Forget pull

Work your back and core muscles using these bodyweight exercises

If you want to improve posture and sculpt your back and core muscles, a back and core strengthening workout is just what you need. You don't need pull-ups or heavy weights to build strength in your posterior chain — just this five-move bodyweight workout.

Although there's an abundance of bodyweight upper and lower-body workouts, it can feel tricker to hit your back muscles hard in the same way, with the same intensity. But by using clever techniques plucked straight from the 5 best ways to build muscle without lifting heavier weights, you could develop your muscles without weights at home.

The moves below are suitable for beginners and experienced weightlifters. If you’re returning from injury or suffer from lower back pain, check in with a qualified physician before trying these exercises. And for all bodyweight workouts, we recommend the best yoga mats for supporting your joints.

Each exercise targets the various muscles in your back, including your lats, erector spinae, rhomboids, trapezius, rear deltoids, and core muscles. Strong back and core muscles are responsible for good posture, protecting your lower back from injury, supporting trunk movement, and improving overall strength across your upper body.

Some of these exercises also activate your glutes — muscles that should be strong to protect your back. But building a powerhouse back isn't easy. These complex muscles comprise intricate, deeper muscles alongside large ones like your lats.

To develop your back muscles, you’ll need to focus on muscle engagement across various planes of motion — forward and back, side-to-side, rotation, and vertical (up and down). Give your muscles a good squeeze, including your core, rather than relying on your shoulders and arms to do all the work — this encourages engagement across different muscle groups.

Perform each exercise for 50 seconds with a 10-second rest before starting the next exercise. Try to hit 8-12 reps of each exercise for 3-4 rounds.

Ab rollouts hit the muscles in your back and core by targeting the rectus abdominis, erector spinae (spine stabilizers), transverse abdominis (a deep belt of core muscles), lats, chest, shoulders, and arms. Avoid this exercise if you experience shoulder pain or rotator cuff injury.

How:

Back extensions target the posterior chain, including your erector spinae, glutes, and hamstrings.

How:

This exercise hits your lats, biceps, rear deltoids, trapezius, and rhomboid muscles. You can also build bigger lats with these 3 lat pulldown variations.

How:

Scap push-ups don't look that impressive, but they’re tough. The exercise improves shoulder stability and builds strength in the serratus anterior — the muscles that keep your shoulder blades flat — using a limited range of motion. If you need to, place your knees down for this exercise. Imagine doing a push-up, just without bending your elbows.

How:

The move stretches and strengthens the muscles in your shoulders, arms, chest, back, core, hips, and legs and helps develop flexibility and mobility in your spine, legs, and hips. Plank pikes also build core stability.

How:

For each exercise in this routine, focus on squeezing and pausing at the top of each move, contracting as many muscles as possible. A hack that works for bodyweight training is time under tension (TUT), which means working your muscles through a range of motion for longer by slowing down the exercise.

TUT is also brilliant while doing the best ab exercises. Working longer through a full range of motion will light a fire through your muscles — even just by using your body weight. However you approach these moves, if you feel any lower back pain at any stage during this workout, stop immediately.

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Sam Hopes is a level III fitness trainer, level II reiki practitioner, and resident fitness writer at Future PLC, the publisher of Tom's Guide. Having trained to work with mind and body, Sam is a big advocate of using mindfulness techniques in sport and fitness, and their impact on performance. She's also passionate about the fundamentals of training and building sustainable training methods. When she's writing up her experiences with the latest fitness tech, you’ll find her writing about nutrition, sleep, recovery, and workouts.

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