The 10 Most EFFECTIVE Bodyweight Exercises for Building Muscle

When it comes to building muscle, there's no denying the fact that lifting weights works. However, that's not to say that lifting with your own body weight doesn't also work. — Thank god, I almost just myself. Today, I'm going to show you that with the right 10 body weightight exercises done the right way that you can actually create that overload and build the muscle that you came here for in the first place. And it starts right here with one of my favorite lat building exercises and it's what we call the human pullover. It actually could be called more like the human straight arm pushdown. You see, in the straight arm push down, you're getting a great lat isolation exercise that's accomplished by basically adducting that arm down and close to your body. Well, take a look at this exercise. Cuz what we're doing is using relative motion. Rather than moving our arms through space like we do on a straight arm push down, we're moving our body through space in somewhat of a dragon flag looking movement, but with a lot less of the core doing the work. Cuz what I want you to do is push with your hands. Drive your hands into something fixed like this or anything that's not going to move to allow yourselves to engage the lats. And by driving through and powering through the lats, you're going to create the leverage to lift the legs up with far less of the abs doing that work. What does it do? It basically creates that same end position with your elbows ending up adducted closer to your side which will engage those lats again in a way that can really create overload and lead to some really good growth. Next, we hit the legs. And the idea here is, do we actually have a bodyweight exercise that can effectively build your legs without requiring extra weight? And the answer is yes. We call it the skater squat. And essentially, it's just a single leg squat. And we know that we can create overload a lot more effectively if we actually lift our entire body weight on just one leg rather than distribute it across two. The skater squat is one of my favorite variations for that because the arm positioning allows people to take a little bit of the balance out of the equation and it also gives you equal benefits to the quads and the posterior chain muscles of the hamstrings and glutes cuz you're bent forward just a little bit. Even if you had access to, let's say, a few dumbbells, a quarter of your body weight in each hand in addition to this would actually equate to a 2x body weight squat. So, you can see just how powerful it is and how quickly we can escalate or compound the effect on your legs just by going to one leg. This is one of my favorite ways to do it. Use the mat so it's a little bit more comfortable on your knee every time you go down. So, when it comes to building muscle with just your own body weight, you know it was going to be too long before I brought in a pull-up bar to the equation. However, maybe not for the exercise you were expecting. See, when it came to building my biceps as a kid, one of my favorite ways to do it was with an exercise called behind the neck chin-up. So, yes, it is a chin-up like you can see here, but done with this behind the neck positioning. Now, don't get all set. We're not hurting our shoulders here because our elbows are positioned forward unlike, let's say, a behind the neck pull down where the elbows would be out. Here, your shoulders are very protected, but the positioning with the arms being held this way gives you more shoulder flexion at the end of the exercise than we would get from a traditional chin-up. And because we know that shoulder flexion is one of the three components of a good bicep contraction along with elbow flexion and supernation, we can get a really, really strong bicep contraction here. And what I like to do as always is focus on slowing down the negative portion so we get that good elongation and stretch and stress on that bicep as it goes down every single repetition. For me, building your biceps with some variation of a chin-up is the way to go. And certainly this one was my favorite and one I definitely think you should try if you want to see the same results. By the way, when it comes to building big biceps, I think I've learned a few things along the way. The good news is it's more than just that behind the neck chin-up. As a matter of fact, I put together all of my greatest biceps training tips into something I call my biceps training blackbook. And I want you to have it for watching this video, guys. And for all the years you've watched my videos, consider it my thank you to you. Head over to athletex. com/blackbook. You can grab your copy completely for free. Again, my thank you to you. Now, let's get back to this video. Now, back to the bodyweight exercises. to know, no need to panic about needing a lot of equipment because this one is done with a plate or as you can see here, just a stack of books because what you're trying to do is take a regular push-up and make it more intense. And we can do that easily by creating a deficit setup. That means just taking either two stacks of books or two simple weight plates and performing your push-ups on those. Because what that will do is give you more range of motion so you can lower your chest down through or past your hands to create more stretch and more tension on your chest and therefore drive more gains even though you're just doing a body weightight exercise. Couple things that go wrong here is that people create the deficit but they don't then take advantage of it and actually go all the way down to the floor. If the shoulder range of motion you have allows for it, then make sure you touch your chest all the way down on every repetition and even hang out there for a second or two to enhance that stretch. Also, at the top of the rep, don't short arm it. In other words, go all the way to full extension if you want a good

complete chest contraction or as complete as you can get from this exercise. And then again, maybe even this variation of the push-up isn't challenging enough for you and therefore it won't change you. Doesn't mean the push-up isn't good. It means you need to find a different variation of that. So, find a variation that limits you to 12 to 15 repetitions in a set to failure. And that will be a good option for you to start building new muscle. But don't give up on the push-up entirely. This is one of my favorite. Back to the legs and this time for one of my favorite posterior chain exercises and this is the slick floor bridge curl and you just have to create this slick floor environment by removing your shoes and just being in your socks. But what this does is it really overloads that posterior chain in a really simple setup that you could do on a bathroom floor or any wood floor you have in your house. So what you're trying to accomplish here is a full bridge to start because what we want to do is actually engage the glutes here. you're actually promoting hip extension and getting fully extended and the glutes are driving that. From that position, when we extend our legs out, we get a good eccentric load on the hamstrings. And when we come back, now we're getting that hamstring curl action again in a way that's really challenging for most people. You might find that you can only do a set of eight to 10 before reaching failure. And in this case, you're doing it in a closed chain way with your feet in contact with the ground. Yet another benefit for why I like this version, too. And you could do different variations from here if you want to. You could do single leg variations. You could do a bicycle variation where you're pulling back and forth alternatively with each leg. The bottom line is this exercise overloads the hamstrings and glutes. And it's really, really simple to set up. Sticking with that posterior chain, but now moving to the upper body, we can't forget those scapular muscles and we can't forget the rear delts. And one of my favorite ways to do that, of course, is with a face pull. Don't think I'm out of options. I'd have a doorway. We can do anything if we put our mind to it. This actually is a great way to overload those muscles and to continue to build them. What you do is you put the back of your hand up against each side of a doorway. You walk your feet through that door. The more you walk through, the more of an angle you create your body here, which is going to create more resistance. At this point, what you do is allow yourself to sink into the door to get this good starting position. And then you push the back of your hands into the door frame and get that same feel that you get from that face pull with the high elbow position, that bicep flex position or opening of the elbows at 90°. You simply let yourself fall through and again pull up against that resistance. The nice thing about this exercise is it hits all the same muscles that face pull does with a cable or with a band. If you don't happen to have those, it doesn't mean that you can't still see the benefits. I've talked about how effective the face pull can be for building up those upper back muscles and those rear delts and those traps. Well, this is a great way to do it without anything at all more than just a single doorway. And so from the face pull, we move to a full-on push exercise with all hands on deck. We're talking about the body weight dip. Now, this is one of the best ways to build your upper body cuz again, we're hitting our chest, our shoulders, and our triceps. But you have to do it right. And the key here is the positioning of your shoulders at all points and times during the exercise. What happens to most people is as they allow their body to sink down through the bars, they allow the shoulders to ride up, keeping no stability through the shoulder girdle. That's the big mistake that I want you to avoid. Instead, set the shoulder blades down at the top of the movement. And from there, maintain that throughout. And the depth of the exercise is going to be determined by your ability to maintain that position. If you find that going any lower starts to let your shoulders start to shrug, then don't go that low. Stay right there and come back up. Now, the good news is when I say stay right there, if you can prolong this a little bit longer like we can here in a one and a half dip, well, you're getting an extra half repetition down in that more elongated or stretched position of the chest, which just drive more tension and ultimately more gains to those pecs. But make sure again that at no time you're allowing those shoulder blades to start tipping forward by getting really, really low in the dip. The extra range of motion will do you no favors if it's at the cost of your shoulder health. The dip is great, but only if you do it the right way. Look, now building muscle is hard enough as it is. Doing it with your own body weight, as we know, can be more difficult. So, this is the hard part of the video because this is one of those really challenging exercises, but it does such a good job of building your shoulders. And we're talking about using a wall doing a handstand push-up. Now, you can make this a little bit easier depending upon the angle that you take against the wall. If you're very steep, then you're going to be pushing a little bit more up against gravity. if you're angled, a little bit less against gravity, so work. But again, there's no escaping the fact that any variation here is difficult. But what I like about it is that though there's a little bit less range of motion occurring here, it's occurring under heavy load and in a closed chain manner. In most overhead pressing situations, you're not performing the exercise closed chain. So the feedback that you get through the entire shoulder girdle and into your shoulder blades is much different. This creates a lot of stability here, provided you can actually do the exercise in the first place. For some, it's just not going to be in the cards. If you want to create a little extra deficit, you could put some plates underneath your hands to create a little bit more range of motion, but I find that it's not necessary to get this

exercise to really produce the gains it's capable of. Again, not for everyone, but for those looking for a great body weight exercise for building big shoulders, you really can't beat this. When it comes to ab exercises, most of them are by nature bodyweight exercises. However, most of them do not build muscle cuz they don't create enough overload. To do that, you'd want to actually allow your legs to become the weight. and therefore the bottom up exercises become your best options. For me, my favorite is the hanging leg raise. Now, lifting your legs straight in space might be too difficult for you. There's another option here. You can do a bent knee raise. You're still lifting the weight of your lower body through space. That is enough overload to create muscle growth. Now, you might be saying, "Why do I want muscle growth in my abs? " Because if you're at low enough body fat levels, what determines how much your abs pop or how much they're visible is going to be the amount of hypertrophy you create here. So getting muscle growth in the abs is actually a really good thing. And this hanging leg raise does that. But you have to do this right just like all the others. The best thing I can tell you here is make sure that whoever's standing in front of you can see your ass. I know it sounds strange, but like you need to make sure that you're curling from the pelvis and actually engaging the abs and not just simply lifting the legs in space using your hip flexors. Cuz if you want to get the abs to grow, you need to target them. So, by curling with the pelvis and making sure whoever's in front of you can see your backside completely visible at the top of every rep, then you know you've done it right. And then again, you know that with this one exercise, no matter how many repetitions you're limited to, you're actually creating the overload that's missing in 90% of the other ab exercises that you're doing, which ultimately allows you to build muscle right again in the area that you're going to need it if you want them to show the most. And as for exercise number 10 is this one right here, the king of all bodyweight exercises, the pull-up. Now, if you struggle to do them, make sure you check out this video over here on how to go from zero to five pull-ups in just 22 days. And to avoid the biggest pull-up mistakes that people make, make sure you watch that video over there. If you haven't done so, guys, remember, click subscribe and turn on notifications, and make sure you visit athics. com to pick up that free biceps blackbook. All right, guys. See you in the next video.