Three Variations Of Push-Ups To Train Your Arms At Home Without Equipment

Training at home, we have no problems training our legs and glutes since we have a lot of exercises and variations that we can try to train them. If we talk about our upper body, it can be a little more complicated to find exercises that do not need material.

Therefore, today we bring you three variations of push-ups that allow us to work our arms at home without the need for accessories of any kind, only with our own body weight (and a little motivation and energy).

Traditional Push-Ups to work our arms

Traditional push-ups are our first choice for working our arms. We will place ourselves in a front plank position, with our hands under the shoulders and resting on the toes. We can modify the work of the muscles by opening the arms to different widths, but we will talk about that later; for now we're sticking with the traditional push-ups.

Once in the starting position, we flex our elbows directing them backwards and slightly diagonally, until our chest almost touches the ground. From that position, we push the ground with our hands, which should be firmly supported on it (not only the "heel" of the hand, but the entire palm and fingers, to make force) and we extend the elbows again.

To make them easier, we can support ourselves on the knees instead of on the balls of the feet. We can also support ourselves on our feet, but place our hands on a raised surface, such as a step or a low table. In this way, the weight of our body that we will carry will be less and the movement will be easier.

Diamond Push-Ups to work the triceps

As we said before, keeping the hands more or less together will modify the muscular work of our arms. In this case, what we will do is join our hands under the center of our chest to focus the work on our triceps.

We place ourselves, as before, in the front plank position, only in this case we will join the thumbs and index fingers of our hands forming a diamond or rhombus just under the chest. We bend our elbows directing them backwards and slightly diagonally until our chest almost touches the ground without losing the horizontality of our body, and we push the ground with our hands to go back up.

These push-ups are more intense than the previous ones, and perhaps we want to start without fully joining the hands, but only bringing them a little closer. As in the previous ones, we can lean on our knees so that the intensity is a little lower.

Handstand Push-Ups to work your arms and shoulders

If we seek to work our shoulders at home, we will generally have to use accessories such as elastic bands or dumbbells. If you don't have them, handstand pushup or overhead push-ups are a good option, if you already have some training experience.

To carry them out we will need to position ourselves near a wall. We start by doing a handstand on the wall, keeping our back as neutral as possible (without arching it excessively) and, from there, we slightly bend our elbows and extend them again. It is not an exercise that allows a lot of travel, but it is very intense. In any case, in case your arms fail at some point, it is a good idea to place a cushion or pillow under your head.

If we are beginners, instead of doing a handstand on the wall, we can place ourselves in the downward facing dog position of Yoga (hands and feet on the floor, hips towards the ceiling, with our body forming a triangle) and bend the elbows approaching head to the ground. It is a less risky position and it will also work our arms and shoulders.

Another option we have, if we want to do the push-ups doing the handstand, is to help ourselves with the legs when extending the elbows. We bend our knees and gain momentum from that position to forcefully extend our legs upward and thus help us extend our elbows as well.