How to Build Muscle Without Weights

Can You Build Muscle Without Weights?

The simple answer is yes. Using bodyweight exercises like pushups , for example, you can definitely build muscle and strength. However, if your goal is to have massive arms and tree-trunk legs, you will have to use heavier resistance training and do isolation exercises.

If your goal is to increase your general strength and your level of physical fitness heavy weights aren't necessary. Actually, if you're just starting to become more physically active, adding weights to your training right away might get you injured.

How and Why It Works

In order to build muscle without weights it's probably best to understand how muscles grow. For your muscles to become larger and stronger a few things have to happen:

1.Stress- An example of stressing the muscle would be just about any exercise that works a particular muscle or group of muscles. Push-ups, squats, bench press, pull ups--the idea is that it really doesn’t matter whether you’re using weights, sand bags, weighted medicine balls, or hell, a wheel barrel filled with rocks. Your muscles can’t tell difference between 150 pounds of dumbells or 150 pounds of body weight.

2. Recovery- After you’ve stressed the muscle, the tissues in the muscle become damaged and have to be repaired. It`s during this recovery period that the muscle becomes bigger and stronger. Muscle tissue comes back stronger than before so it doesn’t break down as easily next time.

3. Intake (Diet)- To help your body recover it needs the proper vitamins and nutrients.

Building muscle isn't rocket science: stress+recovery+diet=muscle growth. Stress the muscle by training properly, rest, and eat right.

It's your body`s effort in rebuilding or replacing damaged muscle fibers cells fusing together and to the muscle fibers that results in larger stronger muscles.

Building muscle without weights requires little or no equipment, but if you want to increase resistance and don't have a rack of weights, you just have to be a little creative.

For example, to add weight to a simple pushup, fill your backpack with some sandbags. Don't have sandbags? Add some canned goods instead.

Here are 5 tips to help you build muscle without weights:

1. Distance Makes the Heart Grow Stronger The longer your body becomes the more stress there is on your muscles-think of it this way, if you pick up a long object like an empty bench-press bar from the middle of the bar it’s pretty easy right?

But if try to pick it up even a couple of inches to the left or the right it becomes heavier.

You haven’t added any weight but because it becomes longer it becomes heavier to your muscles.

How to use it- There are dozens of body weight exercises you can change to put more stress on your body using this concept, here’s an example.

When performing lunges, squats even certain crunches all you have to do is to extend your arms straight up over your head making your body longer and to can adjust the difficulty of the exercise by how far up you extend you arms.

2. The greater the distance the more your muscles will work- The higher the stress on the muscle the stronger and bigger it becomes.

If you're not using heavy resistance like you get from weight training it will be hard to increase force, but you can increase the distance you move during each repetition and increase the amount of work your muscles are doing.

How to use it- How do you increase the amount of distance the body has to work from the start of the exercise to the finish? I’m glad you asked.

How about moving the floor further away? If the range of motion ends at the floor and we want to increase the range there’s a simple way to do it, we'll use the push-up as an example: stack up a few books and place your hands on them and then do the push-up.

Or you can put the books under your feet and you’ve increased the stress on your muscles immediately. You can use this method with your legs when doing lunges as well.

You can switch the dynamics of this method around as well: for the push-up lower yourself into the down position and instead of pushing up all the way, push-up only half way, go down again, then push all the way up like usual.

That’s 1 rep. To make it more challenging you can also go half way up 5 times than push all the way up and that would be 1 rep. You can do this with squats and lunges as well--it’s only limited by your own imagination.

3. Lowering Elastic Energy- Sometimes, we as personal trainers like to use terms that make us feel more important than we really are: elastic energy? Give me a break! Really, all it means is when you lower your body to jump, for example, your muscles are building energy to snap back, making it easier to jump. So get rid of the energy build-up and you’ll force your muscles to work harder.

How To Use It- We’ll use the squat as an example but again, don’t let that limit you. When you perform your squat count 4 seconds to go down and 4 seconds to come up.

If you really want to challenge yourself, add an explosive jump when you come up. But make sure it's a loooong way down.

4. The More You Move the Better It Is- Our bodies move in 3 ways: back to front, side to side, and rotational movements, so let’s take advantage of that.

Most conventional weight lifting exercises move the body up and down and sometimes sideways, but almost never in a rotational direction.

How To Use It- Simply twist your torso right or left when performing lunges, push ups, and certain crunches.

5. Limit the Amount of Contact Your Body Has With the floor- Exercising on an uneven surface will force your body to use more muscles to balance itself. This will also force you to slow down and take real measure of what your body is doing.

How To Use It- Easy, just try raising one foot up the air while doing just about any exercise. This works with push-ups, variations of the plank, squats, and many other exercises. When doing squats you can rest one foot on a chair behind you, just be sure that you aren't resting on it. Your weight should be on the leg you're squatting with.

Test Your Ground

Start slowly and get a feel for your body before you start jacking up your exercises; don't unload your pantry or get all crazy your first time out. A little piece of advice: if you're having trouble with the basic pushup please don't start adding weight; master the simple things first, then move on.

If you jump to something too advanced you're basically stealing from future gains and robbing yourself of the training that will help you right now.

Always remember that when it comes to training, know what your goals are and ask yourself if they are attainable. Educate yourself, and find out what you need to achieve them.



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