Strength Training at Home, Any good or waste of time?

If you're really tight with money, check out www.6weeksixpack.com. He gives the same diet advice as on MFP with a P90X-style training schedule ie HIIT with and without weights.

As others have mentioned, You Are Your Own Gym is a great body weight program. I've been using the app for it (made for both iPhone & droid platforms) and it has the whole program set up for you--timers and counters included. Couldn't be any simpler

Strength training at home is tricky because no matter what you do it is very likely you will never be able to work your legs as hard as you can your upper body. People who do bodyweight based programs specifically often run into imbalances because of the fact that you need to be doing squats with a barbell loaded with roughly equivalent to your bodyweight on it in order to work your legs as much as basic pushups work your upper body. The end result is that you end up training your upper body with extremely strength intensive exercises, but the lower body work you end up doing is more of an endurance oriented nature (low weight, high reps). I mean think about it. Your legs were built to support your weight and then some. Doing bodyweight squats doesn't do all that much. Certainly not compared to the effect pushups have on your upper body.

Basically, you do need some form of heavy resistance on top of your bodyweight in order to work your legs sufficiently, and a pair of moderate weight dumbbells doesn't cut it.

This is why I am investing in a sandbag fitness system. It will take care of that issue with at-home training.

People who do bodyweight based programs specifically often run into imbalances because of the fact that you need to be doing squats with a barbell loaded with roughly equivalent to your bodyweight on it in order to work your legs as much as basic pushups work your upper body.

I wouldn't call it an imbalance. It's not like pushups are going to cause anyone's upper body to become huge, and nobody doing a lot of body weight squats and lunges will have really tiny legs. Sure, you'll get better upper body workout than a lower body workout, but not to the point that there are actually any real issues.

Wasn't referring to aesthetic imbalance but functional imbalance. You're not doing a whole lot to increase/build strength in your legs beyond a certain point which you hit pretty early on, but there's a lot you can do to make tremendous strength gains to your upper body with just bodyweight exercises.

Hi; something I haven't seen mentioned here; I do (TRX) gravity straps workouts at home. All you need is a doorway and your own body weight as resistance! You can buy an expensive or less expensive set. These workouts have done a great deal for me in just a few months, and it only takes about a half hour to do the session. The workouts can also be adapted to increase the difficulty as you become more fit.

I work out with that at home as well and like other forms of calisthenics, you do EVENTUALLY reach a point where you start to see an upper body bias in how hard you can hit your muscles in your training. For me that was around the time I started being able to do pullups using my suspension trainer. Now even single leg squats aren't enough to challenge my lower body anymore. So I'm investing in sandbags.

I lift at home 3x per week with just dumbbells... http://www.building-muscle101.com/dumbbell-workout-routine.html

As mentioned legs are a bit trickier than upper body if you don't have weights at your disposal, or only dumbbells.

It isn't really possible to run out of resistance in the upper body. Male gymnasitcs are all about strength, and male gymnasts have the opposite genetic gift that NFL lineman have. They have the ability to put on a ton of strength with no mass, so their strength:size ratio gets ridiculous. Most of the high level male gymnastics moves are out of reach to normal people, you'll put on too much muscle weight to ever get a ridiculously high strength:size ratio. Powerlifters and strongmen migh be strong, but not strong enough relative to their size to do something like a planche.

If you think that upper body bodyweight exercises are too easy, you need to spend some time with google.

The lower body is a different animal. The highest resistance BW lower body exercises are Pistol Squats, Shrimp Squats, Glute-Ham Raises, and Bodyweight Extensions.

Of those Pistols are pretty easy (relatively speaking), but they are also easy to load and you don't need a ton of weight to do so, every pound added to a pistol is the same resistance increase as 2 lb on the barbel. They can also be done as plyo squats. But since a pistol is a pretty complex move, loading one with much more than 100 lbs begins to get a little infeasible (adding weights aids balance to the point where it gets hard to hold the weights). Granted a pistol + 100 lbs is about as much resistance as a 350-400 lb back squat for a 200 lb person, impressive but not overly so.

Shrimp squats are a good bit harder and a little less known. The leverage is different which greatly increases the squatting forces required. A shrimp squat is actually a 1 leg lunge. In a squat the weight should be centered over the heel, and it is in a pistol, in a lunge the center of mass is behind the heel, which increases the force required by the quads. Shrimp squats are a little more difficult to weight.

Glute-ham raises are crazy hard. It requires a little apparatus at home, a way to support your feet and a pillow for your knees, but the forces aren't so high that a support can't be found/made. They can be weighted, but if GHR's are too easy for you, you have pretty inhuman strength in your legs.

Bodyweight leg extensions are the opposite of GHR's. They are possible to do (I've seen a video of one being performed), however the forces involved for your foot support are absolutely astronomical, I'm still working out a workable support at home. If the cross bars are strong enough a decline situp bench would work for partial ROM.

You can also do weighted sprints, hill sprints, or weighted hill sprints. Sprinting builds muslces as well, especailly when you do it in short max effort bursts (a la the 100m) with enough time to recover between each run so that you are able to apply peak power output on each run (which is not the case witht he whole HIIT fad that is currently going on).

Of course the other option is to go drive to a big empty parking lot, put the car in neutral, and push it around in max effort bursts. A lot of football players do this, but it seems to be mostly confined to them.

Sure, you can. (see my home gym pics below)
Just get the proper equipment. dumbbells, barbel, bench, whatever you can afford.
And so many people just give this stuff away, or sell cheap @ a garage sale, or on craigslist.

Actually, you don't need any weights at all! Here's a large collection of workouts, most of which don't use any equipment! All you need are a good pair of shoes, and your own willpower!

http://www.youtube.com/user/ZuzkaLight?feature=g-user-u

You also forgot to mention the need for a defibrillator to be on hand :laugh:

I would kill to be as young and fit as Zuzka, but alas like most of my pals here on MFP, I'm middle-aged and over-weight. I do lots of cardio so I'm not as un-fit as I was this time last year, but I'd love to find some core strength exercises that I could do at home and not kill myself (I've tried planks and burpees and fail miserably on both counts!)

You also forgot to mention the need for a defibrillator to be on hand :laugh:

I would kill to be as young and fit as Zuzka, but alas like most of my pals here on MFP, I'm middle-aged and over-weight. I do lots of cardio so I'm not as un-fit as I was this time last year, but I'd love to find some core strength exercises that I could do at home and not kill myself (I've tried planks and burpees and fail miserably on both counts!)

how about lunges and squats? they're good for your balance, the squats, if done right definitely work on the back muscles and the lunges on the abs. And, you can make them more difficult with slowing the down-movement or adding a torso rotation...

I'm in my 20's and planks are REALLY hard, so don't feel like it's because you're older! just keep going, they'll get easier.

TRX is nice and versatile, you can work your whole body just with some adjustable ropes (because that's what they are :P )