In addition to building muscle by going to the gym using programs such as No Nonsense Muscle Building, it is also a good idea to make bodyweight exercises part of your routine.
Bodyweight exercises are great for those periods where you do not have access to the gym or for people who want to save time and money that a gym membership entails.
You can easily do bodyweight exercises from home, no equipment is needed, and you will be very surprised at just how much progress you can make with a home workout.
But it is important to note that simply doing pushups and situps over and over again is not going to build muscle. You will just be improving your endurance.
You can still use pushups and situps to build muscle, but a few tweaks are needed for this reason:
1. Slow down the exercise
To make up for the lack of resistance, you need to make each bodyweight exercise as hard as possible in order to make them suitable for building muscle. The best way to do this is to just slow down the exercise and really concentrate on working the muscles.
2. Pre-exhaust the muscles
To really make your bodyweight exercises as hard as possible you can tire out the muscles before you start the exercise. For example, if you are to do pushups, you might flex your chest muscles by doing a range of stretches. And then try to do the pushups. They should be a lot harder to do!
3. Add resistance
You can still add resistance to a bodyweight workout without having to lift weights or go to the gym. A simple way to do this is to place weights on your back when you do a pushup. Get hold of a load of books, put them in a backpack, and place the backpack on your back as you perform the exercises.
Another option is to create your own makeshift dumbells by filling up empty milk jugs with sand or water.
4. Lots of reps
Whether you do weight training or not, this is worth trying out every now and again. Just do a bodyweight exercise for as many reps as possible. Do 100 if you can manage it! Now, this wont do much for muscle mass inititally…but you are likely to find that when you return to weight training after doing loads of bodyweight exercise reps that you will be stronger, can lift heavier weights, and thus build some extra muscle mass as a result.
