3 Ways to Build Lean Muscle With Bodyweight Exercise
|Change The Angles During Your Next Bodyweight Exercise
Pushup – the core of any bodyweight routine
The Simplicity and Complexity of Bodyweight TrainingAt a simple level, bodyweight training is no more than a combination of push ups, pull ups, and un-weighted squats. But bodyweight training can be much more than that.
There is a dynamic world of unique ways to manipulate an exercise to make it much more challenging and effective. Bodyweight exercise is not just a “finisher” exercise after the “real” weight lifting exercises are completed.
Push ups are a bodyweight exercise staple, but there are many variations of a single movement.
Why do so many people see bodyweight training as limited? Because the only variable they know how to adjust is number of repetitions. For example, at first a person’s goal might be to perform fifty push ups in a row. Once the person achieves that, then what’s next? Eighty, ninety, or 100 push ups?
This type of thinking is linear and limited. When, in fact, bodyweight exercises are extremely versatile and can help anyone build lean muscle and increase strength.
How to Extend Bodyweight Training
- Adjust the angle of the exercise
- Distribute your body weight differently
- 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
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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Hi
Being of “senior years” bodyweight training isn’t something I’ve ever tried – although no doubt there’s a level that would be appropriate for me.
My preferred forms of exercise are line-dancing and yoga. Some may think yoga isn’t exercise, but I find it pretty challenging and we do end up in some of the positions you show and shift weight every so often, so perhaps there’s more common ground than I initially thought.
Joy
Thanks Joy
You will be amazed how easily you can build a bit of bodyweight into daily live – think every movement. Each time you get out of a chair – do it 5 times.
Each time you pick 2 litres of milk out of the fridge – lift it above your head 5 times – 2 kg lifts for free. And in our senior years, who cares if it all looks a bit daft.
take care
Mark
Great Article Mark, after 12 years as a full time infantry man and 12 years in the reserve forces body weight exercises have been drummed in to me. Loved the variations and changing the angle will be giving it a go
Thanks Mike. I did a stint in the infantry – now 40 years ago. Pretty well everything we did was bodyweight based other than lifting a rifle above our heads and doing the mile and a half in battle gear. I doubt there was any science applied at the time. Different now. I am getting back into it – building it into every day life.
Thanks for the message – gives me heart
Thank you for informative article. I have a question: If just starting bodyweight training. What is basic number of sets and repetitions you should start with if you just start with push ups for example?
Thanks. Good question. I am starting too – I do have a solid base from the cycling I have done. I have not done any other exercise for 40 years. My plan is to start doing 10 minute sessions. One of my videos maps out a 10 minute workout which has 5 exercises and 5 repetitions each. That is my plan and I will build from there. Of course one neeeds to be aware of what your limits are that come from your base health and body weight.
Over the next few days I will be constructing a 30 day challenge on the site – that will include a list of workouts to alternate with the cardio work.
Good luck.
Great article, Have been trying to loose weight on different parts of my body without success, so will be trying changing the angle advise. Thank you. 🙂