Most people realize that bodyweight exercises are great for muscular endurance, but can you perform a bodyweight workout for mass and strength? While bodyweight exercises are convenient because they require little equipment and can be done almost anywhere, there is sometimes a perception among more experienced lifters that they are too easy and can’t be used to add muscle mass or strength. However, I’ve found some useful techniques to help construct a bodyweight workout for mass or strength.
First of all, why am I performing a bodyweight workout? I’m currently going through Phase 2 of Visual Impact Muscle Building which focuses on adding both muscle mass and strength. Overall I think weight training is probably the best and fastest way to add muscle mass, but right now I’m fighting through some nagging shoulder pain, particularly during my bench press routine. Rather than risk an injury that could derail me for a month or longer, I’m going to switch to a full bodyweight workout. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I find it’s good to put the weights down every 6 months or so and give the joints a break from heavy weight training.
Endurance vs. Mass and Strength
The reason bodyweight exercises are often seen as providing muscular endurance is that experienced exercisers can generally perform high reps. For example, I would guess the average experienced lifter could perform sets of 50 pushups. This type of endurance is great, but doing 50 reps of an exercise is not the best way to gain muscle mass or strength. Think back to weight lifting and imagine performing 50 reps of bench press and you’ll quickly realize that you’d be better off increasing the weight and doing less reps to gain mass and strength. The problem then is creating a bodyweight workout routine that will challenge your muscles enough so that you can only perform a low number of reps.
I’ve found that the best way to train for muscle mass gains is to cumulatively fatigue your muscles. In fact, this is a guiding principle in Phase 1 of Visual Impact Muscle Building. The best way to gain strength and muscle definition is to actually avoid fatiguing the muscles and perform heavy weight, low rep training (Phase 3). Because Phase 2 is a transitional step focused on gaining both mass and strength, the goal is to train the muscles just short of failure. In this manner, you create some fatigue allowing you to add mass but can also lift heavy weights allowing you to gain strength and muscle definition. For weight training, this may translate into a 5×5 program.
Bodyweight Workout for Mass
For bodyweight training, I think the best way to add mass is through density training. In essence, you choose an exercise and complete a certain number of reps. If you’re performing supersets, you would perform another exercise targeting a completely different muscle group and complete a certain number of those reps. This goes on for 15 minutes. For example, you perform 3-5 pushups, then perform 3-5 squats and go back and forth until you can’t complete a full set any more. At that time, you add rest time between sets. If you didn’t want to perform supersets, you could just do 3-5 pushups, rest 10 seconds and continue. Once you could no longer do 3-5 pushups, rest 20 seconds. Continue adding rest time as needed until you have completed 15 minutes of training. It sounds pretty basic, but this is a great way to create cumulative fatigue and really add some size to your muscles.
When doing this type of density training, it’s best to exercise just shy of failure on any individual set. That way you’ll be able to complete the full 15 minute routine. Even if you can do sets of 100 pushups, it’s likely that at some point during these 15 minutes that you’ll have to increase your rest time beyond 10 seconds.
Bodyweight Workout for Strength
When you want to focus on gaining strength, the best thing to do is perform low rep bodyweight training. However, how can you make bodyweight exercises more difficult? It’s all about leverage and different angles. For example, regular pushups might be easy but try performing decline pushups or decline closed grip pushups and they are more challenging. In fact, I think the most challenging
bodyweight exercises involve performing one-arm or one-leg variations of the traditional exercises. Convict Conditioning highlights how to progressively perform exercises such as one-arm pushups, one-leg squats, and one-arm handstand pushups. Another way to use bodyweight workouts for strength is to add weight to an exercise (weighted vest, chains, weights in a backpack, etc.). If
you are focused exclusively on strength, then make sure to avoid fatiguing your muscles though.
Bodyweight Exercises
So what types of bodyweight exercises can you perform with the above strategies? Personally, I perform a HIIT workout and plyometric training exercises for my legs so my bodyweight workouts focus on arms. Because I’m training for mass and strength, I like to group exercises by pushing and pulling muscles thereby creating some fatigue by exercising the same muscle groups on the same days.
Pushing Exercises: handstand pushups, one-arm pushups, decline closed-grip pushups, dips, Hindu pushups
Pulling Exercises: pull ups, inverted row, parallel pull ups, chin ups
There you have a sample group of exercises and a couple strategies so that you can construct a bodyweight workout for mass and strength.
Bodyweight Workout
Workout, Bodyweight
via Losing Weight Exp http://losingweightexp.blogspot.com/2013/09/bodyweight-workout.html
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