1. Adjust the angle of the exercise
  2. Distribute your body weight differently
  3. Slow down the eccentric (when the muscles are relaxing – e.g., lowering from a bar)

By transforming the bodyweight exercise from an endurance exercise (high repetition) into a strength exercise (low repetition), you will be able to make any bodyweight exercise more challenging and more rewarding. One by one then from Todd Duslikis.

1. Adjust the Angle of the Exercise

When you perform bodyweight exercises, angles can also be adjusted to target different regions of the same muscle group. For example, if you perform the normal push up, you target mostly the middle portion of the chest and your weight is evenly distributed between your arms

push up, bodyweight

When you place your feet on a chair or desk or the bottom step, we call this a decline push up,  you target your upper chest.

decline push up, push up, bodyweight exercise

If you raise your upper body by placing your hands on a desk while doing a push up or (for those of you more advanced) use a dip bar or rings to perform dips, you will target the lower pectoral muscles (your chest muscles).

2. Distribute Your Body Weight Differently

As Todd said before, most people look at bodyweight training as linear. They simply try to increase the number of repetitions. But the distribution of your bodyweight while performing an exercise is another factor you can adjust to make an exercise more challenging.

For example, in a traditional push up, you typically distribute your weight evenly across both arms. Fifty percent of your upper body weight is in your right arm and fifty percent in your left.

But what if you were to shift more of your weight onto one arm? Would it make the exercise harder? You bet. By shifting more to one arm, you force the chest muscles to use more muscle fibers and thereby making the exercise harder – and more effective.  Doing push ups this way will allow you to fatigue within a lower repetition range and help you build more lean tissue.

Other examples:

  • While doing a pull up or chin up, you can put more weight into one arm
  • While doing dips, you can shift your weight and put more stress on one tricep.
  • While doing bodyweight squats, you can shift your weight to one side and even eventually be able to perform a one-legged squat.

For every exercise you perform, think of how you can adjust the distribution of your body weight to make the exercise harder.

3. Slow Down the the Eccentric (explained later)

This is one of the most effective ways of building lean muscle using only bodyweight exercises. It causes micro trauma and repairing the trauma builds the muscles (scary but true).  

What is the eccentric you may ask? I did. Body movement is made up of contractions (where the muscles shorten) and relaxations (where the muscles lengthen). Contractions are called concentrics and relaxations are called eccentrics – weird use of funny words, but there you go. An example; pulling yourself up onto a bar is a contraction (concentric) and letting yourself down is a relaxation (eccentric).

So slowing down the eccentric keeps the muscle under pressure while it is relaxing – i.e., it is still working and in this way you will fully fatigue the muscle in both sides of the exercise, the concentric and the eccentric.

There are several methods to performing eccentric training. Here are three Todd has found effective:

  1. Inter-Repetition Eccentric Training – Here, you focus on performing a slow eccentric (5-10 seconds) during every repetition. For example, if you are doing chin ups, you pull yourself up for the concentric portion, then slowly lower yourself down (the eccentric portion) for 5-10 seconds.
  2. Eccentric-Only Training – In this method, you don’t work the concentric at all. If you are doing pull ups, you will need a chair to help you with this. You simply lower yourself down during the eccentric for somewhere between 5-30 seconds, then use the chair to come back up. Since you are “resting” during the concentric by using your leg muscles to come back up, you are able to increase total set volume, which increases demand on the muscle.
  3. Post-Set Eccentric Training – Here, you only focus on the eccentric as a finisher. If you are performing pull ups, you do as many as you can at a normal cadence (1-0-1-0 or 1 second concentric, 0 second rest at top, 1 second eccentric, 0 second rest at bottom). Then, when you can’t perform any more repetitions, you jump straight into eccentric repetitions. Lower yourself down for 20-30 seconds. Once you hit the bottom, use a chair to come back to starting position and lower yourself down again. Once you can’t perform even a 5-second eccentric, then you’re done.

Challenge Yourself With Bodyweight Training

As you can see, bodyweight training can be much more challenging than simply increasing total repetitions. Using the approaches outlined here turns bodyweight exercise into something much more dynamic. It makes you consider many more components of training, including the angle of the exercise, how your weight is distributed, the speed of your repetitions, and getting value from the relaxing too.

Try one of these techniques during your workout today. You’ll notice the difficulty of your workout will increase dramatically. As time goes on, you can even begin to combine multiple techniques to further boost the effectiveness of your workouts.

By using these techniques you can transform any bodyweight exercise into a muscle-building, strength-improving, physique-enhancing exercise.

Thanks to Todd Duslikis