Heavy Home Workouts With Light Weights

Currently it is springtime in 2020 and many of us are forced to work out at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is a good thing as the gym would be an easy place to pick up germs from other since so many people handle the same equipment.

The biggest issue with this is that not all of us have much equipment to weight train with at home. However, with some creativity you can get some heavy home workouts with light weights in even if you don't have much to work with.

For heavy home workouts with light weight, whatever pieces of equipment or weights you have will come in useful. With just a set of cables with handles, a folded up mat, a gym bag and some light dumbbells, I've been able to get great workouts in. With some creativity, weight training at home with minimal equipment can even lead to gains.

Push-ups are going to be the go to exercise to work your chest if you don't have a bench and some weights at home. If you've been weight training for a while, you're going to be able to do a lot of push-ups.

My heaviest dumbbells are a pair of 30 pounders. I've found that I can get them both on my back unassisted so I can do push-ups with 60 extra pounds. The secret is to get one dumbbell in the middle of my upper back and the other on my lower back. If you keep your body stable the weights won't move around very much.

When I do weighted push-ups with 60 pounds I'll go to failure, rest 10 seconds, and continue with more reps. I try to repeat this until I can only do 5 reps. Then I get the dumbbell off of my lower back to do push-ups with 30 pounds and repeat the process of doing sets with 10 seconds of rest until only 5 or less reps can be done. After that, it's on to push-ups without weight. You can even finish off with push-ups from your knees. At this point, you may very well be over 100 total reps and your chest will be on fire.

You can also do weighted push-ups with your feet up on a chair or with your shoes pushed up high against a wall to emulate incline bench presses. This is great for hitting your upper chest.

To hit your triceps with weight push-ups, do them with your hands close to each other. This will be like doing close grip bench presses.

Another way I've found to go heavy without heavy weights is use a gym bag. Gym bags are strong enough to hold a lot of weight. What I do is to put multiple light dumbbells in my gym bag to add up to a decent amount of weight to lift. I've been able to put as much as 85 pounds in my bag. Just don't overdo it as you don't want to ruin your bag.

My favorite exercise to use a weighted gym bag with is the one arm row. I'll start by taking the gym bag handles and wrapping them around the hand I'm lifting with. This is like using wrist straps with a heavy dumbbell and also stops the gym from touching the floor at the bottom of each rep. I then put my other on a piece of furniture and pull the weight up to my side using one side of my upper back muscles. After repping out on one side, do the other side. You can keep going back and forth with very little rest to really hit your upper back. For even more intensity, some weight can be taken out of the back to basically do a drop set.

If you don't have an actual bench to bench press on, I found a great alternative in the form of a folded up mat. It has just enough thickness and width for me to lie on and emulate benching on a normal bench. Due to having only 30 pounds dumbbells to work with, I will superset dumbbell flyes followed immediately with dumbbell bench presses. You can also put your butt on the floor to emulate incline flyes and bench presses.

With some resistance cables, you can add plenty of options to home workouts with light weights. I don't have a pull-up bar available where I live, so I use the set of cables with handles I have as an alternative.

There isn't a great amount of resistance while using cables with handles over the top of a door to do lat pulldowns. I would do a ton of reps with a handle in each hand as I sat on the floor to do the pulldowns. I've found that a better option is to do one armed lat pulldown, repping out on one side then doing the other. You then repeatedly rep out on one side and go to the other until you have over 100 reps on each side.

With cables or bands you can also go for high rep sets of rows, curls and triceps pushdowns.

There are other great options when you want to do heavy home workouts with light weights. Someplace to safely do pull-ups will be very useful. You can use heavy household items like pet food bags or stacks of books. No matter what, you almost certainly will find things you never though of using to train heavy with.