Can I get Huge With Home Workouts?

Does Scooby Workout In a Gym?

Many people comment that I am really muscular and ask if I got my muscles working out in a gym or got them doing the “home workouts” I show on my website – excellent question! A lot of people equate home workouts with rickety infomercial exercise gadgets made of fishing poles, rubber tubing, or springs. Most people think of home workouts as being inferior and only for people too poor to join a gym – how wrong they are!

Let me give you a great analogy for those of you who are religious. Do you need to go to a church to be religious? Is praying inside a special building labeled “Church, Temple, Synagogue, or Mosque” magically better than praying inside your house? Probably not. It might be more inspirational. It might be more motivational to be surrounded with like minded people. Does it make you more religious to pray in this special building? My guess is that many would agree that it doesn’t. Similarly, a gym is not a magical building – its just a building with weights in it! There is no reason at all you cant build just as impressive a physique in a home gym as you can in a gym.

But you cant possibly fit all those machines in your house, you say. Correct. Lets talk about machines though. Machines are great for a number of reasons. First and foremost they allow beginners to workout safely without getting injured when they don’t know what they are doing. If you know what you are doing, this isn’t much of an advantage :) Second, there are some isolation exercises and physical therapy exercises that just are not possible at home; however, these are not mass building exercises and these machines have simple free weight substitutes. The more advanced you become in lifting, the more you will use just free weights and the less you will use machines. Machines do not make you huge. In many cases machines are just as good as free weights. In many cases machines are much safer than free weights because they limit your range of motion to safe zones. But no, machines are not superior to free weights when it comes to building strength and gaining mass as long as you know what you are doing – as all of my readers do! :) What is a home workout? Is it a special kind of workout? No, not really. What a ‘home workout’ means to me is a free weight workout coupled with bodyweight exercises.

So back to our original question – “Can you get huge with home workouts?” YES! You really need very little equipment but you *do* need enough weight. You need a set of used adjustable dumbbells with enough weight plates that you can challenge yourself. You need a straight bar too for bench/squats/deadlifts, again with enough weight plates to challenge yourself. You need a pullup bar and a room. Thats it. OK, an adjustable bench would be nice but its not required as you can use the floor. If you have these things then your home gym is superior to virtually any gym you would join. If you buy the weights used from craigslist then for the price of a few months membership to a gym you can completely outfit your gym with all the weights you will ever need.

To the question as to whether I have ever worked out in a gym, of course! I belong to a gym now but its because I need cardio in the winter and they have an indoor pool and good stationary bikes. Do I lift there? Sometimes but not very often though as I prefer to workout at home. On the rare occasion when I do workout with weights at the gym, I typically workout the same that I would at home anyway. Here is a great example taken of me today at the gym. I was doing a chest workout, on the floor like I do at home. I pushed the benches out of the way. I eschewed the smith machine in the corner and all the hammer strength chest machines and just did free weights. Why? As good as hammer strength machines are, they are not properly adjustable for someone my size. Using them I would risk shoulder injury so I just stick with my dumbbells. Smith machines can lead to asymmetrical muscular development as it lets you favor one side or the other. No, I stick to my free weights on the floor for chest thank you!

So can you get “huge” with home workouts? Let me put it this way, it depends on your definition of “huge” but you can get just as strong and big working out at home as you can at a gym. If you don’t, you are just making excuses.