By using some smart bodyweight training, I’ve gained about 10kg of lean muscle in the last 5 or 6 years by doing six simple movements at home without needing a gym at all. I also built the strength to do all sorts of advanced calisthenics movements as a side effect of that (levers, planches, one-arm chinups, handstand pushups, stalder presses, etc). Here’s how.
The grim reality of the gym
I went into a gym the other day and saw skinny or soft people working out for hours, trying to build every muscle possible, using every machine or weight exercise or routine they could get their hands on. It hit me that I hadn’t stepped foot inside a gym in literally years, but I acutely remember how tiring, frustrating, and deflating that experience was. You’re trying to build muscle, but you feel tied to a gym to get results; you spend hours traveling, heaps of money on gym memberships or expensive equipment at home; you do a bunch of unnatural, complicated movements that you don’t enjoy in an attempt to try and force your body to change. At the same time, you feel like you’re not even progressing, you don’t see any changes in your body, and you’re terrified that if you stop all of this, you’ll lose all your gains.
This was my existence once. I understand how it feels.
A better way to build muscle
I’m going to show you the three things I discovered that, if you apply them like I have, will allow you to build literally as much muscle as you want—or as much as your body is physically, genetically capable of building—without ever needing a gym. Just by using a few simple pieces of equipment you can set up at home, I’m going to show you that by doing that properly, not only will you not miss out on anything that the gym could offer you, but you’ll actually find that you’re better off.
Myth #1: You need to lift weights to build muscle
The first myth I had to dispel from my brain was thinking that I needed weights or machines in order to build muscle. You don’t. In reality, all the body responds to in terms of muscle gain is intensity—the relative difficulty of what you’re doing. It’s about the force requirement at your muscles, not about how much weight you’re lifting. Just by leveraging your own body weight (and a bit of simple weight for your legs) you can generate all the force requirement necessary to build as much muscle as possible.
Of course, the gym works, but the downside of using weights or gym machines is that it’s actually much harder to generate maximum intensity, to load movements to 100% of your strength capacity. When we work with fixed-resistance exercises at the gym, only a very tiny portion of the work that we ever do actually reaches 100% of our strength capacity. So it’s a very inefficient way of stimulating growth. On the other hand, when we leverage our own body weight, we can constantly adjust the difficulty as we train to always keep it at maximum intensity. Not only is this much safer, because we can always scale the difficulty down if we’re failing and stuck—which we can’t do when we’re under a 100-kilo barbell—but it’s also much more efficient because we can scale things up, train only at the point of failure, and therefore get much better results in a fraction of the time that it would take us at the gym.
Side note: That’s why I only train for 40 minutes a week. But that’s for another post.
Myth #2: You need to target every muscle individually
The second myth I had to discard forever was thinking that I needed to do a bunch of different exercises to make sure I grew all of my muscles—isolation movements targeting different parts of the body. None of it is necessary. In reality, there are only six basic planes of motion that you can generate force in. If you load those basic patterns to maximum capacity throughout the full range of motion, you’re not missing out on anything. As you build strength in these basic movement patterns, your body grows muscle in unison, in balance. Weak links catch up, and you don’t have to think about it or try to engineer it yourself.
Another downside to using the gym to try and build muscle is that, because fixed-resistance gym exercises are only maximally loaded to one tiny part of the range of motion, you end up needing a bunch of different exercises to actually challenge your muscles at each different point in that range of motion in order to build balanced strength and muscle mass. So, it’s much more complicated to achieve the same result.
The strength you end up building from isolated work, or work that’s only heavy in specific parts of the range of motion, doesn’t transfer as well to real-world strength. We know that closed-chain kinetic movements, where you’re moving your body through space, deliver very transferable strength to all the sorts of skills you want to build. Open-chain kinetic movements, where you’re moving external weight relative to your body, don’t build that sort of transferable strength. That’s another downside to fixed-resistance gym training.
The upside to using bodyweight training in the basic planes of motion is that it’s so simple. You only need to train six movements, and they’re the only movements you ever have to learn. Progress on them to a high enough degree, and you’ll build your end-goal levels of muscle mass. Because we can strip away everything else and just have this handful of exercises to focus on, it makes it much easier to consistently push progress long-term and get to really advanced levels of strength and muscle.
The side benefit, obviously, is that the strength gained from doing that transfers to anything else you want to do, and you get a bunch of physical ability for free.
Myth #3: You need to choose between muscle growth or strength gain
The third and final belief I had to dispel, which allowed me to finally break through and reach my lifetime goals, was thinking that there was a difference between hypertrophy training (muscle growth training) and strength training. There is this common quip thrown around that says “calisthenics can’t build you size, it can only get you ripped.” A lot of people think that there’s fundamentally a difference between gaining muscle and gaining strength, and that bodyweight training might get you shredded but won’t get you bigger.
This just doesn’t make sense. In reality, there’s only one type of muscle growth: muscle growth. The only other factor that affects how you look is body fat, which is a completely different issue. Aside from the neurological adaptations that occur when you start learning a new skill, like strength training certain movements, the only way that you then continue getting stronger on those movements is by building muscle tissue. Get stronger long-term, and you gain muscle. Strength and muscle mass are, for all intents and purposes, practically the same thing.
So, if you get measurably stronger on your basic movement patterns, you get measurably bigger muscles.
The biggest downside to the gym here is that by focusing on the byproducts of effective strength training—like getting a pump, getting sore, or feeling like you’ve worked your muscles hard—we end up completely missing the point. You can spend all the time you want achieving these things and still not grow. Whereas, when we focus on these basic movement goals and solely on improving our maximum strength, it means that as we progress and succeed with our training, we guarantee the changes we want to see in our physique as a result.
There’s no more praying and waiting—just a direct correlation between performance and size.
How to build muscle fast in 3 steps – No gym required
These are the basic three principles that get in the way of most people ever actually having success with muscle gain. They keep people tied to a gym and extensive, time-consuming training regimes in order to try and not lose gains, even when they’re not making any. These are the three steps I would take to implement these lessons and actually get a result from them.
Step 1: The first thing is to stop, right now, ever thinking about weight on a bar or a machine, and think instead about force requirement. There is no rule that you need heavy external weight to make muscle gains, but you do need your strength goals to require a lot of strength from your muscles to perform.
Step 2: The second point, and this is crucial, is to stop thinking about muscles and think instead about movements. You can try to engineer your body piece by piece, but it’s much easier to just build strength in the basic six planes of motion and let your body figure out the muscle-building side of things.
Step 3: The third piece is to stop thinking about growth or hypertrophy and just focus on strength gain. You can’t tell your body to grow muscle—you can try and see how effective it is—but you can do everything in your power to get stronger every single week. As you do that, piece by piece, you guarantee yourself the results you’re after in terms of muscle mass.
Pack on muscle without setting foot in a gym
To summarise, if you want muscle mass, you just need goals that require a disgusting amount of strength in order to perform. You reach those goals, you’ll be jacked. Simple.
Take this list, if you want. These are my six long-term goals that I’m just on the borderline of achieving at the moment:
- Straddle planche pushup
- Front lever row
- Handstand pushup
- One-arm chinup
- Single leg squat + 60kg
- Nordic curl
Set those as your goals, and you can achieve all the intensity you could possibly need from your training with just a few hundred dollars’ worth of simple equipment, which you can set up at home. If you progressively improve your strength toward this single set of goals, with time you’ll build all the muscle mass that your body is physically capable of building. I can promise you, you will have the strength, mobility, and physique to show for it.
Regardless of where you’re starting… you can gain muscle
Please, please do not let your distaste for the gym stop you from gaining muscle. Whether you’re male, female, old, young, fat, or skinny, increasing your muscle mass is one of the most worthwhile things you can possibly do for how you look, feel, and function, now and into your later years.
I truly hope this makes muscle gain feel more achievable because, regardless of where you’re at, it absolutely is.