Best Way To Build Muscle: Weights Or Bodyweight Exercises?
Answer:
The best way to build muscle is to train with weights, but you can build muscle with bodyweight exercises with added progressive resistance. Understanding how muscle is built using any method is very important, so before I go into each method in more detail, I’ll briefly explain the 3 universal components for building muscle using any method.
1: Progressive resistance
Simply put, progressive resistance is the constant and gradual addition of more weight to your lifts. When you stop increasing the amount of weight you are lifting, you won’t get any bigger or stronger but will stay the same. Add some weight, and you’ll start growing again, in size and strength.
2: Progressive fuel consumption
Think of the body as an engine. The bigger the engine, the more fuel it requires. And, with each lb of muscle you add, that is an upgrade to your engine. So, when the engine gets upgraded, naturally, it burns more fuel. Therefore – as you get bigger, you need to eat more fuel to feed the ever-growing engine.
You need progressive amounts of fuel to allow you to work out at your optimum level without being tired and weak, and also to provide the fuel for growth while you are resting.
3: Rest and recuperation
Again, let’s think of the body as an engine. Say the engine starts having problems… what do you do? You take it into a garage, where it goes off road a while (rests) while the mechanics (food) work on repairing it.
It would look like a scene from a Keystone Cops movie if the repair work was to be carried out on a car while it was still in use – and slapstick aside, it’d be impossible, right?
Therefore, repair (growth and energy re-fuel for next workout) only happens when you rest.
Best way to build muscle with weights:
Of the two methods for building muscle I’ve described, training with weights is the most effective and most efficient. If it weren’t, bodybuilders and strength trainees would be doing sit-ups, burpees and push ups – you can bet your life on it.
Why is it the most effective?
Well, simply put, the ability to hold a weight (any sort of weighted object from phone directories, dumbbells, barbells, to kettle balls) allows us to directly target muscles at all kinds of angles.
Muscles get bored with the same old, and stop growing, so variety is crucial in any effort to build muscle, and the almost limitless opportunities specially designed weights (dumbbells, barbells, EZ-curl bars, etc.) provide us with more variety than we can shake a stick at.
But… you need some kind of structure, so you need a plan which consists of the right exercises, at the right times, in the right amounts, or your results will be minimal, at best.
Best way to build muscle with bodyweight exercises:
Bodyweight exercises, also known as callisthenics are a good way to build muscle, and there are enough ways to leverage bodyweight to build almost every aspect of the body to some degree. Although, callisthenics are much more limited than weight training in a few ways:
- Adding progressive resistance is still necessary to grow, but much more awkward and difficult than simply adding another plate to a bar. Plus, you’ll soon reach your muscle growth capabilities with callisthenics, whereas with weights, this will take years.
- With callisthenics you are relying upon your body weight to build muscle. There is only so much you can do with your own bodyweight to target specific muscles, making it much more ‘general’. Whereas, with weight training, in my opinion, you have much more scope and variety.
The verdict:
I can’t deny it – I do know of several people who have trained with weights for years and have converted to callisthenics and have said they wouldn’t go back to weights. But, I also know other who have done the opposite.
At the end of the day, it’s all about what you want out of it. As already discussed, there is no way you can build the kind of muscle in callisthenics that you can with weights, but, for fun, aerobic, calorie burning exercises, callisthenics is hard to beat.
Try them both and decide for yourself. Have fun!
