Can you gain a bigger circumference by exercising at home?

The answer is - it is absolutely fine for 90% of ordinary fitness enthusiasts. If you want to achieve the competition-level circumference of professional bodybuilding, you will most likely not be able to achieve it at home.

I met a brother who worked in the backend two years ago. I had a gym membership for the past three years and went to the gym less than 20 times in total. When the epidemic first started, I was afraid of being banned, so I gritted my teeth and bought a set of adjustable dumbbells. The heaviest weight of each dumbbell can be adjusted to 40kg. I also added a foldable bench press worth a few hundred yuan and practiced on the two square meters on the balcony. At first we all thought he was messing around, but when we met again three years later, his arm circumference had grown from 34cm to 41cm, and his chest muscles stretched out the crisp cotton T-shirt with obvious outlines. He said he had trained at home, but no one around him believed him.

Of course, there are also many people who say that you can’t achieve a large girth by practicing at home, and this is actually not wrong. After all, the core of muscle growth is progressive overload. To put it bluntly, the muscles must be continuously stimulated with stronger stimulation. Weight is the most intuitive dimension of stimulation. If you want to squat with a barbell weighing more than 150kg for leg training, or deadlift 120kg for back training, it is really difficult to achieve it at home - let alone whether you can put down a two-meter-long barbell and a squat rack half a person's height. Even if it is installed, if you deadlift and throw the barbell, the neighbors downstairs will probably knock on the door and complain.

But then again, how many ordinary enthusiasts can really squat 150kg? A single 40kg dumbbell can be used to do box squats and lunges. The weight is enough to train most people's legs to a circumference of more than 60cm. When wearing jeans, the leg shape is just right, which is completely sufficient for daily aesthetic needs.

Don’t think that everything will be fine if you have equipment. I once met a friend who only had dumbbells, barbells, rowing machines, and adjustable benches filling half of the second bedroom at home. After two years of training, his arm circumference was still stuck at 36cm and he couldn’t move. When I asked, I found out that after training, he drank iced milk tea and ate fried chicken. His daily protein intake was not even 1g per kilogram of body weight. How can muscles grow without raw materials?

If you don’t even want to buy dumbbells, but want to rely on bodyweight exercises such as push-ups and pull-ups to build a large circumference, then you’d better wake up as soon as possible. At most, bodyweight training can sharpen muscle lines. It is too difficult to break through the dimensional bottleneck, just like if you only add half a tank of gas to your car every time, how can you run far?

To put it bluntly, this matter is not so black and white at all. If your goal is to take off your clothes and look muscular, and wear clothes to look strong, and no one will think you are thin when walking on the street, then you can achieve your goal at home as long as you practice the right movements, eat enough protein, and get enough rest. There is no need to spend thousands of dollars to get an annual pass and go to the gym to take a shower.； If your goal is to have an arm circumference of 45+ and a leg circumference of 70+, turn heads more often than the handsome guys and girls photographed on the street, and go to compete, then you really have to go to the gym to lift heavy weights, and the hardware conditions at home are still somewhat restrictive.