Strength Training Without Weights

This article is about strength training without weights. Is it possible to build strength without weights? Don’t you need to lift a lot of heavy weights to build enormous amounts of strength? The answer is NO!

You CAN do strength training without weights. Take a look at the physiques of gymnasts, they usually have amazing levels of relative strength AND they look great.

Why would you want to do strength training without weights? Maybe you…

• Can’t afford a gym membership and need to work out at home…
• Don’t like gyms and would rather work out at home…
• Can’t afford an olympic barbell weight set and you still want to build strength…
• Or you just want to try something different this time for strength training!

Here’s the guidelines you should follow…

1. Pick Whole Body, Multi-Joint Exercises.

When you’re just starting out, the basic pushup, Bodyweight Squats, Pullups, Dips and situps are good. Once you’re past a beginner’s level though — it’s hard to build maximal strength with these exercises. (Read my article on Strength Training 101 for the different definitions of strength).

Once you’ve built a base level of strength, you can pick full body exercises like the pistol (one legged squat) and one arm pushup and ab wheel rollouts. These are excellent full-body exercises.

2. Decrease Your Leverage To Increase The Resistance.

In order to build strength you need lots of resistance. Your bodyweight doesn’t provide a lot of resistance if you’re doing just pushups, squats, pullups, etc… so you increase resistance (because you can’t increase the weight past your bodyweight) by decreasing your leverage.

What are some ways to decrease your leverage?

• Decrease the number of limbs used in the exercise (ex: one legged squats/pushups, over the regular versions)
• Decrease your leverage by varying your “weight supports” (ex: put your feet up on a wall, or all the way up the wall for handstand pushups, etc)
• Decrease the speed of your repetitions to increase the time under tension (ex: perform a pushup on a slow 15 seconds down and 15 seconds up speed)

So now you know what exercises to pick and how to make them hard enough to build strength… Next is the rep/set/frequency question…

3. Practice as Often As Possible, While Staying as Fresh As Possible

The key to building strength is making your muscles “Fire” harder, contract more of your current musculature to in essence become “stronger”. You do this by continually practicing building strength. Performing perfect repetitions of:

1. Full body exercises
2. Under High Tension
3. As often As Possible
4. Without “degrading” the quality of your reps/exercises because of fatigue.

So how to do keep from getting too fatigued? Do 3-5 reps of each exercise. If you can do more than that, make sure they’re perfect reps and do multiple sets of that exercise. 3-5 sets too.

Does this sound familiar? Yes, it’s how you build strength. It’s the same rep/set scheme found in the DoubleYourGain’s 3-5 Strength Training Program (with weights).

So there you have it you now know exactly how to do strength training without weights.