3 Rules for Building Strength Without Weights

3 Rules for Building Strength Without Weights

Listen, you’ll have no problem putting on some serious strength and size without hitting the weights… as long as you know how to PROGRAM your training.

As you may or may not know, my “thing” is training for muscle and strength with body weight – and so I wanted to give you three “rules” to help you accomplish this goal.

Follow these rules, and you’ll be on your way to getting big and strong with bodyweight exercise … neglect them, and you’ll likely have a hard time reaching your goals.

3 Rules for Building Strength Without Weights

1 – Stick to the basics

Cool calisthenics moves and tricks are AWESOME – my personal goal list for the year includes these exercises:

– solid clutch flag on both sides
– elbow lever
– free handstand

And a few more.

HOWEVER … when it comes to actually gaining STRENGTH and MUSCLE, these moves are not going to help a ton. They are more “skill” oriented … and are GREAT exercises … but not perfect for getting big and strong.

To gain muscle and get strong with your own body weight, you need to be focusing on things like:

– push ups and advanced variations
– pull ups and advanced variations
– squats and advanced variations
– jumping
– sprinting

2 – Do the “right” amount of volume

If you are training for skill – practicing handstands is a great example – you want to go LOW reps, and do a lot of them, frequently, and NOT to failure. It’s like PRACTICE more than anything.

But let’s say you’re going for hypertrophy, like we do in phase one of Body Weight Strong … you want to pound those muscles with some volume.

Now, you don’t have to go old-school, “golden age” bodybuilder-style and do thirty sets for each body part … but here is an example of what a workout might look like:

(...NOTE: workout does not include warm up, skill work, metabolic “finisher” at the end, etc...)

push up / one arm push up progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
+
vertical jump progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible

four sets total of each move

THEN

pull up progression progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible
+
squat / one leg squat progression – 30-45 seconds, as many reps as possible

four sets total of each move

3 – Higher reps for size, “medium” reps for strength

A lot of folks think these two things are one in the same … and while there is without a doubt a relationship between the two, training to get big is actually different than training to get strong.

As you can see in the workout above, you end up getting around 8-12 reps of each exercise … this is generally best for that muscle size goal.

If you’re going for STRENGTH … like we do in phase TWO of Body Weight Strong … you want to move towards a little lower in the rep range, like 3-5 ish … this is best for raw strength.

Boom! Your three “rules” of body weight strength.

Train hard, and until next time -

by Forest Vance
Author, Body Weight Strong