Stop the insanity!
If you want to start building some serious muscle with your body weight workouts.
Then you have to stop doing the 5 things that I'll show you in todays video.
What's up guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM
You know with the release of the new Athlean Xero program.
Complete bodyweight program, no bends, no bars, no bench, no bull next Wednesday.
I thought, let's keep this thing going on the theme of body weight training.
And I think it's time to dispel one of the biggest myths that's out there, that bodyweight
training can't build muscle.
I always say, it comes down to the program that you are following to try to build that
muscle.
If all you are doing is a workout that has you jumping around a gym, with pure cardio
conditioning, no you won't build muscle.
So I thought, let's cover 5 mistakes that I think most guys are making or at least thinking
when they hear the word bodyweight training.
And I'm going to show you how to stop doing all of them so you can turn body weight training
into serious muscle building.
So here we are, Number 1 on our list of body weight workout blunders.
Body weight is weight.
Guys, body weight is a form of resistance training.
When your body is training, your muscles don't know the difference between a barbell, or
a dumbbell, or your own body weight or cables.
Sure there's different strength curves associated with those but in terms of the form of resistance,
your body doesn't know the difference.
So as you can see in these exercises here, these two ways to work the shoulders, one
with dumbbells and one with my body.
You can see here when I turn myself upside down and do body weight, I am certainly pressing
weight.
And I'm pressing in this case, a 165 pounds of body weight up against gravity.
Now in the dumbbell version I have 45 pound dumbbells in my hands and I'm pushing 90 pounds.
You can certainly overload with body weight, but you have to understand that weight is
just weight.
Whether it be from you or whether it be made out of iron It's the same, right?
And if you keep doing these things the wrong way, your body will never be made of iron.
I'm going to show you today, with this and some of these other blunders, how you can
start to get that to be the case.
Number 2.
Forgetting that longer equals stronger.
Guys, again, body weight training, weight training in general, it comes down to physics.
Now your body operates like a series of levers and arms, you know like moving arms, levers,
does that ring a bell from physics?
The longer the lever arm, the harder it's going to be for the muscle to exert the force
it has to, to move that object.
So if we have in this example here of a pushup.
My arms are nice and tight to my body, up close, underneath the shoulders.
I'm not talking about arms specifically as defined by the word arm.
I'm just saying the lever arm.
Here I am doing pushups up and down.
But if I make one slight tweak, and I get away from the norm and stop doing just regular
pushups, because you can knock those out, 25, 30, 50, 100 at a time.
We are going to push our hands up ahead of our body, in this Pancake Press version of
it.
And immediately the exercise becomes so much harder.
Why?
Because my chest, the working muscles, and the triceps and the shoulders are further
away from my hand placement.
So that lever arm just became longer.
By doing that, the force has just gone up considerably, the exercise has become that
much harder, the tendency to create overload is that much easier.
And for those guys that said that they can't build any more muscles doing pushups, they
are probably right, but not if they switched their way that they were doing them.
Number 3.
Following up on our point there about physics, there's a quick funny story.
I was training two of my athletes.
I showed them the exact same example I just showed you about the difference in the push
up.
The hand placement making all the difference in the amount of overload.
One of the guys says to the other, or actually asked me, Coach, why is it so much harder?
And the other guy that I was training, who had heard my speech before and had gone through
it, said number 3, 'It's physics bitch'.
And that is the fact of the matter, is he kind of gets it now.
But it is, it's physics as I just showed you.
And one of the things that we can also pull from physics is, work equals weight times
distance traveled.
So the amount of work that you do is equal to the weight that you are using and the distance
that you move it.
So if you want to think of it like a dumbbell, if we move a weight from here to here, it's
going to be less work than if we moved the weight all the way up.
Well since In body weight training, our weight isn't changing unless you somehow miraculously
gained weight within the workout that you're using.
You're not going to have that ability so you have to change the distance traveled.
So there's a big opportunity for you to be able to make a workout much harder.
Therefore much more productive and able to build muscle.
And that is by changing the distance that you travel.
You see here on this example of the Dips, I'm using a one and a half rep style.
By going one and a half reps I am under tension all the way down.
Instead of coming up which would only be up and down in terms of distance covered, I go
back down again and then come up.
So one and a half times an extra half rep of distance for every rep that I do.
Ok, the other thing that we do is we can do here a Single Leg Squat.
But you do it up on a bench or something, any elevated surface.
Because if you don't have equipment, who cares that you don't have a bench.
The point is that you are allowing your foot to go past the level of the ground.So again,
distance is increased.
If you start to increase the distance that you cover with keeping your force the same,
the work that you do, is obviously,
by our physics bitch problem here is going to show you that you are doing more work.
And that is what we are after, when we're trying to building muscle.
Number 4.
No MO.
What I'm talking about here guys is no momentum.
We know that there is something called elastic energy especially if you are an athlete.
You want to take advantage of elastic energy as much as possible.
When a guy is getting ready to jump up for a rebound, he first squats down so he can
build up some elastic energy to then propel himself up.
But that doesn't mean that when you are trying to create muscle overload or isolated muscle
overload that you want to always employ that.
For proper body weight training to actually build muscle you want to sometimes get rid
of the MO, get rid of the momentum.
Ok, you want to eliminate that and how do you do it?
I'm showing you an example here, two examples, either the static exercise like this, the
Spiderman Push Up.
When I get down to the bottom of the rep, I'm pausing.
I'm not just getting down and then coming right back up.
Especially because I have moving arms and legs here to generate a little bit of momentum,
I removed that.
But more so in this example when I show you the Plyo Push Up.
I get into a low hover position so that my hands, and my chest is not touching the ground.
I have tension through the muscle but no momentum.
I gotta hang out there literally for a few seconds and then try to generate an explosive
force enough to get my whole body off of the ground.
Try just a couple of these and you will see that there is a big difference of using that
elastic energy on the rebound to get right back into your next rep and not using anything
at all.
Finally Number 5.
Not going through failure.
I didn't say to failure, I meant through failure.
Because a big reason why I think guys don't get the results they like to get or that perception
of body weight not causing enough stimulus to build muscle,
is that a lot of guys don't even go to failure but when they do they're not finding ways
to go through failure.
Now I mentioned back in the beginning , Athlean Xero.
A new body weight program.
No bands, no bars, no bench, no bull, literally we've stripped out everything.
And came up with the most serious muscle building bodyweight only program that you could do.
And we use something in our strength training workouts called our Xero Sum progression.
Now what is that?
We will insure that you will get more results because objectively we have built in ways
to insure that you do.
Guaranteeing that you have to do more reps the second time that you encounter a workout
or an exercise than you did the first time.
And also by doing these combo type training workouts where we insure that yeah, we'll
give you a workout or an exercise that you do to failure.
But by partnering that up with another exercise, that I and O, based on physics and all the
other stuff that you can do more of, even if you've gone to failure on that exercise,
that's how we get you through failure.
So Just when you thought you were done and you got as much as you could out of that exercise,
I know that we're just beginning.
And we can push you through to a level B, to a level C, all the way through failure,
different depths, again depending upon where you are in the program.
Guys as I said, it's about applying the right principles.
I don't care what program you're using from AthleanX, whether you're doing the AthleanX
Program, AthleanX 2, or using Athlean Xero.
The fact of the matter is we put science back in strength.
And I show you how we can get so much more out of our workouts.
And Athlean Xero is just the latest example.
For you guys that have been using AthleanX, this will kick your ass, I guarantee it.
Because we are still using the same principles that we always have.
That is training you hard but keeping those workouts brief so you can get back and rest
and recover and keep those results going.
That's what's made AthleanX as popular as it has been because we can get results but
still allow you guys to do the other things in life that you enjoy.
Ok, instead of spending an hour and a half or two hours in the gym every day.
Guys for more information, Athlean Xero coming out this coming Wednesday.
In the meantime, for all our AthleanX programs head on over to AthleanX.com.
join me on team Athlean.
And start training like an athlete.
I'll see you guys back here next week.
If you thought this was valuable.
If you liked these tips and you're going to start applying them to yourself,
make sure you leave a comment below and a thumbs up.
And let us know if you are excited about Xero coming out next week.
I'll talk to you guys soon.