One of the things about body weight training is how versatile it is. You can use just your own body weight as resistance to accomplish a WIDE variety of fitness goals including strength, muscle gain, fat loss, conditioning, and much more.
HOWEVER the way you PROGRAM your training makes all the difference when it comes to reaching your goals.
As you may or may not know, my thing is training for muscle and strength with body weight and so I wanted to give you three rules to help you accomplish this goal.
Follow these rules, and you ill be on your way to getting big and strong with body weight exercise neglect them, and you ill likely have a hard time reaching your goals.
3 Rules for Building Strength Without Weights
- Stick to the basics
Cool calisthenics moves and tricks are AWESOME and my personal goal list for the year includes these exercises:
Solid clutch flag on both sides
Elbow lever
Free handstand
And a few more.
HOWEVER , when it comes to actually gaining STRENGTH and MUSCLE, these moves are not going to help a ton. They are more skill oriented if you will and are GREAT exercises but not perfect for getting big and strong.
You need to be focusing on things like:
Push ups and advanced variations
Pull ups and advanced variations
Squats and advanced variations
Jumping
Sprinting
Use this exercises to gain muscle and get strong with your own body weight.
2. Do the right amount of volume
If you are training for skill, you want to go LOW reps, and do a lot of them, frequently, and NOT to failure. It’s like PRACTICE more than anything.
But let’s say you’re going for hypertrophy, then you want to pound those muscles with some volume.
Now you don’t have to go old-school, golden age bodybuilder-style and do thirty sets for each body part but here is an example of what a workout might look like:
(NOTE: workout does not include warm up, skill work, metabolic finisher at the end, etc)
Push up / one arm push up progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
+
Vertical jump progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
Complete four sets total of each move
THEN
Pull up progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
+
Squat / one leg squat progression ñ 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
Complete four sets total of each move
3. Higher reps for size, medium reps for strength
A lot of folks think these two things are one in the same and while there is without a doubt a relationship between the two, training to get big is actually different than training to get strong.
As you can see in the workout above, you end up getting around 8-12 reps of each exercise this is generally best for that muscle size goal.
If you’re going for STRENGTH, then you want to move towards a little lower in the rep range, like 3-5ish this is best for raw strength.
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