The 30 best bodyweight exercises for men

Best body weight exercises To build muscle

Lose Weight / April 6, 2017

Body Weight Exercises Build MuscleWhile weight training is often synonymous with looking big and ripped, it’s not the only way to get there. Strategic use of body weight exercises can be just as effective, if not more, than the traditional stalwarts like the bench press and squat rack.

Skeptics, since I know you’re out there, take a look at gymnasts. These athletes are some of the most ripped on the planet and they don’t use weights. Many modern programs make it both safe and effective to get ripped without adding weight.

Gravity and Resistance

Gravity, not weight, is what we use to build muscle. Gravity creates resistance within our atmosphere, and that resistance can also be termed weight. That’s why the technical term for weight training is “resistance training.” Weights are merely tools that are used in the process of resistance training. They are good ones, too. They allow you to do all sorts of resistance exercises easily, and in a confined space. They also allow you to choose an exact amount of resistance, making using them more versatile than if you were to just rely on body weight and gravity.

They can, however, be limiting and often are. Body weight resistance training uses more natural movement patterns. It forces your body to move functionally, or in a manner that helps your functionality in life. With a little bit of creativity, you can get all the effects of weight training as well as functionality advantages, and add “lack of equipment” to your pile of bad excuses. Let’s take a deeper look at how gravity is your friend.

The Push-Up: The Perfect Example

Let’s begin with an example using an exercise everyone knows: the push-up. Invert a push-up, and add a bar with weight, and you have a bench press. Up until the point you can bench press your body weight, you have two very similar exercises, only one of which requires pumping iron.

For many people, a body weight push-up is completely adequate to build all the muscle you want. It won’t be for everyone, but you can increase the intensity of the push, by switching positions, taking away an arm, etc., to mimic the way you would add weight on a bench press.

Unless you’re in a space ship, there are body weight exercises that will force resistance and build muscle without using added weights.

3 Ways to Use Body Weight Exercises to Build Muscle

In order to continually get stronger, you need to progress over time. With weight, this is easy to do. You just add more. With body weight training it requires more thought and planning. Here are three ways you can force resistance so that your body will continually adapt, which is how it keeps the muscle growth happening:

1. Make Movements More Difficult

The simplest way to add resistance without weight is by finding more difficult movements. If you’ve done a Beachbody program, which hang their hat on both creativity and utilizing as little equipment as possible, you’ve seen a lot of these variations. From push-up and pull-up variations, to side-to-side yoga movements to almost anything done from the plank position, to hybrids of them all (push-up to side-arm balance anyone?) the possibilities are endless. With this strategy it’s not that hard to create body weight exercises where you fail due to stress at about the same cadence (time under muscular contraction) that you would using added weight.

2. Reduce Stability

Instability is another way to add resistance without weight. This can be done using an unstable platform, like a stability ball, or simply by doing exercises in a balance-challenged position. For example, lifting a leg or an arm off the ground during almost any movement makes it tougher. Again, your goal for resistance training is that point of failure. If lifting a leg or an arm makes it harder to hold the position, you’re strength building.

Stability training forces loads onto more muscles in your body than, say, doing most old school isolation training does. Detractors might say that this takes away from the muscles you are attempting to make larger, which is true. But isolation training is also old school. Stability training has a better overall training effect on the body. And a stronger training effect means that you have a more solid fitness base and can thus push harder in other areas. That leads to muscle growth with a more functional effect and a reduced risk of being injured.