How To Build Muscle Without Weights

Javier from Spain asks...

“I have a demanding sales job, always on the run, without access to local gyms, so I want to know if one can build muscle without weights. I know that gymnasts do this all the time. Do they follow some kind of special training?”

Sure you can. And you are right, looking at Olympic athletes makes it obvious that what matters most is how you train and not the actual equipment used for this purpose. In fact, you could probably achieve your full muscular potential and get really strong without even touching a barbell in your life.

Now, I'm not implying that you should copy their programs because you would develop specific skills that you don't really need. What I'm saying is that you should base your training on sound principles and results will follow.

How To Build Muscle Without Weights – Key Points:

1) Load your muscles

The not so big secret of gaining lean mass is to constantly challenge your body and ask more of it. However, this can be tricky when the only resistance used is your own weight, especially when you get stronger.

So what do you do in this case? You perform the exercises in a strict form to avoid any momentum and keep a constant tension on the targeted muscles.

For this reason, increase the speed only gradually (minimizing the acceleration), and make a smooth transition between the concentric (lifting) and eccentric (lowering) phases. Your bodyweight will feel heavier, so you will have more room for progress.

However, if you follow this recommendation, there is no reason to go overboard by moving too slow because this wouldn't make any difference. (Keep in mind that momenta are generated by force, which is a function of mass and acceleration.)

2) Limit time under tension

An exercise is effective when it affects a large number of muscle fibers, but is also carried long enough to fatigue them. In other words, your results do not depend on these two variables per se, but rather on finding a good compromise between them.

If your muscles are not exposed to sufficient intensity, the slower-twitch fibers have time to recover and are called back into play, which means that their higher-twitch counterparts will remain unsatisfied.

By the same token, if the load is too high, the weaker muscle fibers are not recruited long enough to be fatigued.

Bear in mind that no optimal set duration is written in stone because this figure should be correlated with the slow/fast twitch fiber ratio – which is not the same for different muscle groups or individuals. However, the rule of thumb here is to keep the time under tension between 40 and 80 seconds.

Now, assuming that lifting and lowering movements last 4 seconds each, and you pause for about 2 seconds in the fully contracted position, you get a 4 – 8 rep range.

If you lack strength and start with the lower end of this interval, the emphasis will be on the almighty fast-twitch fibers. But as you gain strength and increase your reps (and time under load), the balance will shift more and more towards stimulating their modest slower-twitch neighbors.

3) Work harder

Eventually, you will get strong enough to do 8 reps correctly, and that's when the fun begins. You have to find another way to make the exercises more challenging or otherwise your gains will stall completely.

There are 3 ways to overcome this drawback. Make use of all of them, but not at once because you wouldn't be able to track the progress:

• limit the range of motion to its harder part (lower half for the pushing exercise and upper part for the pulling exercises), and do more sets;

• use isometric pre-exhaustion – right before doing a compound exercise (such as chin-ups) focus on contracting the same muscle group by performing an isometric movement (pull-overs); 

• when you become really strong, and need more than partial reps and pre-exhaustion, it's time to start all over but...using only one limb at a time.

This should be enough for you to build muscle without weights – I have yet to see somebody doing lots of single-legged squats while maintaining a perfect form.

4) Increase training density

Progress can also be achieved by reducing rest intervals between sets – more muscle fibers will be stimulated due to a more pronounced cumulative fatigue.

As a side note, this point refers to the specific situation where you want to build muscle without weights. However, you shouldn't get crazy about reducing rest intervals when heavy barbells are available because your results will be less than stellar.

Along these lines, it's important to mention that many trainers still use some kind of circuit training (moving fast from exercise to exercise) in an attempt to increase testosterone and growth hormone levels.

My advice is not to worry about manipulating the anabolic hormones through increasing training density because research failed to support this hypothesis – growth hormone variance doesn't seem to be correlated with hypertrophy or strength, and testosterone's increase is insignificant.

5) Don't look for more exercises

As Peter Drucker was insightfully preaching, "what gets measured, gets managed", so if you get obsessed with finding special exercises, you will not manage to get the body you want. What you need is to rely on a few good ones, and keep the same movement patterns at least for a while to be able to track your progress.

It goes without saying that your focus should be on contracting the muscles and not on keeping your balance. So avoid any exercises done on unstable surfaces because, apart from acquiring nontransferable skills, you wouldn't get any benefit from them.

How To Build Muscle Without Weights – Closing Point:

Ralph Emerson was definitely on to something when he was saying: “As to the methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

In the same vein, when it comes to training, understanding the basic physiological principles and applying them correctly is far more important than if you use barbells or not.

Yes, it's true that some training methods are better than others, but is also true the effective ones have always the same foundation. And only by mastering this foundation you'll be able to properly adjust these methods to your particular case.

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