We believe that bodyweight workouts deserve more respect. You're not doing your muscles and mobility any favors if you only do push-ups and lunges when the squat rack is full. Training with just your body weight can make you stronger, more coordinated, and tougher mentally, which will help you the next time you're trying to get a new personal record.
The six workouts listed below can all be done without any equipment, so they are perfect for when you're traveling or don't have access to a gym. They can also be done in your home gym or a commercial gym. No matter where you go, you can always do these exercises. So get your workout gear ready and let's start sweating!
The Workouts
Leg Day
The workout includes a lot of lunges and squats. We know that it's not the most creative approach, but using simple methods is often the most successful way to achieve something. Why change something that is working? You need to do 400 total reps to gain muscle and strength. You shouldn't be using weights to build up mechanical tension, so you have to rely on doing more sets and reps.
Two rounds of:
- 50 bodyweight squats (conventional stance)
- 25 bodyweight reverse lunges (each side) — It’s okay to alternate.
- 50 bodyweight squats (wide stance)
- 25 bodyweight lateral lunges (each side) — It’s okay to alternate.
- 25 jumping jacks
- 25 glute bridges
This is a lot of information. If you're not tired and still have energy left, do another round. Two rounds will total 400 reps. Three rounds will total 600 reps. Take as much time as you need, there is no time limit. feel free to add breaks as needed.
Training Tips
Push through your heels for the squats, the lunges, and the glute bridges. Your feet's balls keep you in balance, but they shouldn't take any of the force while you're working out.
Grip the floor with your foot during the eccentric motion of the squat and lunge. Then on the concentric motion drive through the heels. You can improve your balance during the movement by gripping the floor with your foot. This will also help to keep your knee in the correct alignment.
Remember to keep your core engaged while you're working out — pretend you have a weight belt strapped around your waist that's pulling your abs in.
Push Day
Pushups are a staple in any good bodyweight training program – you'll encounter them often and that's a good thing! Just make sure you’re not doing them wrong.
The proper way to do a push-up is not something that people who work out their chest and shoulders on a bench or in a power rack do regularly. Even though you'll be sore, you'll be doing your shoulders a favour by adding pushups to your routine. This will help to even out any imbalances and adding new skills and strengths.
4 rounds of:
- 8 push-Ups
- 20-second plank
- 8 bodyweight skull crushers
- 4 diamond push-ups
- 8 bodyweight skull crushers
- 20-second bear crawl static hold
- 8 push-ups
This workout is a lot of time under tension, so allow yourself to rest for three minutes between rounds. Warm up your wrists by shaking them out. Make sure your shoulders are not tense and your breathing is back to normal.
You will be able to do eighty push-ups (standard and diamond-shaped) by the time you finish this workout. After completing all the repetitions with the correct form, you should feel a pump and be quite fatigued. Again, there is no time limit. Try to complete a full round before resting, but if you need a break, take one.
Training Tips
Make sure your shoulders are pulled down and back every time you do a push-up or any of its variations. One way to do this is to start in a push-up position. The author is asking you to imagine touching your rear delts (shoulder blades) to your tailbone.
While doing this move, try to engage your core muscles by tilting your hips towards your chest. This position should remain solid throughout the entire movement.
Also, don’t flare your elbows during a pushup. It can harm your shoulders and waste your energy.
The “Core Clock” Workout
An entire workout that focuses on your core might seem unappealing or uninteresting, but it is worth considering. You'll be moving with precision and ensuring your muscles are tense throughout your body. This will help get your body ready for future heavy sets of deadlifts and squats. Although you may dislike working on your core, the “Core Clock” is still beneficial.
A large clock face that you can fit inside is drawn on the floor. You perform a given movement for a certain number of seconds or reps, then move to the next number on the clock.
Let’s use the plank as an example. Imagine you are in a plank. That’s the noon position. You should remain in the plank position for 12 seconds before moving your head to the 1 o'clock position. Hold there for one second. Then move to the 2 o’clock position and hold for two seconds. Keep going until you have made a complete circle. This refers to the amount of time it takes for the clock to complete one full rotation.
3 rounds of:
- “Core Clock” mountain climbers (one rep is a mountain climber with each leg)
- “Core Clock” plank to pikes (paper plates or socks under your feet can make it easier to slide if you don’t have core sliders)
- Rest two minutes
- “Core Clock” ab rollouts (if you don’t have an ab roller, paper plates or socks under your hands will work)
Rests are needed in the middle of rounds because the central clocks are harder to manage than they look. It is important to keep your core engaged during the movement. If you need a break, signal with your lower back. When you feel your lower back caving, you know that your abdominal muscles are not toned. If you cannot find a way to fix the problem, take a break until you can figure it out, and then continue working.
Training Tips
Don’t rush through these. Although they are called core clocks, it does not mean that you are on one. Slow and controlled movements will be helpful here. Focus the engagement on your core on each rep.
Why Can Bodyweight Exercises Build Muscle Just As Effectively as Weights?
We need to understand what causes muscle growth in order to answer this question.
Currently, the research suggests that muscle growth is primarily driven by mechanical tension. Mechanical tension includes both active tension and passive tension.
Passive tension, on the other hand, is the force generated by outside sources, such as the weight of an object. The difference between active and passive tension is that active tension is generated by the muscle fibers themselves, while passive tension is generated by outside sources, such as the weight of an object. Myosin is a protein that helps muscles contract by pulling on actin.
The force generated by the stretch of the muscle is called passive tension. This force is generated by the stretch of titin (a component within muscle fibers) and the extracellular matrix (surrounding muscle fibers).
Since Mechanosensors can be found both within and around muscle fibers, they are able to detect any sort of mechanical tension and start a signaling pathway. This then eventually leads to an increase in muscle growth.
There is active and passive tension in everything we do. Here's the thing: both active and passive tension are present in everything we do, not just weights.
Passive tension relates to the particular exercise. Some exercises stretch the working muscles more than others. When passive tension is combined with active tension, it appears to have additive effects on muscle growth.
In conclusion, exercises that stretch the muscle to its furthest point are most effective for building muscle. An example of this is when the muscles are stretched during the lower portion of the bench press and squat, and they are simultaneously producing high levels of active tension.
Bodyweight movements like squats and push-ups are good for achieving this.
But what about active tension?
Active tension is the force generated by muscle fibers. The growth of muscle would be at its best if we created high levels of active tension, meaning high levels of recruitment of muscle fibers.
We know muscle fibers are recruited in a progressive sequence:
When low force is needed, slow-twitch fibers that don't produce much force are used.
The more force that is required, the more fast-twitch fibers are recruited.
If you only look at these principles, you may think that you need to lift heavy weights to engage all the slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers.
This means that if you want to target the most muscle fibers possible, you should lifted heavier weights. However, this is ultimately inconsequential.
When we use a light resistance, we can cause the majority of a muscle's fibers to get tired by performing repetitions until we can't do any more (the point where another rep cannot be completed): force requirements increase as we approach not being able to do anymore, necessitating the recruitment of fast-twitch, high force-producing fibers.
resistances. This means that we can use either light or heavy weights to create high levels of active tension and thus optimize muscle growth.
Indeed, longitudinal research assessing muscle growth supports this. A 2017 meta-analysis by Schoenfield et al. found that performing repetitions to failure with loads between 30% and 85% of one's one-rep max (equating to reps between 5 and 40) similarly induced muscle growth.
We need to find an exercise that we can keep doing for 5 to 40 reps before we get too tired to continue.
We will find out later that there are many exercises that do not require any equipment that we can use to reach our goals, no matter how much experience we have.
If the resistance is too light, it won't elicit optimal muscle growth. A study done in 2018 showed that using a resistance that is 20% of your one-rep max is not as good for muscle growth as using a resistance that is between 40% and 80% of your one-rep max.
If you use a resistance that is approximately 20% of your one-rep max, you will need to do 60 or more repetitions to reach failure. Bodyweight movements that you can do more than 60 reps of are probably not good for muscle growth, because they don't create enough active tension.
The threshold may even be lower than 60 reps. It is best to choose bodyweight movements that will let us stop within the 5 to 40-rep range so that we are being careful.
Using Movement Patterns to Select Bodyweight Exercises
Since we now comprehend the reasons why and how bodyweight movements are just as potent as weights, it is time to deliberate how we can generate our routine.
There are many different methods you can use to select exercises, such as using a random number generator, looking up exercises in a book, or using an online workout tool. I think choosing exercises based on movement patterns is the simplest way to achieve this.
There are many ways to classify basic movement patterns. Below is the one I feel is most suited for building muscle (note, I’ve also detailed the muscle groups trained beside each movement pattern):
- Horizontal press: chest, triceps, deltoids, and abdominals
- Horizontal pull: back, biceps, forearms, and abdominals
- Vertical press: deltoids, triceps, and abdominals
- Vertical pull: back, biceps, forearms, and abdominals
- Knee dominant: quadriceps, glutes, adductors, and calves
- Hip dominant: glutes, hamstrings, and calves
It's important to note that even though horizontal and vertical variations target the same muscle groups, it's still better to include both in your workout routine. This is because using different angles hits different parts of those muscle groups.
If you select exercises based on common movement patterns, most of the muscle groups in your body will get a workout.
Some muscles may not be receiving enough stimulation, so adding exercises that focus on one muscle group may be necessary. We will discuss this more in depth later, but for now, let's go over each movement pattern to see what kind of bodyweight exercises we can do.
Horizontal presses
In order to create horizontal resistance for your body, you must do some variation of push-ups.
You may think that the push-up is too easy and not a good training activity if you have had a lot of training. However, as discussed earlier, as long as we can select a push-up variation that we can do until we can't do any more, muscle growth should be achieved.
Kikuchi and Nakazato's 2017 study provides additional support for this. 18 males were trained to do either the bench press or the push-up for 8 weeks.
The bench press group lifted 40% of their one-rep max and did more than 30 reps in each set. The group doing push-ups adjusted their hand and feet positions to make the exercise harder, so it would be similar to lifting 40% of their one-rep max on the bench press.
Both groups saw similar increases in the thickness of their chest and arm muscles after 8 weeks.
