Can exercises with your own weight build muscle mass.
If you are used to lifting super-heavy weights in the gym, grabbing a barbell, or moving weights on exercise machines, repeating this at home may be somewhat difficult. But this doesn't mean that you can't build muscle mass if you limit yourself to exercises with your own weight; it just means that you will have to switch to something else a little. Perhaps for you, this means doing exercises more slowly or increasing the number of repetitions, sets, or the time to complete each movement. To build muscle mass, you need to challenge the muscles. And how do you figure out what works best for you or what your body is experiencing the most? Well, it will take trial and error.
The advantages of exercises with your own weight are that you perform functional complex movements that allow you to focus on the technique without additional resistance. You will become stronger in the movements that you use in everyday life, and you will also work with several joints and muscles at the same time with exercises such as squats, push-ups and lunges. You also work with many smaller muscles, especially when doing stabilizing exercises. These types of movements target the upper and lower parts of the body, as well as the core muscles that require muscle tension, which you don't always work with weights.
How does the body build muscle?
Building muscle mass, known in science as hypertrophy, involves loading muscle tissue and increasing protein synthesis, which is the process of cells creating new proteins. You can do this with exercises in three ways: by creating mechanical stress, metabolic stress, or microtrauma. While most types of training involve all three ways to cause hypertrophy, which gives the greatest benefit (plus, these systems tend to work together), different training methods may target one method more than the other. You don't need to plan your workouts to focus on one or the other, but it can be helpful to understand exactly how each method builds muscle:
Mechanical stress: Mechanical stress usually manifests itself during weightlifting. You load the muscles with enough resistance to create tension, triggering cellular and molecular reactions that then lead to growth. An increase in the number of repetitions and approaches (i.e. the total volume) in each exercise can also increase mechanical tension, which contributes to the build-up of muscle mass. Slowing down an eccentric movement or a downward phase of movement, such as lowering into a squat, can also cause additional tension. For some people, certain exercises with their own weight alone offer sufficient resistance, such as push-ups or pull-ups.
Metabolic stress: The burning sensation you feel when you squat and do push-ups? This is the result of metabolic stress, which occurs when metabolites accumulate in muscle tissue (that is, waste products formed as a result of exercise, such as lactate).This triggers reactions of hormones, cells and growth factors, offering another way to pump up muscles. It can increase the release of anabolic hormones (hormones such as testosterone or growth hormone, which stimulate protein synthesis), lead to cell swelling and an increase in the number of growth factors, proteins that can stimulate tissue growth, promoting cell reproduction.
Microtrauma: this is when you get small tears of muscle tissue due to exercise, namely training with weights. Then your body works to repair that damage, and that triggers muscle growth. While any exercise can do this to your muscles (squats, plank, deadlift, etc.), new movements that you haven't done or haven't performed before can also cause this microtrauma. Dancing, running, movements with their own weight, etc. can cause microtrauma — this is not always the result of mechanical stress.
How to increase the benefits of exercising with your own weight to build muscle mass
So many options! There are many ways to diversify your regular workout with your own weight — even small changes can lead to a greater set of muscle mass.
Try one or all of these tactics at your next workout and see what strains your muscles the most:
Increase repetitions and approaches; reduce rest time.
The more exercise you do, the more you increase the metabolic load on your muscles. Do more repetitions and sets of exercises with your own weight than you usually do in the gym with weights to achieve similar results. It is also necessary to limit the breaks between these repetitions and approaches without sacrificing proper technique. This increases the load on the muscles, contributing to their growth. In fact, research shows that low-load weight training (light weight or self-weight) combined with a little rest can increase metabolic stress and increase muscle size even more than lifting weights and taking long breaks. If you usually lift weights in about eight reps at the gym, try doing the same movement for 20 reps at home using just your body.
Change the angle or pace of the exercise.
To strengthen the microtrauma, try to make lunges or steps diagonally. Or add a tilt to the push-ups. Changing the angle can not only involve other muscles in the movement, but also work with different parts of the same muscle group. It is also a good idea to slow down the eccentric or descending phase of the exercise (for example, when you descend into the lower part of the deadlift), and then make an explosion (quickly rise from the deadlift or the hinge position). Another option: slow down the whole exercise. For example, go down into a squat on the count of three, stay at the bottom for three, then stand up for another count of three. This increases the amount of time your muscles are in tension, which means that you are more likely to create microtrauma in your slow-contracting muscle fibers, which have more endurance than fast-contracting fibers.
Add a few delays and half-repetitions.
This can increase the metabolic stress in the muscles, which will lead to an increase in gain. For example, if the lunges seem light, hold the lower part of the movement (both knees are bent at a 90-degree angle) for a few seconds before standing up. Or take a step back in the lunge, rise halfway up, then drop back down before returning to the starting position. Also, try to stop before reaching a full rise from a squat or lunge, or before reaching a full descent in the gluteal bridge. This works because you put the muscle under strain for a longer period of time or eliminate any points in the movement where the working muscle is resting.
Do more plyometrics.
To increase the tension in the muscles, add a little explosive force to the movements. Squats, lunges, articulated jumps, burpees — all of them contribute to building muscle mass. When a muscle stretches, it leads to nerve excitation, which signals a concentric contraction (shortening of the muscle). More rapid stretching (for example, what happens during the explosive part of the plyometric exercise) leads to a stronger excitation of the nerves and, as a result, to a greater contraction of the muscles. This stronger contraction means that your muscles are working harder, which will probably lead to more microtrauma and therefore more enlargement.
Never stop in progress
As with any type of exercise, there is always a risk of reaching a plateau if you keep doing it over and over again without playing with any variables or continuing to test your muscles in new ways. That's why it's important to improve your program by adding variations to exercises and increasing the complexity of movements using different methods.
If everything starts to seem very easy, you probably aren't gaining a lot of muscle. Keep this in mind as a sign to change your workout routine.
