The world’s biggest streamer, IShowSpeed, said he got jacked without a gym, and the one piece of equipment he uses costs less than a membership

IShowSpeed has revealed his approach to staying fit, and it requires nothing more than a pull-up bar and a bathroom break. The 21-year-old streamer, whose real name is Darren Jason Watkins Jr., shared his routine over the past weekend, as first highlighted by UNILAD, explaining that he does ten pull-ups every time he uses the toilet. He has a pull-up bar installed just outside his bathroom door, and since most people use the bathroom around five times a day, that adds up to roughly fifty reps across five sets without any dedicated workout time.

Speed is convinced the method works. “I have gotten so much stronger from doing these, I don’t think y’all understand,” he said, and by all appearances, the results back him up. The logic behind the approach is that by attaching the exercise to something you already do multiple times a day, you barely register the extra effort, making it far easier to stay consistent than scheduling a dedicated gym session.

Fitness experts actually have a name for this strategy: habit stacking. It uses an existing, consistent habit as a trigger to perform another action, in this case, exercise. The pull-up bar itself is a one-time purchase that costs considerably less than a monthly gym membership, and it installs directly in a doorframe, making the whole setup genuinely accessible for anyone trying to build fitness at home.

Pull-ups are one of the more effective exercises you can do with minimal equipment

The exercise Speed has landed on is not a bad one to build a routine around. Pull-ups primarily target the lats, the large muscles running down the back, but also work the biceps, deltoids, and core simultaneously. Andrew Tracey, fitness director at Men’s Health, has noted that daily rep counts of just 30 to 50 can be genuinely beneficial, and that you do not need to complete them all at once. Spreading reps throughout the day, exactly as Speed does, is a legitimate and effective approach.

A review published in Sports Medicine also found that prioritizing pull-ups is among the most time-efficient ways to maintain and develop multiple muscle groups at once, and the movement builds grip strength that many other upper-body exercises miss entirely. That said, doing the same exercise every day does carry some caveats worth knowing. Repetitive high-volume training on the same muscle groups can lead to overuse injuries, particularly at the shoulders and elbows, and the risk is higher for anyone new to the movement.

Research on resistance training has generally found that muscles benefit from 24 to 48 hours of recovery between demanding sessions, and training to failure daily tends to produce diminishing returns rather than faster gains. Speed’s approach of spreading out lower-volume sets throughout the day, rather than pushing to failure in one session, actually lines up reasonably well with what the research supports for building endurance and improving form without accumulating too much fatigue.

For anyone looking to try it, stopping one or two reps short of failure each set is the key detail that separates sustainable daily practice from the kind of volume that leads to burnout or injury. The Jaden Ivey situation, where an impulsive social media post ended a promising NBA stint before it started, is a reminder that what people share online about their habits and routines can have consequences well beyond the post itself, though Speed’s pull-up reveal has gone over rather better.

Pull-ups also work best as part of a broader routine rather than a standalone daily habit. Since the movement primarily trains the back and biceps, pairing it across the week with push-ups, dips, and some lower-body work helps prevent the muscular imbalances that can develop from repeating the same pattern too often.

Speed’s toilet-door setup is a solid starting point, and the Khloe Kardashian story about what finally pushed her to her breaking point drew similarly outsized attention this week for reasons that have nothing to do with fitness, though both stories share a certain everyone-has-a-threshold quality.