Ladies & Gents,

Hope everyone is travelling well with their goals!

To cut a long story short, I have a mate who wants to start building but he refuses to go to the gym and has very limited equipment.

What are your opinions on the best FBW that will make you sweat and really make you work for your gains? The catch is, it needs to be from home and with limited equipment

The equipment at hand is a bench, barbell, dumbbell and a stack of free plate weights (a total of aprox' 200lbs worth) to attach to the bars. On top of that, manual labour (as I like to call it) such as pushups, situps, overhead squats etc etc would definately be a big gain for him.

As I am well seasoned, I am out of touch on the new age sort of stuff and what works best for newbies (or previous builders) etc etc. Some could say I am to engrosed in myself haha.

I seen this kid do pushups and he struggles to pump out 10 reps. As far as im concerned, he needs to be worked hard from the start but im having trouble coming up with something using the equipment he has provided - contributed to by a lack of knowledge on my part.

Would anyone like to contribute?

That is all the equipment you need.. eventually he may need more weight though.

One other thing is a pullup/chinup bar.... or any place to hang from to do these... thats a must...

Anyway you say he can barely do 10 pushups? Well in my opinion (and others may disagree) he should not start bench pressing until he can do 3 sets of 12 proper form slow pushups... so first thing is to work toward that!! It shouldnt take very long at all to get to that stage..

After he can do 3 sets of 12 pushups he can move onto Bar Dips (just use the backs of 2 chairs... look up the exercise if unsure) until he can do 3 sets of 12 of those..... then bench pressing can begin....

So i would do something like this 3 non consecutive days a week (i.e mon wed fri):

3 sets of 8-12 for each exercise... once 3x12 is achieved at a certain weight then increase the weight.

Pushups --> move onto bar dips after 3x12 is achieved then onto bench press.
Barbell Squats / Deadlift <-- Alternate between these two each session
Pullups / Bent Over Rows <--- Either one or both... do pullups if doing only one.
Seated Shoulder Press with dumbbells.
Ab Work

That would be something to begin with and then eventually can add some tricep or bicep isolation... in my opinion anyway.

Sounds good Johnny.

I was thinking along the same sort of track. In saying that, I have always been one just to dive right in - I learnt badly from that so I didnt want to subject him to the same regime.

I completely forgot about the dips using chairs!

Anyways, his punishment starts tonight. I'll whirl through the 3x8-12 to see how he goes. I'm sure the 1x10 pushups was him just being lazy - we'll soon find out!

Cheers!