5 Household Items You Can Use to Create Challenging Bodyweight Training

Flat Lay of a towel, water bottles, notebook, measuring tape, fruit, cell phone, and scale
If you want to start strength training using your body weight, there are a considerable amount of different exercises you can use. One of the best parts? No equipment is needed to get started.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking bodyweight training always means without equipment. You can often use equipment to enhance your bodyweight routines. Prominent examples of this might be a pull-up bar or a dipping station. With either of these items, you can get a more intensive and effective workout and build muscle faster.

But it’s not only pull-up bars and dipping stations you can use. One of the best parts of training with bodyweight is how versatile it is. Anything you can hang off or lean on can become a piece of equipment for training. It may surprise you how much of a difference using equipment can make.

Here are some great examples:

Chairs

You can use chairs as a dipping station by placing two opposite each other. They can also offer something for you to put your back leg on when performing lunges or you can use them for box jumps. Likewise, you can arrange chairs in a triangle to do increased range of motion push-ups. These are push-ups, except you are dipping down further than level with your hands.

Towels

A towel is a versatile piece of training equipment. If you hang it from a door frame, it gives something for you to hold while performing neutral grip pull-ups, which will also train your grip strength. Likewise, you can use it to do triceps extensions in the same position, or you can close it in a door and lean back to execute leaning back rows. Another idea is to place a towel under each foot on an uncarpeted floor and use them as sliders for ab exercises.

Punching Bag

A punching bag is a piece of exercise equipment that is fantastic when coupled with typical bodyweight training. This is an example of cardio-resistance fitness and is an excellent method to boost muscle, melt fat, and get your hormones pumping. A punching bag is great because you are speeding up during the movement. This means you’re engaging all those fast-twitch fibers just as you would when lifting heavy weights!

Skateboard

Instead of an ab roller, you could try using a skateboard. You can use this to do crawls along the floor (for pec training). You can also use a skateboard for many other functional exercises. These include any activity that requires one or two limbs to move independently from the rest of your body or slide along the ground.

Water Bottles

Take a couple of full water bottles, and now you have light dumbbells. Water bottles can be used to add resistance to bodyweight moves, including squats and lunges. You can also use them for upper body moves such as biceps curls and shoulder presses.

These are only a few examples of household items you can use! Look around your home for other things you can turn into a piece of training equipment.