How to get jacked with bodyweight training (40min/week)

This video provides a detailed overview of an effective bodyweight training program focused on achieving six key strength goals in order to transform your overall physique in 40 minutes a week.

The key principles include:

• Setting clear, challenging strength goals as a “north star” for your training [15:07]
• Practicing the movements at your current strength threshold rather than attempting the full move or doing work that’s too easy for you
• Progressively increasing the difficulty as you get stronger over time (i.e. changing body position to make it heavier) [04:11]
• Training each movement once per week with maximum effort, allowing for recovery and progression [08:01]
• Following this focused program can lead to significant gains in muscle mass, strength, and overall physique over the course of 3-5 years with just 40 minutes of training per week. [15:15]

Most body weight training, quite frankly is useless, but it doesn’t have to be. And so in this video I want to show you how you can get seriously jacked with just a set of gymnastics rings, a few weight vests, a Nordic strap and 40 minutes a week. The truth is that most people will just have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to doing body weight training. And so they might go and do some pushups and pullups, some crunches and then think that body weight training just can’t get you very big or strong. You need a gym or that you are the problem and getting in really fantastic shapes just not feasible for you. Neither are true, you just need a better process. And the two big problems that I see stopping most people ever getting any significant results with body weight training, firstly a lack of clear strength goals that are anywhere near hard enough to actually cause significant changes in your body or not having a process that allows you to work hard enough within your current capacity so that you can actually progress towards those goals and never have a chance of reaching them.
And because of this, most people stay stuck. They stay the same, they never reach their goal. So I’m going to address both these points here so you can skip these problems and actually get results yourself. So the first issue is goals. Most people just dunno what they’re trying to achieve with the training and that’s a problem. Fundamentally, all that body weight training can do for us is get a strong past an absolute beginner level. Building strength means we’re building muscle tissue and that muscle tissue is what’s going to allow us longevity. Mobility, obviously strength and the ability to be lean and stay lean and look great. If you dunno what I’m talking about with this already, go watch this video for an explanation. And because we know that strength is the goal, what we basically want is a select handful of very high level strength goals.
Ones that are achievable, but they’re going to be so heavy that they mean that by the time we reach them, our bodies are going to be an end goal level, muscle mass and leanness. And so in our system there’s basically six goals and they are lifetime. What you’re trying to build towards, eventually you can think of them like your North Star through all the bullshit, all the effort and trial and error and frustration and hard work for five to 10 years that lies between you and having body of your dreams, incredible strength, muscle MAs, everything. There’s going to be a lot of work and time in between you and getting there. But through all of that, if you have this set of goals that don’t change and every time you come up for a, you can see them and you can see the progress that you’ve made since you started towards them, it means that you stay on track with direction and you give that enough time, give you somewhere that you can actually get to.
And these are what I’ve had for five years that have allowed me to build all the strength and muscle and stuff you see with 40 minutes a week of training and very little effort with DART and anything else. But it’s only through this clarity that I’ve been able to keep putting in the work with sufficient intent to actually keep pushing progress into these advanced stages. And so the goals are very simple, got other videos breaking down more of the reasoning behind them. But essentially what we’re trying to build up to are six goals, one for each plan of motion. These are sort of all roughly equivalent if you are a taller person, if you are female, if you are older, there’s various factors that are going to make them more or less achievable. I’m six foot male in my late twenties for 10 years, train experience everything behind me and I’m kind of borderline achieving them all.
The point is not necessarily getting there, but the point is that you’ve got goals that are roughly equivalent that give you again that north star. If you can keep progressing towards ’em over time, it’s going to mean that you keep moving in the right direction. I’m going to do this as acronyms instead. A straddle plan, a front lever, a handstand pushup, a one arm chin up, a single leg squat with 75% of your body weight loaded on top and an Nordic curve. Those are the six. They are all we need to build towards to get the strength mobility, low body fat overall physique that we want. That’s everything. And the reason that these movements work for all that is because of a very simple concept of your strength to weight ratio. All of these movements are so hard to build because they require an incredibly higher level of strength, meaning a large amount of muscle mass on your body, but they’re also dependent on how much you weigh because the more body weight that you actually have to move, the more muscle you’ll need to be able to move that weight.
And there’s only two variables you can actually change to affect your overall body weight. One being your level of muscle mass and the other your body fat. And so because the muscle mass is literally the tissue that’s required to be strong, we need it to be high. And so the only thing that we can reduce down here to make that muscle go further in terms of capability is reducing our body fat. And so all of these movements, yes, require a large amount of raw muscle mass on you to be able to do. They also require you to be lean, have really good body composition. So that means that without having serious muscle mass and being like 10% body fat, it’s very difficult to be able to complete these movements. But that works in our favour because it means that by the time we achieve them, we know that this is where we want it to be.
For all those goals that I’ve stated, basically to do these six movements, you need to be a very strong, very lean beast. And I’d spent a lot of time fluffing around with training, doing a lot of distracted stuff and thinking about my body and whether I was gaining muscle mass and whether I was getting leaner. And once I realised how hard these movements were and how far off I was from ’em, but how purely they guaranteed the result I was after in terms of my physique, I was literally able to just lock in and forget about my body, forget about how I was looking, forget about whether I was growing or not, forget about whether I was lean or not, and just purely focus on my incremental strength gain towards each of these movements. I was so far off them, but if I could see my strength inching towards each of them week by week, month by month, then I knew that I was moving in the right direction.
And that’s literally what’s dictated my training over the last five years and meant that I look up now and suddenly realised that my physi is utterly transformed just as a result of getting closer. And I’m kind of borderline on all of them in terms of actually having them within capacity. And you can see the physique that’s resulted in me now from getting to that level. So these six movements are your north star. They’re all we need to worry about. If your training can get you there, then it’s worked. And in terms of an end goal, that is how you get jacked with body weight training. So that’s the goal. The question then becomes, okay, well and good clear outcome. We’ve now solved what most people completely miss because most people just go about training without very clear strength goals or without strength goals whatsoever. They just try and get more reps or do more sets or change up their exercises and there’s no actual linear progression towards any significantly heavy movements.
And I can guarantee you without clear targets, these things won’t be achieved by themselves because the raw level of effort that it takes is nothing that occurs incidentally. But then the question arises, okay, well alright, how do we actually get there? The short answer is practise. I’m going to break down what the whole routine technique looks like. But the fundamental principle to understand here is that in order to build these movements, we need to practise the closest approximation of them that we can because we practise the side as we can over time, we get better. And these strength movements are all just skills. The only difference between this and learning a language or learning to cook is that as you get better, you’re actually physically getting stronger and in that process, building muscle tissue. So what we need to do with our training is set things up in such a way that we can practise as hard as possible, but it’s easy enough for us to still do the practise because if we just try to do those strength movements, but you can go try and do a one on champ now and I’m sure you’ll quickly find that it’s impossible.
And so the art of getting better at this is learning to train in such a way that you are in control of the difficulty and can match it to your current ability. Not too hard so that you don’t move, but no easier than max effort because anything under the threshold of your strength is not going to stimulate improvement and therefore growth. So to break this down for you, there’s two levels. We’ll go macro and then we’ll go macro. So on the big picture level, we have our six movements for each of those movements. We want to do one continuous effort trying as hard as we can per week and then we want to stop and rest and recover and come back the next week and be stronger. If we practise each other movements once a week and we come back the next week and we’re a little bit better, all we need to do is just keep repeating that for enough years that those adaptations stack up and compound and we’re left with the high level result we want within each of those efforts.
So each time you train each week is one continuous set, but these sets are not going to look like normal sets of strength training where most of the time you’re fluffing around nowhere in your threshold. What we want to do within these sets is mimic the strength goal, the highest level of the movement, but mimic it at your current threshold of strength. And so if the difficulty of say a one arm chin up looks like this across the range of motion and our current level of strength was down here, then we want to just make our training meet this threshold throughout the movement. And over time as we come back and keep training, that would slowly increase bit by bit as we get stronger and build ball muscle tissue until eventually our approximation of the movement becomes the movement. There’s no longer a gap between our ability and the end goal and this may be a two year, three year, five year process.
It really doesn’t matter. The point is that if we can work at our threshold, then over time that threshold increases and because we’re always matching it, our training will always be rising up to meet our maximum strength. So what that actually looks like, to give you a few examples, let’s run with the one arm chin up for a second because it’s simple. If I’m trying to do a one arm chin up, you can see I start by trying to do it and I failed because my strength isn’t there. And so that’s okay. What I do is just bring enough help in by taking weight off that pulling arm, then I’m actually able to pull through the movement, but I’m still trying as hard as possible to do one arm chin up. And so I’m basically optimising the amount of resistance on that ring that I’m pulling so that I have to do everything possible to pull it, but I can still pull it.
And so I get to practise the movement, I get to do the closest thing possible for me at this point in time, two or one arm chin up. And by doing that work I signal to my body to get better at it. And next time I come back to do the same thing, I’m going to be able to exert a little bit more force throughout that movement. And so week by week I’m getting better and better and better and needing to put more and more and more weight on that working arm on the ring that I’m pulling until it’s my entire body weight that I’m pulling. And really is that simple. Every movement has a variable that you can adjust to change the difficulty and find the limited of your strength that current threshold. To give you another example, the plant pushup, the difficulty here comes from how far we lean forward in front of where our hands are anchored.
And so yeah, the end goal, I want to lean so far forward that my feet come off the ground, but if that’s impossible, as I’m doing plant pushups, I can lean back, put my feet on the ground, and then just lean far forward enough again that I can find that point of failure and make it as hard as possible, keep the difficulty at my threshold throughout the wrap and reduce the lean if needed. And I can increase the lean If it’s too easy for the single leg squat, I load up a bunch of weight on my back so that it’s really heavy for me at the top. And then when I’m at the bottom of the movement and it’s much more difficult, I can add assistance again with my other foot, with my hands so that there’s as much weight on the squatting leg as possible.
But it’s easy enough that I can just move if I put everything into it and try as hard as possible. And so again, the principle here is just practise. We’re trying to approximate as close as we can to the real thing and use every bit of strength that we currently have, but we’re just scaling down the difficulty so that it’s easy enough for us to actually be able to get practise in rather than it just being impossible and us not being able to move. And so it means that regardless of what level your strength is currently at, you can be a complete beginner down here or much stronger with your ability close to the end goal. You can just adjust that difficulty variable and whatever move you’re doing so that you’re able to train, work against as much resistance as you can handle, practise as hard as possible.
And in doing that, increase your level with time. And regardless of what level you are currently at, you tend to find that working at the threshold of your strength, it tends to take a couple of minutes of that max effort work to reach the point where it’s no longer fun and you gassed and want to break. And by that point, that’s the set done for the week. You go and rest and recover and come back the next week ready to go again and be a little bit stronger than you were. And so doing that, even if you did all six of your movements back to back and took five minutes rest in between each one, that’s about 40 minutes of work for the week and your training’s done and you can do it that way. That’s the most time consuming difficult method. If you can split them up over the week, maybe do them in pairs on three different days, then it’s even less time and even easier to get done.
Making progress with this stuff really isn’t about the amount of time that you put in, but about the intent. People spend a lot of time training but not actually going about doing anything. The way we push our bodies to actually adapt and grow is through that maximum effort training where we are practising being stronger, we’re trying as hard as possible, and there is a very short limit on how much you can do that each week. So if you just do it, nothing else, it doesn’t take much time at all, but it won’t happen by itself. It requires a huge amount of concentration and effort to make that happen. So the best way to do that is eliminate all the other work and just do this so that you have a chance of putting in the level of intent required. And I know all this because I used to fluff around so much with my training.
I did a lot more work, spent a lot more time than this on training every week and I just wasn’t that strong. And it was only when I sort of realised the simplicity of the battle ahead, I saw that, okay, all I needed was to build up to six or so strength goals, but actually building those to a seriously high level and realising that doing that wasn’t complicated but was just going to require me adding slabs of muscle tissue to my body in order to achieve them. It was only then that I was able to actually focus and lock into that long game process of just building raw strength, working as hard as possible every week and eating to fuel that muscle growth. And then year after year, build the muscle tissue, build the raw strength to the point where now scraping these strength goals and actually have the muscle mass and the physique that those movement goals guaranteed.
Anything that’s distracting you from that work is going to make it extremely difficult to put in the amount of intent required consistently for long enough to have any chance of reaching them without the clarity of those goals and eliminating everything else, you’re kind of fucked because if you’ve got more work to do or you’re just playing around for a bit, seeing if you can do them, you’re never going to put in that work and never over a long enough time harass and to actually have a shred of a chance of generating the raw physical changes in your body necessary to get there. And so this is why I put so much emphasis on those goals, and this is as complicated as the process itself has to be, right? You do one set a week, you work as hard as possible until had enough always at your limit, and you just repeat that over and over and over.
But without the goals there guiding this training, guiding you in terms of what it looks like to keep upping this difficulty, keep increasing your strength threshold, then you really have no chance of ever making those significant changes. And it’s only through that strength gain that you generate, that muscle gain that you generate the ability to be really lean and look really impressive. So get that north star clear commit to actually going on that journey of progressing towards those strength goals. May take three years, may take five years, may take longer, but if you commit, you can start the process. And because you know that everything you want in terms of physique and strength mobility is going to be there when you get there then or what else do you have to do with your fitness? And then just get that process in place every single week for practising .
If your practise keeps improving over time, then you know you’re getting closer and that’s really all that matters. The only real basic skill you have to learn is adjusting each of those movements to match your strength limit. So as I said, each of them has a variable you can adjust to scale it down. Realise that it doesn’t matter if you’re a complete beginner, this is all exactly the same. The only difference between where I’m training at now and where someone who’s a lot weaker, less experienced might train is just that absolute level. And so the skill is learning to adjust that difficulty variable, figure out what it is for each of your movement goals, and then learn to adjust it as you train so that you always state your threshold. That is a skill. It’s something we spend a lot of time working on, but the better you get at that, the more you’re going to allow yourself to just put in that raw intent with your practise and get the most you can out of that set each week.
And then it really is just a time game. It’s just about keeping on coming back and being a little bit better every time. If you want to dive deeper into that, I’ve got some tutorial videos running through what that looks like for each of the movements, and if you want to dive deeper into maximising the results of that one set each week so that you can progress after these levels as fast as possible and check out this video. But I hope this really gives you some clarity on what the journey looks like. It’s not that complicated. It’s not very time consuming at all, but it requires effort, it requires consistency, and it will require a long time. So this video helps clarify what needs to happen, but I also hope it makes you realise just how achievable and incredible looking and functioning body really is.