Most people argue that if you’re not doing rounds on the bench press or dumbbell flyes, you are not going to go far when it comes to building your chest. Funnily enough, that could not be further away from the truth.

In reality, there are a lot of great bodyweight chest exercises that will help you sculpt your pecs to perfections, without the use of any weights or equipment. Yup, you read that correctly, you can get an amazing chest workout at home.

It just takes a little know-how.

It is true that in order to achieve peak muscular development weighs are mandatory. This is simply because they allow for a wider range of movement (ROM), more exercise variations and the benefit of progressive overload.

So, can bodyweight exercises help build muscle?

Absolutely!

I even have the research to prove it. This study published in Physiology & Behaviour showed that muscle growth “can occur independent of an external load”. It shows that muscle hypertrophy (growth) can be reached through full range of motion and control of the movement.

Also, bodyweight exercises are great for beginners to build, not just muscle, but also strength, power, and endurance.

So, what makes these bodyweight chest exercises good?

Simple. They help target the muscle through its primary functionality, they allow for a full range of motion, and can be diversified to form other exercises. I will go in more depth further in the article.

Today, I am going to help improve your home chest workout with my favorite bodyweight chest exercises.

Ok, let’s dive into it.

A common trend that you’re going to notice in most calisthenic articles is that the number one bodyweight chest exercise that they list is the push-up.

While push-ups are great, and they are definitely on this list, I personally believe that the chest variations dips deserve first place. And similarly to pushpups, with a bit of creativity you can do chest dips at home.

Keep reading to find out how.

In order to understand why is this so we need to ask ourselves what makes a good chest exercise?

As I have already described in my previous article “The Best Exercises for Each Muscle Group” – the reason why I chose dips for chest is because this exercise best targets the chest’s two main functions.

Those two being – adduction of the arm towards the front plane of the body (which means moving your arms in front of your body) and moving your arms towards the sagittal plane of the body (moving your arms down towards your lower body.

The push up only activates one of the two, which literally means that if you’re mainly focusing on pushups as your go to bodyweight chest exercises then that means that you’re losing 50% of the muscle activation and, er go 50% of the muscle growth potential.

An important detail here is that I am referring to the chest variation – as dips have a triceps variations that better targets the triceps and a chest variation that better targets the chest.