One of the biggest lies in the fitness industry is that bodyweight exercises can’t be used to build muscle.
Resistance is resistance whether its coming from an outside weight or your own body. Below, I’d like to share with you my top 3 ways to adjust how you are currently using bodyweight exercise so that you gain more muscle mass.
1. Focus On The Eccentric Contraction
The eccentric contraction is the golden ticket for building size. The movement of a muscle is divided into two phases: concentric and eccentric.
During the concentric phase, the muscle shortens. For example, when doing a chin up the concentric phase for the bicep is while you are going up.
The eccentric phase is when the muscle lengthens. For example,during the down movement of the chin up.
Research shows that the eccentric phase is more effective for building muscle than the concentric phase. How do you focus more on the eccentric movement? Slow down your movement. During the chin up for example, count to 4 seconds as you go down. You’ll notice that it makes the exercise much harder.
2. Utilize A Bodyweight Drop Set
A drop set is a technique for tearing muscle tissue more effectively by using lesser and lesser weight or by using easier bodyweight exercises.
There is an inherent difficulty level in each bodyweight exercise. For example, a one legged squat is much harder than a normal no-weight squat.
You can use the inherent difficulty of the exercises to tear more muscle tissue.
For simplicity sake, let’s take the push up as an example. The decline push up is harder than a push up with your knees on the ground. When doing a bodyweight drop set you want to choose 3 exercises that work the same muscle group but are all at different difficulty levels. For the push up, lets choose (1) decline push up, (2) regular push up and (3) push up with knees on the ground.
In order to do a drop set you would start off doing decline push ups (the hardest exercise) until you can’t do any more. Then you would immediately switch to regular push ups (the medium difficulty exercise) until you reach fatigue. Lastly, you’d immediately switch to push ups with your knees on the ground (easiest exercise). Once you get to the final exercise you are recruiting and fatiguing muscle fibers that wouldn’t have been recruited with the hardest exercise.
Boom! More muscle growth.
3. Rest for Less Than 90 Seconds
When your goal is muscle mass, you don’t want to let the muscle fully recover during the rest periods.
My recommendation is less than 90 seconds but 45-60 seconds is ideal. When you rest for more than 90 seconds you are focusing your workout more on strength gains because you allow your muscle to fully recover. If you rest for short periods than you are able to recruit different muscle fibers during later sets because many of the muscle fibers haven’t recovered yet.
There are quite a few more principles to growing muscle. If you aren’t noticing growth then there is some component of your training that is not quite right.
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