Build Muscle Without Weights

Want to build killer arms? Whether you’re a guy who wants gunnies for the honeys or a gal who wants to rid the wiggle, the path is simple: diet + key exercises.  I’ll deal with the fat loss diet at a later post; today I want to tackle arm training in two parts.

Part 1: Triceps

Since the triceps make up 2/3 or more of the upper arm mass, they’re a great place to start.  For guys and gals, the secret to super upper arms is simple: strict, compound exercises like triangle, decline, & handstand push-ups, and of course, dips.  But there’s a special tricep exercise that builds size on guys and shape on the ladies that requires a small but critical departure from traditional execution.

The Close-Grip Bench Dip

Set yourself up on a bench or set of chairs to perform the bench dip. Your legs can be bent with feet on the floor (easiest), straight with feet on the floor (intermediate), or straight with feet elevated on a chair or bench (hardest).

Now, here’s the secret: place your hands so close to each other that your thumbs come in contact.  This dramatically increases the contraction of the inner triceps, a hard place to reach in any movement.   Now begin the exercise by lowering your body into the eccentric contraction (be sure your behind is close enough to your arm support so that when your hips drop vertically they brush up against your knuckles).  Press back up.  Perform 10-20 reps with a tight squeeze at the top.

At the end of the very first set you’ll have a knot of a pump in your tri’s that shames every other exercise!  Why does it work so well?  A simple application of biomechanics.  If you can get a muscle to work in more than one plane of motion at once, you boost intensity (and you know how I love intensity).  The triceps not only straighten the bent arm at the elbow (extension), but also draw the arms in towards the torso (adduction), and this exercise utilizes both actions because the close-grip causes the elbows to flare out; when you straighten your arm, you also adduct the upper arm to lock out at the top.  BAM!  Triceps madness.

Give the Close-Grip Bench Dip a shot in your next workout.  You’’ll be glad you did.

Until next time, keep bangin’!

So what is a plyometrics workout? To develop strength and power, you need something great, something really efficient. A plyometrics workout is your way to go.  Follow me in the video above, and we’ll learn about how this great technique can build more muscle and strength.

So a little about plyometrics…what you’re using is extremely fast, explosive repetitions. Fast contractions designed to elicit more recruitment, and much more power and force generation.  Essentially what you have to have, though, is great strength and a great foundation in the basics: your push-ups, squats, lunges, and pull-ups.  If you don’t have that, don’t try this.

So the thing to remember about plyometrics is that you want to get an explosive contraction, you want to explode up off the floor as high as you can and land like a cat, make no sound.  And you want to do it continuously, so the rhythm is never broken, you never take a breather, you never take a break, you never land like a ton of bricks.  Push-ups, pull-ups, squats, and lunges – there’s a whole series of exercises waiting for you to check them out.

Give it a shot! And leave a comment below about what variations of plyometric workouts and exercises you’ve experimented with…

When you’re going for muscle gain and increased strength with body weight exercises, the constant challenge is finding ways to keep up the intensity, every rep, every, set.  It’s not like you can load up plates and blast out some heavy bangin’.  So the trick is all about technique, fellas.  In my previous posts I’ve covered destabilization and exercise sequencing, now it’s time to focus on repetition speed.

First, the principle: when you’re strong, “go blow” or “go slow”.  In other words, once you’ve mastered the form of a given exercise and have a good level of foundation strength, you want your reps to fall on one of the two ends of the speed scale: fast and explosive, or slow and deliberate.  This time around we’ll tackle go slow”.

The theory behind slow reps for muscle gain is simple: exaggerated, deliberately slow repetitions eliminate momentum so that the target muscles and their synergists are heavily stressed.  What matters here is doubling or tripling the time under tension (TUT).  In addition to generating more overall force, especially during negative reps (lowering your body more slowly actually requires more force than if you lowered it more quickly, which – you guessed it – increases strength faster), your muscles will also struggle to cope with the extra lactic acid created from a much greater number of muscle fibers recruited and cycled through to complete the set.  And high lactate tolerance and clearance is a big marker of strength, power, and endurance, so you want a lot of that.

There is a warning, though: this style of training is painful!  But it yields great results in strength and size.  Here’s how to get started:

For your pushing and squatting-type exercises, begin by doubling your normal rep time.  So if it takes you two seconds to drop into a squat, and two seconds to return to the top, double it to four seconds each phase.  Same with all your push-up variations: most guys do a full rep (positive / negative) in a little over a second, so try doing each phase for a full second (count “one-one-thousand” on the way down, and the same on the way up) and build from there.

With pull-ups you have a challenge.  You can easily perform Incline Chins with your feet elevated on a chair or bench and apply the technique as described.  But when doing full free-hang Chins, you might get only 2 or 3 positive reps before your arms are toast.  But this is no time for quitting!  Solution: 1) Have a chair handy and perform the remaining reps as pure negatives, taking a small hop to the top of the bar and slowly lowering.  2) If you’re using an adjustable chin-up bar, reposition it lower until you’re at a level where you’re able to assist with one leg to complete all the positive reps for the full set, then gradually raise it higher as your strength increases.

Training with slow reps will give you rapid gains in strength and a boost in muscle size, but it takes a lot of heart and attention to technique.  But, that’s what makes a bodyweight trainer a warrior.   Until next time, keep bangin’!

Welcome back for more on building muscle without weights!  I could hardly wait to write this post because there’s a lot of great “meat” in this one – if you read no further than this blog your muscle training will never be the same.  And I say that as my body groans from the wicked workout I did two days ago, one I guarantee you’ll love and which I’ll share with you another time.

So let’s get down to it: there’s an obstacle to overcome if your plan is to build muscle fast.  Some of you out there might describe the obstacle as “not having heavy weights to lift.” Actually, that’s not it.  Here’s how I see it out from a science perspective:

The Problem:  How to create enough INTENSITY to build muscle without weights.

The Solution: P.O.W.E.R. + OES = INTENSITY.  And…

INTENSITY + Anabolic Nutrition + Recovery = MUSCLE GROWTH!

The theory behind P.O.W.E.R.

P.O.W.E.R. is my proprietary method; it stands for “Progressive Overload With Equilibrium Response”.  Translation: increasing the overload on your muscles while eliciting a rebalancing effect by destabilizing the body.  Simple example: performing a push-up with your left hand on a medicine ball and your right leg elevated.

If you compare the standard military push up to the P.O.W.E.R. push-up above, what you’d see is the person trembling and wobbling, struggling to maintain balance as the exercise is performed.  After a few sessions, stability (equilibrium) reappears and reps increase.  Why?  It’s called synchronous firing, and it’s a sign that neural recruitment dramatically increased, and rapid neural recruitment is one of the keys to increased intensity. Ever been on a heavy flat bench press and notice that as you hit the tough reps, your form degrades as your legs push into the floor and your hips pop up?  That happens for two reasons: one, you cheat better leverage by turning the exercise into a decline press.  But more importantly, your pecs, shoulders, and tri’s get a neural amplitude supercharge when the whole body contracts maximally at once.

The whole range of P.O.W.E.R. exercises takes classic calisthenics like the push-up, the dip, the chin-up, the squat, and the lunge – among many others – and dramatically upgrades them by making them unstable.  I do this by reconfiguring the body with either a 1-point or 3-point base of support, or with simple props and devices that further destabilize the body.  (I also recommend training barefoot for the same reasons.)  The result: super intensity!

The Theory of OES

In a way, Optimal Exercise Sequencing is simple: given 6 exercises, there exists one, or at the most two, sequences that will maximize fatigue (INTENSITY!) and result in bigger muscles.  It’s all about leveraging the interplay and fatigue of the primary muscles you’re targeting along with those that are only assisting.   In fact, arranging the exercises in the right order will render your muscles as limp as if you lifted twice your bodyweight in dumbbells.

Here’s an example of 6 standard exercises in typical workout order:

1. Squat
2. Lunge
3. Chin-Ups
4. Push-Ups
5. Bench Dips
6. RT* Curls  (* Resistance Tubing)

Now here’s the same workout for building muscle without weights, supercharged with P.O.W.E.R. and OES:

1.  Swiss Ball Lunge  ..supersetted with… 2.  Plyo-Squats
3.  Contralateral Medicine Ball Push-Up  …supersetted with… 4.  Towel Chins
5.  Close Grip Swiss Ball Bench Dips …supersetted with… 6. Stork RT Isolateral Curls

Two critical things to notice here…

1)  Each exercise has been destabilized by using a Swiss Ball or medicine ball instead of the floor; adding a jump; using a flexible anchor like a towel; or standing on one leg.

2)  In supersets there is ZERO rest between paired exercises, and only 30-60 seconds between each superset!  The rest interval is the other piece of the OES solution that guarantees the critical hormonal factor. Research shows that this rest range causes the greatest growth hormone surge to help you build muscle and burn fat.

Coming up next time: the 80 / 20 factor:  the muscle mass diet.  I’ll reveal the right food, great supplements, and some biochemical tricks to maximize results.  Until then, keep banging!