Building upper body strength at home

geekman

geekman

geekman

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First post ever in this section! :)

I've noticed recently that my upper body strength is embarrassingly poor - my arms felt like they were about to drop off after carrying 2 heavy bags of shopping from the car! My nearest gym is miles away, but in the coming months I'll be having a lot of time off work, so I was hoping to find something I could do at home to build up a bit more strength. I already do quite a bit of walking and swimming so I feel like my lower body is fine: I can run fair distances and not feel out of breath.

I've always been extremely skinny, and I'm not doing this for vanity reasons - I don't really care if I end up looking more muscular or not, but I would like to be able to carry stuff / do press ups / sit ups without feeling like I'm about to die :p

I was thinking of maybe buying some weights to use at home, but not really sure what sort of thing is appropriate. Are there any particular exercises which would help?

Advice would be appreciated
 
Press ups and pull ups. I used to keep a bar over the door of one of the moderately used rooms in my house. The simple rule was that every time I went through the door I would do 5. This soon became 10, then 20.
 
What is wrong with vanity reasons? :(

Pull-ups, push-ups, inverse rows off your dining room table (then adding weight in a rucksack as required)...

BUT...

Just because you can run doesn't mean your legs are strong or even work effectively.

Look up Bulgarian split squats and lunges, single leg Romanian deadlifts to make yourself strong.
 
Thanks, that's all really helpful. Just tried the initial test on the 100 pushups link, I'm rank 2 :eek:

And nothing wrong with vanity reasons, I just meant that if some exercises were more vanity biased than outright strength I'd rather avoid them as my main objective here is not being ridiculously weak. If I end up ripped I obviously wouldn't be complaining :p
 
Dunno what the professional opinion is but if building upper body strength don't just let gravity do the work when coming back down/lowering weights.
 
Rroff said:
Dunno what the professional opinion is but if building upper body strength don't just let gravity do the work when coming back down/lowering weights.
Click to expand...

For a lot of lifts the negative portion is just as if not more important for building strength than the actual lifting portion.
 
tom_e said:
For a lot of lifts the negative portion is just as if no more important for building strength than the actual lifting portion.
Click to expand...

I swear they used to call it overloading but googling it just now just gets his for overload principle - its a long time since I've had any professional input of lifting, etc.
 
Buy a kettlebell, find one of the numerous workouts online/youtube and get to work on your core and legs while you're at it.
 
Recently I've been doing pressups (varying between diamond, narrow and wide plus getting my 4 year old to lie on my back for extra weight) and lifting a piano stool full of books at home (bicep curls I guess).

For the legs - single leg squats. I don't think it's safe to add a 4 year old for those but it's got the the stage where I can knock off about 50 on each leg. Maybe a rucksack full of stuff might be a way to up the load. That would do for the pressups too, when there's no 4 year old handy.

Could move up to the 7 year old I suppose.

Give me a couple of months. The wife is on standby...
 
I got a book "You are your own gym" Its amazing how much you can do without specific gym equipment. Its written by an ex special forces guy, who now designs the fitness programs for the Navy Seals.

I just use it to build core strength and basic conditioning to help with my running.
 
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