CAN YOU INCREASE MUSCLE MASS USING ONLY YOUR BODYWEIGHT?

Lifting heavy weights at the gym is generally considered the way to go when the aim is to add lean muscle mass. However, for beginners it is possible to make gains in muscle mass using just bodyweight.

Making Gains

For a footballer it makes sense to focus on compound exercises first. Exercises such as squats, lunges, press ups and pull ups all train multiple joints and muscle groups simultaneously. This is exactly what occurs on the football pitch, muscle groups work together to exert and absorb force.

No matter the exercise, time under tension should be a central focus (which means performing the exercise in a slow and controlled manner) and it must be made progressively harder over time in order to maintain the adaptation of hypertrophy (increase in the size of the muscle fibres). This can be achieved in a number of ways, most commonly:

• Increasing the number of sets

• Increasing the load

• Increasing the difficulty of the exercise (single leg vs double leg for example) Increasing time under tension

Essentially all ways of increasing muscular stress.

It makes sense to perfect exercise form and technique, as well as explore the range of exercise variations (for example forward lunges vs side lunges vs reverse lunges vs diagonal lunges) before adding any further weight or resistance to the exercise. However, the difficulty comes when the athlete reaches a certain level of proficiency, has explored many exercise variations and experimented with tempos to increase time under tension and now cannot efficiently train for hypertrophy for a given exercise using only their bodyweight.

Exercises such as squats for example using just bodyweight can be quite easy, making it increasingly hard to trigger the mechanisms of muscle growth. Progressive overload is required to increase muscle mass, once a good base level of strength has been achieved through bodyweight training, training different aspects of the strength curve can be done more efficiently by utilising added weight or resistance.

Key Point

Bodyweight training can be used to increase muscle mass, but it will only get you so far. If you’re new to strength training then gains in muscle mass are possible using your bodyweight alone, but you will eventually hit a point where creating enough of an overload to keep triggering muscle growth becomes difficult and a switch to weights and gym training will eventually be needed to make further gains in football specific strength and power. This will also enable you to train all aspects of the strength curve in an efficient and varied way.

It’s also important to note that many players skip straight to training with weights and miss out on all of the possible benefits of bodyweight training, which can be equally as detrimental. A good phrase to refer to here is “the wider the base, the higher the peak”. In short this means that if you focus on squeezing as many possible benefits as you can from the more basic exercises, then greater benefits will be waiting for you when you reach the sexier, more advanced exercises further down the line.

This goes hand in hand with earning the right to progress any exercise. To give an extreme example, if you cannot repeatedly perform a simple bodyweight squat with correct technique, then trying to perform barbell back squats with chains hanging from either end of the barbell would be doing yourself a huge injustice. If we can use subtle but effective increments to keep increasing the difficulty of an exercise, then you are building the foundations for a much higher peak of performance in the future whilst addressing the immediate training goal. CLICK