Bodyweight exercises for muscle building

Introduction

If your goal is to build muscle mass, bodyweight exercises probably won’t be your first pick. However, it’s possible to build muscle by performing only bodyweight exercises. You can obtain an athletic physique but you will never reach the level of a professional bodybuilder.

Performing the same exercise while adding more and more repetitions won't do the trick in this case. To build muscle you need to stimulate muscle growth. You need to let your muscles know that they need to be bigger and stronger. The way to do that is to increase the load and there are three methods that you can choose from. If you can execute more than 40 reps of push-ups and more than 15 reps of pull-ups with a good form it’s time to move on.

1. Add excessive weights

You can take a rucksack and put weight plates or dumbbells in it. If you don’t have any weight plates you can use rocks. You can use rucksack for pull-ups and squats, but it’s not suitable for push-ups, because the weights aren’t closely attached to your body and they will move around.

If you try to do push-up exercises with a rucksack full of weights you will be concentrating more on retaining your balance than the actual exercise. If you want to make push-ups harder, be ready to invest some money. A weight west is your best choice. It’s easy to use and it won’t affect the range of motion in any exercise. You can use it for almost any bodyweight exercise including pull-ups, push-ups, squats, lunges, body row, rope climbing etc.

2. Move on to more advanced exercises

The range of bodyweight exercises is really wide. You can improvise and even create your own variations of bodyweight exercises. Actually the exercises what we call “advanced” is nothing compared to the movements professional gymnasts perform. Do you know many people who can execute an iron cross, human flag or planche push up? Personally I don’t know any. The physique

For chest training you can use advanced exercises like one hand push-up, mole hole push-up etc. You can watch my Advanced push-up exercises video to see more advanced push-up variations. For upper back and biceps you can use advanced pull-up exercises like around the world pull-up, clap pull-up etc. For more pull-up variations you can check my Pull-up variations: beginner to expert video. For leg training nothing is better than single leg squat variations – pistol squat, one leg box squat etc. For every casual exercise there is an advanced variation. Just use your imagination.

3. The 15 minute workout

This is a training program designed by Nick Nilsson. This program incorporates a unique repetition counting concept. According to Nick Nilsson, this program will help you to build muscles using only bodyweight exercises. The average workout length is 15 minutes. You start by performing a set of 3 repetitions. Rest for 10 seconds and execute the next set of 3 repetitions. When you can no longer execute 3 repetitions you increase the rest period by 10 seconds, i.e. you now rest 20 seconds, then 30 and etc.

The aim of this workout is to do as many repetitions in the given time period as you can. You should take some notes so that you can see your results and track your progress. If you achieve a point where you can work through the 15 minutes without increasing the 10 second rest period it’s time to move on to harder exercise variations or you can perform the repetitions at a slower tempo, it will make it a bit harder.

The 15 minute period isn’t the absolute time limit you can vary the workout time. For bigger muscle groups use longer time periods for smaller muscle groups - shorter periods. For example, for leg training you can use 20 minutes, for upper back or chest use 15 minutes, for biceps 10 minutes. It’s totally up to you how you design your workouts.

I have tried this program a couple of times. I find it pretty intense. I incorporated it in my push-up and pull-up routines. Both were 15 minutes. After these workouts I was completely exhausted. One of my friends has been doing this routine for a longer period of time. He uses it for chest training. There is a slight increase in muscle mass; however, his strength has increased the most. After a month of following this routine he could do several repetitions of one hand push-ups with quite a good form. Beforehand he couldn’t do even a single repetition.

Conclusion

These are the three methods that work for most people. You can tweak and improve each of these training methods to fit your requirements but you have to remember that you can build muscle mass only by increasing the level of difficulty of your exercises. Doing 100 repetitions of a regular push up will increase endurance but strength and muscle mass will increase very little. Even in the 15 minute routine you always have to reach for harder exercises. You can even mix different exercises together to get a well rounded workout.