There are various strategies for boosting up your bodyweight workouteven small changes can lead to greater muscle picks up. There are some concrete tips for challenging your body and empowering muscle building. These are in no specific order and the perfect way to incorporate these strategies is individualized.
Increase Reps and Sets
The more you do a workout, the more you'll increase the metabolic stress you put on your muscles. Do more reps and sets of bodyweight workout than you'd regularly do at the gym with weights for similar results.You want to limit breaks between those reps and sets without sacrificing proper form. This puts more stress on the muscle, promoting growth. In fact, research shows that low-load resistance training combined with small rest may upgrade metabolic stress and increase muscle size even more than lifting overwhelming weights and taking longer breaks. If you regularly lift weights for approximately eight reps in the gym, attempt doing that same move for 20 reps at homewith just your body.
Do More Plyometrics
To increase the tension on your muscles, add some explosiveness to your moves. Squat jumps, lunge jumps, hinge jumps, burpees—they all count toward more muscle building. When a muscle is stretched, it leads to nerve firing that signals a concentric contraction. A quicker stretchleads to a stronger nerve firing and greater resulting contraction of the muscle. That stronger contraction means your muscle is working harder, and will likely result in more microtrauma and thus more gains.
Add Some Holds and Half Reps
This can add more metabolic stress to the muscles, thus resulting in more gains. For example, if lunges feel easy, hold the bottom of the movement (both knees bent 90 degrees) for a few seconds before standing up. Or, step back into your lunge, lift halfway up, then drop back down before you come back up to standing. Also, try stopping short of standing all the way up from a squat or lunge, or stop short of lowering all the way down in a glute bridge. This works because you're putting the muscle under tension for a longer period of time, or eliminating any points in the movement where the working muscle gets a break.
Perform Single Sided Exercises
Switch your typical bilateral or two-sided exercises to unilateral or one-sided movements. That means turning a squat to a pistol squat, making your glute bridge a single-leg bridge, or turning your plank into a single arm (and/or leg) plank. These simple switches can increase the microtrauma to a muscle, as well as add more tension or load to that muscle, says Galbraith. Think about it: One side is handling all the weight rather than splitting it.
Change The Angle of The Exercise
To increase microtrauma, try taking your lunges for a walk or stepping out on a diagonal. Changing the angle can both incorporate other muscles into the move but also work different parts of the same muscle group. It's also a good idea to slow down the eccentric or downward phase of an exercise and then explode up - quickly moving up from a deadlift or hinged position. There’s another option - Slow down the entire exercise. For example, lower into a squat on a count of three, holding at the bottom for three, then stand up on another count of three. This increases the time your muscle is under tension, meaning you're more likely to create microtraumas within your slow-twitch muscle fibers, which have more endurance capacity than fast-twitch fibers.
About The Author
Shreyasi Maiti is a Content Specialist working with Body & strength. She is a rare multi-tasker you’ll come across. Along with a dancer by passion, she enjoys writing ..
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