Description

Army bases, city parks, church gyms, and stateprisons are full of guys with wide shoulders, thick backs, and bigchests and arms. And if you asked them what they do to achieve thislook, you’d always hear the same answer: pullups and pushups. Thesesimple, timeless exercises work the entire upper body and can beperformed virtually anywhere. We’ll show you how to take fulladvantage of these moves, and some of their most effectivevariations, to build your back, arms, chest, and shoulders—noweights, or jail sentence, required. How It Works When you do apullup, you engage your lats, mid-back, rear delts, biceps,forearms, and core. Pushups train your chest, shoulders, triceps,and core. So between these two movements, you’ve got the wholeupper body covered. Another benefit of body-weight training is thatit’s low-impact. As a result you can train more frequently than ifyou were using heavy weights, and the more often you work out, thegreater your potential to build muscle. The only caveat tohigh-frequency training is the risk of overuse injuries, but youcan avoid those by changing up your exercises so you don’t recruitthe same muscles the same way every time. That’s why each of theworkouts on these pages pairs up a different variation of thepullup and pushup.