I began discussing articles on building muscles via bodyweight exercising in my 14 May 2020 post. I’m continuing on that thread today. I read several articles on bodyweight exercises plus an article on the process of skeletal muscle growth.
Bodyweight Exercising
To recap my earlier post, I wrote that this article by Jason Ferruggia “affirms that you can build muscle from bodyweight training, but it takes time, discipline, and an understanding of how muscle growth actually happens (hint, doing more reps doesn’t necessarily mean more muscle growth).” Let’s keep going by diving into several articles.
BuiltLean on Bodyweight Exercising
I read an article from BuiltLean on bodyweight exercising for muscle growth. Nick Holt begins with the three primary factors of muscle growth:
- Mechanical/Muscular Tension. Described as trying to move something heavy with good form stresses your muscles and promotes muscle growth.
- Metabolic Stress. The burn in your muscles that occur when they engorge with blood.
- Muscle Damage. The soreness you feel for 24-48 hours after a workout. Not essential to muscle growth, but a good sign that your muscles are repairing, getting stronger, and needing to rest.
After covering these basics, Holt wants to address the central question of the article, “Is the resistance of your bodyweight enough to stimulate muscle growth?”
Challenges
In order to stimulate muscle growth, you must progressively overload your muscles. To simplify, you must make exercises more difficult over time. This is easily done when weight training, but can be difficult when bodyweight exercising.
Holt moves onto challenges for muscle growth during bodyweight exercises.
- Targeting the Largest Muscle Groups. He says the glutes and the lats are difficult to effectively target and strain with bodyweight exercises. The lats can be decently targeted with pull-ups. Glutes are harder to target.
- Increasing the Challenge. “Progressive Overload” requires that your exercises increase in difficulty over time. You can add more reps, but this focuses on muscular endurance more than muscular growth. You can also progress to more difficult versions of an exercise, such as pistol squats instead of squats. I’m curious about how increasing time under tension (TUT) may relate to progressive overload.
Advantages
Holt ends with some advantages of bodyweight exercises.
- No equipment, or limited equipment, necessary.
- Great place to start if you want to build up to weight training or another type of training.
- Based upon the Ferruggia article I mentioned at the beginning, bodyweight training is also good for stabilizing your joints and allowing them to recover. If you run, weight train, or do other exercises that can excessively stress your joints, you may want to supplement your routine with bodyweight exercising.
Todd Kuslikis on Bodyweight Exercising
Next, I read an article on Military.com. Todd Kuslikis says that you have to reach muscle fatigue within a low-rep range to build muscle mass. Then, Kuslikis provides three techniques to fatigue your muscles with bodyweight exercises in a low-rep range.
- Angular Training. Adjust your body’s angle to target muscle groups from a different angle than usual. For example, a decline push-up targets a different part of the chest than a regular push-up.
- Bodyweight Distribution. Adjust your body to distribute your bodyweight unevenly. For instance, instead of doing a regular squat, try pistol squats. Normally your bodyweight is distributed 50% per leg, but pistol squats allow you to focus your bodyweight on one leg. Once one leg is tired, do pistol squats on the other leg.
- Variable Rest Intervals. Adjust your rest time between sets to force your muscles to fatigue with fewer reps. Instead of resting 60 seconds between sets, try 10 seconds or 30 seconds, for example. Maybe try a superset, where you don’t rest between sets (best if you’re cycling between multiple different exercises). You’ll have to experiment with yourself. Also, expect to rest more between later sets than earlier sets because you’ll hopefully be tired closer to the end. If you’re working your upper body, try to reach fatigue in 8 to 12 reps. If working your lower body, fatiguing by 20 reps is okay.
- Time Under Tension (TUT). Kuslikis doesn’t discuss TUT, but I suspect that increasing time under tension can lead to muscle fatigue within a low-rep range and stimulate muscle growth.
Coach Magazine on Bodyweight Exercising
Finally, I read an article in Coach Magazine. It didn’t provide any new information, but here’s what it said,
- Bodyweight training is good for beginners because your bodyweight provides enough resistance to promote muscle growth and strength.
- Bodyweight exercises, performed at high reps, increase muscle endurance. This may be good for athletes or others seeking endurance instead of muscle mass.
- These exercises also help to stabilize joints and auxiliary muscles. This reduces the risks of injuries when performing in sports and when training with weights.
- If you want muscle mass, you’ll eventually have to use weights. However, you can continue using bodyweight exercises for other benefits (like stabilizing joints).
The last point, I think, has been contradicted by the other articles I discussed above.
Basics of Muscle Growth
To supplement the discussion of bodyweight exercising, I read an article on muscle growth by John Leyva of BuiltLean. The article focuses on growth in skeletal muscles, which are the muscles we tend to talk about when we discuss muscle growth in a fitness context.
Leyva walks through several topics related to muscle growth.
The Composition of Skeletal Muscles
Skeletal muscles are composed of muscle fibers. These fibers are composed of “thread-like myofibrils and sarcomeres.” Furthermore, these fibers are the basic units of muscular contraction.
3 Factors of Muscle Growth
I mentioned these factors above, but to recap, they are mechanical/muscular tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage.
Hormones and Muscle Growth
Testosterone and IGF-1 are the two hormones that are particularly important for muscle growth. Testosterone is important for stimulating protein synthesis, inhibiting protein breakdown, activating satellite cells, stimulating other anabolic hormones, and increasing the presence of neurotransmitters at the damaged fiber site. While most of the testosterone in the body is bound and unavailable for use in muscle growth, strength training may cause more testosterone to be released and may increase muscle cells’ sensitivity to available testosterone.
According to Leyva, IGF-1 “[enhances] protein synthesis, facilitates glucose uptake, repartitions the uptake of amino acids (the building blocks of protein) into skeletal muscles [I don’t know what that means], and activates satellite cells.”
Rest and Nutrition
Muscles need rest and proper nutrition following exercise because the response of muscle protein metabolism lasts 24-48 hours. Inadequate rest and/or nutrition can cause the body to switch into a catabolic process, which breaks down muscles.
Patience and Discipline
Finally, muscle growth takes time. The amount of time required for you to see results from your exercising will depend on a myriad of factors. These include nutrition, rest, frequency of exercise, the intensity of exercise, hormones, medical conditions, genetics, and more. Based on Ferruggia’s article, it seems that you’ll need even more patience to see results from bodyweight training.
Conclusion
Muscle growth will take time but can be done via bodyweight exercising or weight training. Furthermore, fitness and health is a long-term game. Therefore, instead of seeking quick results, I recommend focusing on building constructive, sustainable habits. I’ve written about habit stacking, but I recommend you check out Atomic Habits by James Clear. The book provides a comprehensive guide to how and why you should build healthy long-term habits.
The featured image is by GMB Monkey on Unsplash.
