright that was our third exercise we just have one exercise to go now I showed you one compound movement that was unanchored which was our pushup now I like unanchored exercises because I can do those anywhere for example just recently I went on a trip and I did a full workout on top of a mountain obviously I didn't have a door or a pull-up bar on top of a mountain so it's nice to be able to have exercises that you can do without relying on a door anchor or tying the band off to something so that's what an unanchored exercise is so we did one unanchored chest movement a compound movement those our push-up then we came in and we did an anchored compound movement which was our incline press we did an anchored isolation just now so now I'm going to show you an unanchored isolation exercise for chest first thing we're going to incur this right underneath our feet you got a couple options here for increasing the resistance one we know that if we shorten the length of the band we create more resistance so by the width of my stance you can tell I'm shortening the band so we can adjust it on the fly by adjusting our stance but we can also adjust on the fly by how far down see how there's all this loose slack band in the middle versus grabbing up here so we can make little adjustments on the fly to create the right resistance now I showed you this exercise if you watch the video I did when we were out paddle boarding one day I showed a complete total body workout we did this exact same movement now we're just doing it here in a chest specific workout but what it's going to look like just in case you haven't seen the video chest how nice and high and we're going to bring our arms straight up in front of us and together so they're not just coming straight out here they're coming to the center line just like that you want to keep your arms nice and straight and really squeeze to the middle so you want to make sure you got good resistance down here if you need more again scrab lower down one more now we talked about doing most muscular body builders coming in here like this to squeeze their chest there's the second style most muscular you'll see guys do and they'll come from the bottom up like this same thing you want to focus on really squeezing your chest here's what I don't want to see is you're doing these though the movement is not in your arms in other words it doesn't look like this I don't want to see any movement at the elbow so instead of thinking about bringing your hands up because if you focus on your hands you're gonna have a tendency to use your biceps here to bring it up like this so focus on bringing your elbows up so elbows up squeeze toward the center pinky - pinky right out in front of you chin height just like that we're almost done with this workout okay you already know the drill by now how many reps are we doing this next set yeah you guessed it 10 reps 10 good reps here really focus on squeezing that chest every rep this is home stretch now make this count a lot of people feel make the mistake have they rushed their last sets just to get done with the workout but you've worked this hard to get to this point you've worked this hard to get the muscle this tired so this is when you want to come in and you want to finish strong want to keep good form mmm feeling it gonna be sore tomorrow I don't think I need to tell you how many reps we're going to do on our third set you got the routine down 90 seconds rest shake it off toughen up suck it up six is my marker if it's too easy then I'm gonna grab a little bit more of the band that's too hard I'm gonna loosen up you don't see it because it's subtle but that's why I'm usually able to finish right on the mark like hitting that wall where it's just like almost that point of total failure why is it that I always hit my mark with my reps it's because I'm making those little adjustments on the fly you just can't really see it in between each rep if I feel like it's too easy I'm subtly grabbing just a little bit more or if it's a little bit too hard I'm loosening up just a little bit so adjusting that resistance so when people say well you know that's the thing that I don't like about resistance bands it's not a fixed weight it doesn't have a number on it you're right it doesn't but with everything in life it's a double-edged sword there's the good and there's the bad so the bad yeah you're right it's not one fixed level resistance the good is it's not one fixed level resistance so makes it easy to really maximize the the value of every single set and if you don't want it smacking you in your junk just take out some of that slack no one likes to be smacked in the junk with a band maybe some people do not me alright that's it that was our complete chest workout now those are just four of my favorite exercises with chest there's actually I can't even really call my favorite those are four that I use a lot I've got a lot of other exercises if you happen to follow the TA to build program that I put together for resistance bands there's a ton of other chest exercises in there a lot of different variations different angles etc but those are for that if you got a set of bands you can take your chest workout anywhere you want like we talked about in the beginning take it to the beach take it to your backyard take it on a trip you could travel around the world with a set of bands and get a workout wherever you are and that's one of the things that I love about bands is that freedom to be able to train wherever I want and still get an awesome workout this wasn't some sort of subpar you know workout that like wow it's better than not getting a workout at all no that was just as good as any chest workout that I get in the gym I feel the same kind of fatigue I feel the same kind of pump the same kind of burned so that's it I'm James greige and this has been our BT resistance band training I'll see you guys next week we got more cool videos coming your way so make sure you subscribe make sure you turn on notifications so you don't miss any future videos and I'll see you guys soon

Channel: James Grage

Views: 819,294

Rating: 4.9017887 out of 5

Keywords: resistance bands workout, resistance band exercises, resistance bands chest, resistance band chest exercises, resistance bands, resistance band training, at home chest workout, travel workout, James Grage, RBT, Undersun, TA2, workout bands, chest exercises with bands, workout at home, home workout, exercise at home, home chest workout, tension bands, resistance bands chest workout, James Grage resistance bands, tension bands chest workout, tension bands chest exercises

Id: xgrUxp-WY3k

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019