I’m a Personal Trainer: Here’s the 5 Most Effective Exercises You Can Possibly Do at Home

Getting started on a home fitness program can be pretty confusing. With so many exercise and workout choices, knowing where to start can be intimidating. That’s why I’ve collated the five most effective exercises for strength, cardio, and muscle-building results you can do at home with no equipment.

As a seasoned personal trainer, I’ve witnessed many people investing their efforts into exercises that don’t deliver the desired results. That’s why I’m sharing these five standout home workout moves with you. These exercises, proven effective and efficient over my 35 years of experience, will help you achieve your fitness goals.

Let’s break down each exercise to understand its benefits and how to do it with optimal form.

1. Pull-Ups

Pull-ups are my favorite upper-body exercise because they recruit multiple muscle groups. The primary focus is on the latissimus dorsi (lats), which take up about a third of the real estate on the back.

Pull-ups also engage your rhomboids, which are in the middle of your back, and the trapezius, a kite-shaped muscle running from the base of your neck down to your mid-spine. In other words, this exercise works all of the main back muscles apart from the erector spinae.

The pull-ups also open up your shoulder-chest tie-in. This helps counter the shoulder hunch that many people develop from sitting at a computer all day long and doing a lot of pressing movements. Pulling your shoulders back helps promote good posture.

One of the things I love about the pull-up is its versatility. It can be done virtually anywhere. All you need is a beam or rafter overhead to grab onto. This flexibility allows you to do a few reps whenever you feel like it, giving you the power to control your workout routine.

One of my favorite pull-up workouts is to set a daily goal and progressively work towards it over the course of the day. So, if the goal is 100 reps, you might break that down to 12-13 reps every hour for eight hours.

Celebrity trainer and health author Thomas DeLaur is a massive fan of the pull-up. Here’s what he said about it in a recent YouTube video:

“Pull-ups don’t just help you look better; they help you feel better and rev up the metabolism.”

How to Do a Pull-Up

1. Hang from a bar with an overhand grip slightly wider than shoulder width. Extend your body to a dead hang with straight legs. Depress your shoulders, squeeze your scapulae together, and engage your lats. Now, tense your core.
2. Pull up, driving with the lats, to bring your chest to the bar. Your torso will be arched as you come up.
3. Slowly lower, concentrating on drawing your elbows toward your hips.

2. Push-ups

The push-up is the perfect complement to the pull-up. Just as pull-ups work most of your back muscles, push-ups activate the key muscles on the front of your upper body — the chest, shoulders, and triceps.

Better still, the push-up works those muscles as a unit. They are forced to work together and become stronger as a unit, making them functionally stronger. This contrasts most weight training exercises, which are isolationist rather than compound.

Push-ups also train the proprioceptive muscle fibers that keep your body balanced. These fibers constantly fire when you hold the push-up position, improving your reaction time, balance, and speed.

How to Do a Push-Up

1. Lie face down on the floor with your feet about six inches apart. Place your hands on the floor slightly wider than shoulder level.
2. Press your body off the floor. Maintain a tight core and glutes, and keep your back straight. Look directly ahead.
3. Lower back to the floor, taking two seconds to go down until your chest touches the floor.
4. Press through the triceps and chest to return to the top position, again taking 2 seconds to go up.

Check out our guide to doing 20 consecutive pull-ups and 20 push-ups.

3. Bodyweight Squats

The squat is another terrific compound exercise that forces the major muscles of your body to work together as a unit. This exercise primarily works the quadriceps, hamstrings, adductors, and hip flexors but also engages the core. As a result, your lower body will become stronger, and your balance, proprioception, and agility will improve.

The bodyweight squat allows for a higher rep count than the weighted version of the exercise. This enables you to build muscular endurance and burn significant calories.

In a 2013 study, adolescent boys performed 100 bodyweight squats for 45 sessions over eight weeks. They had an average reduction in body fat percentage of 4.2 percent and a 2.7 percent increase in lean body mass. Their vertical jump also increased by an average of 3.4 percent. [1]

The squat is one of the five primal human movements. Before the invention of the seated toilet in 1596, humans squatted several times daily to relieve themselves. As a result, people’s functional strength was much greater than it is today.

How to Do the Bodyweight Squat

1. Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and your toes pointed forward. Clasp your hands together in front of your chest.
2. Maintaining an upright torso, hinge at the hips to lower into the squat position, as if sitting in a chair. Sit back with your hips, keeping your back straight. Go down until your thighs are parallel to the floor.
3. Push through your heels to return to the start position.

4. Glute Bridge

The glute bridge focuses on strengthening the gluteal muscles. The glutes help maintain proper spine, hips, and pelvis alignment. If weak, postural problems may lead to issues such as anterior pelvic tilt and lower back pain.

Strong glutes contribute to stability in the hip joints, reducing injury risk and improving joint function. The stronger your glutes, the more power and propulsion you can generate when lifting, sprinting, and jumping.

Powerful glute muscles will also support functional movements such as squatting, lunging, bending, and twisting, which are required for daily activities and sports performance.

Glute development has aesthetic benefits, including a more sculpted, defined buttock.

How to Do the Glute Bridge

1. Lie on your back with knees bent and feet shoulder-width apart. Place your hands at your sides.
2. Your lower back should be touching the floor.
3. Squeeze your glutes as you lift your hips toward the ceiling.
4. Hold for a 2-second count.
5. Lower back to the floor.

5. Burpees

The burpee is my favorite calorie-burning exercise. It engages all the muscles in your body in a dynamic movement that demands a lot of oxygen, so after just a few reps, you’ll be puffing like a steam engine. That increased demand for oxygen will elevate your metabolism during and after your workout.

Doing burpees, you’ll burn around 10 calories per minute, assuming that each rep takes you 3 seconds. So, if you could maintain that pace for an hour, you’d burn 600 calories. In addition, the excess post-oxygen energy consumption (EPOC) effect can increase your metabolism by up to 30 percent in the hours following your workout.

The burpee is an effective endurance builder. A 2002 study examined the endurance benefits of burpees among 52 15-16-year-olds over four months. The control group had an average endurance increase of 1.9 percent, while the burpee group increased endurance by 8.6 percent. [2]

However, the burpee is more than just an aerobic (cardio) exercise. It’s also anaerobic. It includes both push-ups and squat movements, delivering all the benefits of the exercises we’ve already discussed.

YouTube fitness influencer and former Marine Corps Force fitness instructor IronWolf84 considers the burpee the ‘king of all exercises.’ He used it as the foundation of his Marine Corps program while on deployment in Afghanistan. [2]

There are several versions of the burpee, each geared to a fitness level and training outcome. My favorite is the ten-count Navy Seal burpee, which balances aerobic and anaerobic benefits well.

How to Do a Burpee

1. From a standing position, drop your hands to the ground.
2. Jump your feet back to a plank position.
3. Drop your chest to the ground.
4. Push up out of the push-up and frog jump your hands to your feet.
5. Jump up to standing.
6. Jump and clap your hands overhead.
7. Place your hands on the floor.
8. Repeat for recommended reps.

Workout: Putting it all Together

Let’s combine the five best bodyweight exercises you can do at home into a time-efficient routine that will give you the most bang for your workout buck. Here’s a challenging circuit designed to ramp up your metabolism as it burns through the calories and stresses every muscle in your body.

The workout is to be done in EMOM (every minute on the minute) style. Here’s how it works:

• Set your phone’s timer to beep every 45 and 60 seconds.
• Start the first exercise.
• Stop when your timer beeps 45 seconds.
• Rest for 15 seconds until the timer beep again.
• Repeat this process for every exercise.
• Rest for 120 seconds, then repeat the circuit.

The Workout:

• Pull-Ups
• Push-Ups
• Bodyweight Squats
• Glute Bridges
• Navy Seal Burpees

Begin with a single round of this EMOM circuit. Focus on your exercise form as you perform the reps fluidly and controlled, and get used to the short rest periods. When you’re ready, add a second round after a two-minute rest. Work up to five rounds.

I recommend doing this workout three times per week on alternate days. You’ll need those rest days to recover from the stress the exercises place on your muscles and cardiovascular system.

Wrap Up

Now that you know the five most effective exercises you can do at home, it’s up to you to use them. The workout I’ve included is just one of many ways to do this.

Another method I like is focusing on one of the five moves every day of the week and working towards a daily total. For example, you target 100 pull-ups on Monday, 500 push-ups on Tuesday, 500 bodyweight squats on Wednesday, 200 burpees on 500 glute bridges on Thursday, and 200 burpees on Friday.

Whatever way you do them, these five exercises will help you sculpt a fitter, leaner, more muscular body than any other set of exercises. Consistency and dedication are essential, so choose the best method for your schedule and fitness level. With these five exercises as your foundation, you’re on the way to achieving your fitness goals and transforming your body like never before.

References

1. Takai Y, Fukunaga Y, Fujita E, Mori H, Yoshimoto T, Yamamoto M, Kanehisa H. Effects of body mass-based squat training in adolescent boys. J Sports Sci Med. 2013 Mar 1;12(1):60-5. PMID: 24149726; PMCID: PMC3761779.
2. Polevoy G, Cazan F, Padulo J, Ardigò LP. The Influence of Burpee on Endurance and Short-Term Memory of Adolescents. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Sep 18;19(18):11778. doi: 10.3390/ijerph191811778. PMID: 36142051; PMCID: PMC9517252.

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