Top 5 Bodyweight Exercise MISTAKES - (STOP Doing These - Build Muscle!!)

Where bodyweight training equals beast training - http://athleanx.com/x/endtheinsanity

Stop the insanity. If you want to start building some serious muscle with your body weight workouts, then you have to stop doing the five things that I show you in today’s [Music] video. What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalere, athletex. com.

You know, with the release of the new athleene zero program, complete body weight program, no bands, no bars, no bench, no bull, next Wednesday, I thought, let’s keep this thing going on the theme of bodyweight 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’re following to try to build that muscle. If all you’re doing is a workout that has you jumping around a gym um with pure cardio and conditioning, no, you won’t build muscle. So, I thought, let’s cover five mistakes that I think most guys are making or at least thinking when they hear the word body weightight training.

And I’m going to show you how to stop doing all of them so you can turn body weightight training into serious muscle building. So, here we are. Number one 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 are 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 165 lbs of body weight up against gravity.

Now, in the dumbbell version, I have 45 lb dumbbells in my hands and I’m pushing 90 lb. 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 blenders how you can start to get that to be the case.

Number two, 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, 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 that has to to move that object.

So, if we have in this example here of a push-up, 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 push-ups up and down. But if I make one slight tweak and I get away from the norm and stop doing just regular push-ups because you can knock those out 25, 30, 50, 100 at a time.

We’re 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 uh the tendency to create overload is that much easier. And for those guys that said that they can’t build any more muscle doing push-ups, they’re probably right, but not if they switched to the way that they were doing them. Number three, 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 was training who had heard my speech before and had gone through it said, “Number three, it’s physics, bitch. ” And that’s 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’re 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 move the weight from here all the way up. Well, since in body weight training, our weight isn’t changing unless you somehow miraculously gain 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’m 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. Okay. 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, cuz if you don’t have equipment, who cares if you don’t have a bench? The point is that you’re 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 [ __ ] problem here is going to show you that you are doing more work and that’s what we’re after when we’re trying to build muscle. Number four, no mo. What I’m talking about here, guys, is no momentum. We know that there’s something called elastic energy.

Especially if you’re 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’re 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. Okay? You want to eliminate that.

And how do you do it? I’m showing you an example here in two examples. Either a static exercise like this, the Spider-Man push-up. When I get down to the bottom of the rep, I’m pausing. I’m not just p, you know, 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 remove that. But more so in this example when I show you the pio push-up, I get to a low hover position so that my hands are and my t my chest is not touching the ground. I have tension through the muscle but no momentum. I got to hang out there literally for a few seconds and then try to generate an explosive force enough to get my whole body off the ground.

Try just a couple of these and you’ll see there’s 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 five, 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 causin