Here's How Much Muscle You Can Build With Only Bodyweight Exercises

If you don't have access to weights, or you don't have much interest in strength training, you can still build up muscle with only bodyweight exercises—you just have to choose the right type of exercises, and form is going to be even more important than ever.

Unless you're already lifting heavy at the gym and for some reason, you need to leave the weights and switch to just using your body for resistance, you'll make muscle gains from doing just bodyweight work with relative ease. As long as you're feeling challenged by the exercise, it will likely boost your buff-ness. "In order to build muscle, you need to challenge the muscle," Alexis Colvin, M.D., an orthopedic sports medicine surgeon, told Shape, adding, "If everything starts to feel really easy, you're probably not gaining much [muscle]."

Luckily, for many people, pushups are enough of a challenge to build chest and upper arm muscles, while lunges and squats even without weights will help develop quads and hamstrings. Sure, you likely won't get Schwarzenegger-level biceps without actual weights, but muscle will build.

Focus on the right exercises

For bigger muscles, focus on more-explosive, fast-paced circuits with moves like jump squats and pushups, running through a circuit set quickly, trainer Brian Nguyen told Men's Journal. "If you're doing the body weight movement of these exercises but not the explosive component, then you're going to have more of the muscle you might find on cross country runners," he added.

Nguyen also notes that isometric holds—pausing at the bottom of a pushup hovering over the ground, or holding a plank—should also be added to that routine in order to build muscle.

You can also add challenge to your standard exercises to make them more effective at muscle building: Doing things like lifting a foot while doing a pushup changes your effort level, while doing a lunge with your back foot propped up on a step shifts your range of motion and demands that your body work harder to stay in balance (via Women's Running).