As trendy as the weight room might be these days, the world of barbells and dumbbells can be a pretty intimidating place. There are gym bros grunting. There’s metal slamming. And the heavy equipment looks like an injury waiting to happen. So what about strength training without all that, using just your own body with moves like air squats and planks?
Officially known as bodyweight exercises, this type of workout can offer legit benefits. For starters, it’s super accessible. “Bodyweight is a great, free option that can be done anywhere,” Kristie Larson, CSCS, founder of Tension, a strength training studio for women in Brooklyn, New York, tells SELF. It doesn’t matter if it’s storming outside or you’re traveling, you can crank out a few push-ups or lunges without any equipment (or even much space).
But can you really grow muscle and get stronger on bodyweight workouts alone? Well, that depends. Here’s what experts want you to know before you ditch the dumbbells altogether.
Bodyweight load can vary
Not all bodyweight exercises are equal. Depending on which muscles an exercise is targeting, and which part of the body is acting as the “weight”, difficulty can vary from totally manageable to brutally hard.
Think about it: “You’re not going to get benefit out of doing bodyweight biceps curls,” Meredith Witte, MS, CSCS, founder of functional strength training platform The Playground, tells SELF. Since the only thing you’d be moving up and down is your forearm and hand, there’s virtually no stress put on the muscle.
Yet doing a push-up requires you to support up to 75% of your body mass, according to a study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. For a 150-pound person, that means moving 112.5 pounds—which is why push-ups are so freaking tough even without stacking any weight plates on your back.
Then there are lower body moves like lunges and squats, which also use the majority of your body as the load. But because you’re working some of the largest muscles in your body—like the glutes and quads—it takes a pretty significant challenge to create tiny tears in muscle tissue that rebuild back stronger, leading to gains. “For the average person, bodyweight squats are not going to be enough,” Witte says. “Our legs are very strong, and so they’re going to feel challenged by body weight, but it’s still really not going to be enough to sufficiently build muscle, unless you truly have not worked out before, or you are an older adult who has not been working out.”
Yes, bodyweight can potentially build muscle, as long as you get close to “failure.”
In order to trigger hypertrophy (the fancy term for muscle growth), Stuart Phillips, PhD, a kinesiology professor at McMaster University in Ontario, tells SELF that you need to get close to the point where the muscle “fails”—meaning, you feel like you can’t possibly whip out another rep—according to research conducted by his team. It doesn’t matter whether you’re lifting heavy or light, or with no weights at all, as long as you generate enough tension in the muscles that get within a couple reps of that muscular failure.
How do you know if you’re there? Witte says the sensation of muscular failure is like “trudging through mud”—your final reps should feel nearly impossible to complete.
Almost anyone can get to that point with an extra-hard bodyweight exercise like a handstand push-up. Phillips points to gymnasts as an example of athletes who build a ton of strength and muscle mainly through challenging bodyweight moves. But the people who stand to benefit most from simple bodyweight exercises—like arm circles or glute bridges—are beginners or those who haven’t worked out in a while. “The biggest improvements in strength and muscle are going to happen in people who are pretty inactive to start with,” Phillips says.
That’s because, if you aren’t super fit—or you’re rehabbing post-injury or surgery—even lower-intensity bodyweight exercises will be enough to make the muscles quake. At the same time, these moves will also strengthen the brain-body connection. “You can teach your brain to recruit the muscle fibers that you maybe aren’t utilizing,” Larson says.
To keep getting stronger, you need to increase the challenge.
As any trainer will tell you, the key to continually getting stronger is to apply the principles of progressive overload. This training strategy typically involves picking up heavier and heavier free weights to systematically increase the difficulty of an exercise. But Phillips says that’s not the only way to do it: Anything that puts more stress on your muscles can work.
That could mean trying a trickier variation, like moving from a double-leg to a single-leg squat, Witte says. Or you can switch up the tempo by going faster or slower (as long as it’s harder). “I also think cleaning up your form is a good way to progress,” Witte adds, explaining that using proper technique can keep you from letting momentum help or allowing stronger muscles to take over for the ones you’re actually trying to target.
And of course, you can always add more reps and sets—up to a certain point, at least. Once you can complete 30 or more reps without tiring out, it’s time to up your game. “At that point, that’s not really resistance training—it’s much closer to endurance training,” Phillips says.
Skipping the weights will limit your progress.
So what happens if you never pick up a weight? Eventually, you’re gonna hit a dead end. “Bodyweight exercises just can’t provide enough stimulus for the average person for very long,” Witte says. “Pretty quickly, your body is just simply going to need more to build muscle.”
That said, not everyone is looking to always get stronger and stronger. If all you really want is to stay healthy and mobile throughout life, bodyweight exercises are enough to get you there. “If someone wants to just maintain muscle, then bodyweight could be appropriate indefinitely,” Larson says. You may not win any bench-press competitions, but you’ll still be getting all those bone-building, balance-boosting, mobility-improving benefits (among plenty of others).
Related:
- Does Calisthenics ‘Count’ As Strength Training?
- An Outdoor Circuit Workout That’ll Build Strength and Boost Cardio in 20 Minutes
- 31 Leg Exercises at Home That Require No Equipment
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