What happens when you use bodyweight to build muscle without weights?
Building muscle without weights can be challenging, however, it can also help you build core strength and definition rather than strictly mass. It’s also a great alternative if you don’t have access to a costly gym or don’t have the funds to purchase an expensive array of weights.
The key is to focus on slow and deliberate movements with isolation at depth. Essentially, you use your body weight as the weights. All strength training is basically performing movements in practical ways that stimulate the primary and secondary muscles you want to target. This is why correct form is so important. Otherwise, you wind up building muscles you don’t intend to and you can look kinda lopsided and wonky. Not only that, you run the risk of injuring yourself by performing potentially dangerous exercises and movements.
Doing bodyweight workouts uses the same concept as if using weights, where you extend the time-under-tension (TUT) in order to break down the muscle fibers. During the lockdowns of the pandemic I was forced to only use bodyweight workouts to build muscle without weights. Little did I know, I got jacked pretty damn quick. As a matter of fact, I got in the best shape of my life. Let me tell you how I did that by just using bodyweight.
In the before time…
It took me some time to understand why this was happening, but let’s start from the beginning. First, I’ll explain to you why I wasn’t seeing even close to the amount of muscle gains when I was using weights even though I was lifting weights way more often. Quite simply, I was working out really hard, but unfortunately, I wasn’t working out very smart. Let’s take a look.
We all remember back in 2020 when everything shut down for an insane amount of time. Yeah, it sucked big time! It sucked especially bad if you were in colder regions because it was in the middle of March and cold AF out! Unfortunately, I lived in the Philadelphia, PA at the time and the whole city shut down for about 3 months. Fortunately, spring was right around the corner. So even though it was still cold out (average around 45 F), we only had to deal with a few weeks before it started getting significantly warmer.
Most places like retail stores and restaurants opened up with a very limited capacity (25-50%) with outdoor seating in the summer of 2020, but in the city’s infinite wisdom, they kept the gyms closed for over a year. Yeah, you heard that right, the one place that would have actually helped people be more healthy, the city kept closed for over a year. Hey, at least McDonalds, Walmart and Target were open to feed you processed crap while swarming with people not social distancing and wearing a mask that never worked. Who knew?
How did I adapt to the gyms being closed?
But I digress. The point is my gym, City Fitness, was closed for over a year. Therefore, if you wanted to maintain any semblance of physique or fitness level to build muscle without weights or going to the gym, then you had to get creative… and fast. For those first few weeks in March and April it was really difficult to peel myself away from the TV because the talking heads were incessantly telling everyone the world was ending.
Once the fear porn started to subside and the weather started getting a little nicer, I had to get my doughy-ass back in gear and figure something out. Thankfully, I had a bike and remembered there were some monkey bars and parallel bars down by West River Drive along the Schuylkill River. It was only about 5 miles away from me and I had nothing better to do, so one day I decided to head on over and check it out. Little did I know, this little discovery would forever change the way I trained while building an insane amount of muscle without using weights.
How did I work out in the before time to build muscle?
So now that you have the grasp of what was going on at the time, let me explain to you how I was working out in the before time. Quite simply, I was working out really hard at the gym, but I wasn’t working out very smart. I did the typical 4-5 days a week strength training with ab training here and there. I would accompany that with 20 minute steady state cardio on the elliptical or stationary bike.
All in all, I was spending about an hour and a half to two hours at the gym about 4-5 days a week consistently. I was eating decently, but I wasn’t particularly set on having a muscle building diet. At the time, I thought that was all I could really do. Like most other people, I thought I needed weights to build muscle. Thankfully, I was forced to learn the benefits of adapting my workout to use bodyweight and build muscle without weights.
How did I develop this workout to build muscle without weights?
I’ll be perfectly honest, when I first started developing this workout, it was kinda pathetic. In my head, I thought I was jacked, but reality set in, and very quickly smacked me in the face. I soon came to realize I was kinda fat and weak. Additionally, I had just spent the past month or so consuming pure junk. I was eating junk, watching junk, sitting on my couch like a fat baby, and wallowing in self-pity getting super depressed. Any muscle mass that I had built up for the past several months and years had quickly evaporated. Technically, I was starting from scratch.
It was really hard at first. My first workout was on the parallel bars and I could only do about six dips, about seven body weight rows, maybe seven leg raises, and I was struggling to do ten pushups at a time. Honestly, it was pretty depressing. I felt like all that hard work lifting weights over the years was for nothing. I could only do about 4 sets of those 4 exercises. Greatly dejected, I rode home on my bike thinking that this whole routine wasn’t going to work.
It felt like a waste of time to do a ten mile bike ride to go do some pushups and body weight exercises. I was down in the dumps with Mr. Lumps. How I longed for the gym. It was right around the corner from my home (less then 5 minute walk even!) The gym was so easy and warm! It was calling out to me with the hope of glistening new machines, tight bodies, and brand new dumbbells. As you can tell, I missed the gym a great deal.
The first couple weeks were rough!
After that first mini bodyweight workout I was sore AF! Honestly, I was shocked how sore I was with such few exercises. I had only done 16 sets for fricks sake!! You know you’re really out of shape when you can’t wipe your butt the next day after doing 16 sets of bodyweight exercises. Nevertheless, I was committed to regaining, if not simply maintaining, the little muscle mass I had left until the gyms reopened and I could go back to building back up my muscle with weights. Little did I know, that would be more than a year and a half later before I would see a gym again.
With no work, nowhere to go, and most people in Philadelphia too scared to even talk to each other; I resigned myself to workout every day. Clearly, it started rough. The weather was still cold and I had to deal with April rains, but I persevered in maintaining a routine of riding my bike five miles up, workout outside for about an hour, and riding five miles back. My only interaction with other people would be stopping at Whole Foods for about 45 minutes on my ride back home. I called that my “happy hour”.
Thankfully, I had a background as a professional chef and had a pretty good knowledge of nutrition. I knew how to prepare some pretty good food and sure as hell knew I had the time to cook. Subsequently, I decided that I might as well go all in on being healthy and start cooking for a diet to build muscle. Once I started factoring in a high-protein muscle building diet with the consistent workouts by the river, I really started to see my efforts pay off.
Progression of building muscle without weights
As I started building muscle without weights and the workouts became easier, I had to add exercises to the original four sets of dips, rows, leg raises, and pushups. Eventually, I modified some exercises and added quite a few more to the workout. At this point, I had completed an NASM (National Association of Sports Medicine) online personal training class and really began to understand the kinesiology of the body better. Through trial and error I learned that functional movements with body weight were far superior than my previous methods of training with weights. Essentially, I could completely replace my whole gym routine with bodyweight while exponentially building muscle without weights.
The whole point of building muscle is increasing your time-under-tension (TUT). Breaking down the muscle fibers and nourishing the rebuild with a high-protein diet full of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, legumes, and limited complex carbs. This is the key to building muscle. I experimented with a bunch of different combinations of ingredients and discovered ones I really loved and others not so much. With that experimentation, I was able to also categorize the price points so I could lower the cost on eating a muscle building diet.
On a side note…
The whole philosophy of Foodsource Nutrition (if you can’t tell from the name) is that we should be getting all our nutrients from food. Supplements should be used exactly how their name suggests; to supplement the nutrients we need to optimally perform that we cannot ingest from our diet. It’s as simple as that. In the modern fitness world, everyone is trying to grift some simple workout to “GET SIX-PACK ABS IN NO TIME”, or “TAKE THIS ONE PILL TO BURN BELLY FAT”, or another “TRY THIS NEW DIET TO INCREASE TESTOSTERONE AND GET HUGE MUSCLE”. \
These are gimmicks that have been around since the advent of marketing. They are total grifts. Even though you may see results in the short term, the process is not sustainable. I was naive enough to fall for these several times over. I remember taking ephedrine and Hydroxycut in the wild west days of supplementation and thinking it was good for me. As a 16 year old kid, I remember jittering like crazy in high school and getting hot flashes from all the amphetamines in those pills.
Looking back, I can’t believe we used to take that stuff. The taste was so awful in those beginning days of supplements in the 1990’s that 100% of the time you’d gag trying to swallow it and you had a 50/50 chance of not puking it back up. I also remember having to run to the bathroom with the shits in the middle of class several times throughout the day after taking some of those supplements. Now I’m rambling like an old dude and getting off track. The point is, by combining a diet to build muscle with the workout to build muscle, it doesn’t matter if you are using weights or not. You will supercharge your muscle gains with compounding returns.
Anyway… Back to the story of results of building muscle without weights
So now that we had that nice little detour into my escapades with supplements and basically crapping myself in high school, let’s get back to the main subject. After all, I’m sure you want to hear about when you can expect some results. am I right?? Once you start any workout routine, whether it’s with weights or not, you have to be prepared to not see results for roughly 3-4 weeks. You will start feeling stronger as time goes by but the physical results of muscle growth and definition won’t start showing up until about a month. Additionally, 9 times out of 10 it will be someone else who will notice your muscle growth and changing body.
They’ll say something like, “Have you been working out?” or “You look different. Did you lose weight?” Well let me tell you, it feels damn good when this happens cause you’ve been flexing in the mirror every day for the last 30 days chastising yourself for not working out hard enough or eating like crap. Nevertheless, don’t get a big head about it because your work has just begun.
Now we’re just getting started!
So now you’re seeing some results and starting to get some attention (perhaps from your crush would be even better!). Great! Keep at it and keep getting stronger. Building muscle and staying fit isn’t a quick fix or something that has a finish line. Fitness is a lifelong commitment and you will ebb and flow from times at your peak physical performance and other times where you’re kinda fat and doughy. It’s all good though, the point is to keep at it and keep improving. So whether you’re climbing up the ladder or going down, you have your feet planted firm on where you plan to go with your fitness goals.
I’m going to leave it there for now because I have my own work to do. I’ll continue with the story of my own escapades at a later date. This page will be updated with more links to internal pages, motivation, workout, recipes, etc., as I develop more content. In the mean time you can explore the benefits of strength training HERE or learn about muscle building nutrition HERE. Stay up to date with any new posts by clicking on the subscribe button below. That’s gonna be it for now! Have a great day and stay swole!! Peace!
