Effectively Building Muscle With Bodyweight Workouts

For decades, the thought of building muscle brought with it images of weight benches and rigorous workouts. In order to really build muscle, people had to be one with their weights. Today however, there are new trends in body building that are a bit less strenuous and a bit more effective than those of yesteryear.

Muscles could care less what type of equipment is used, as long as they get the stimulation that they need in order to grow. Even the most expensive equipment in the world will not work if it is not used correctly. Bodyweight training is not meant to be a replacement for weight lifting. On the contrary, it is designed to be another tool in the muscle building arsenal.

“When in a pinch or in addition to your current routine, you can add these simple strategies to bodyweight exercises for a great workout weight free”. – Breaking Muscle

Bodyweight training can be a very effective method for building muscle. Many feel that it works much better than free weights. So, what exactly is bodyweight building? Basically, it is exercise that requires full body tension. There are various benefits such as a more natural range of motion and the fact that bodyweight training does not put as much stress on joints as traditional weight training.

The biggest drawback to bodyweight training is that most people are not aware of how to properly increase resistance and so they simply keep going at the same pace. Traditional exercises in their basic forms are simply too easy and do not provide the tension that is required for muscle building. Increasing resistance is key in building muscle mass and maintaining those muscles.

Many people believe that weight training is the best way to build muscle simply because it is easier to use weights instead of progressing their exercises. Bodyweight training takes much discipline and patience. Bodyweight exercises may become more difficult as they progress which causes some people to give up. Used in their correct form however, these can be very effective exercises for building muscles, much more effective in fact than any other form of body building.

“The lack of knowledge regarding bodyweight training and its proper progressions is what prevents more people from getting the results they should from it”. – Jason Ferruggia

Doing repetition after repetition will not help to build muscle. An increase in resistance is key. There are no special equipment workouts that will produce the effects of bodyweight building. The trick is not only doing the proper exercises, but doing them in progressions that will force the muscles to grow.

Basic bodyweight building exercises incorporate traditional exercises such as lunges, pushups and squats and then push the workout to the extreme by progressing to a higher level. This progression is what makes bodyweight building such an effective method for building muscle. This relatively new way of working out has become very popular as more and more people learn the benefits of the routines as well as the proper way to build healthy muscle mass.