Get Huge Without The Gym: Workout And Grow Muscle With No Equipment

hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization and today I'm going to talk to you about how to train when you have no equipment at all no gym no friends no family no one to love you no one to whisper sweet nothings in your ears you fall asleep that got creepy so if you don't have anywhere or with anything to trade no dumbbells no barbell no stretchy bands definitely no gym what can you do what should you do to put together a decent approach to training that can get you some kind of results a few things before we get into the numbered tips cardio is obviously still possible so if you don't have anywhere to train you can still jog you can do all kinds of Parkour if you want cardio is you can definitely take walks you could hike so cardio is absolutely on the table no problem at all but what about resistance training what are you supposed to do if you have zero weights how do you train with resistance training well turns out that there are tons of exercises that you can do that require no equipment at all or something that you don't think typically of as equipment but you will still use as equipment for example you can do with no equipment at all just really a floor you can do push-ups you can do push-ups which are closer and grip and your hands stay closer to your head and you end up doing them called tricep push-ups they're like Skull Crushers except for the push-up variation you can get two chairs together and do dips in between them with your feet out on the front on the floor the chair dips are very popular crunches body weight squats you can do lunges with your body weight you can do squats where you squat staying on your tippy toes and you touch your knees all the way down to the ground and then come back up you can do split squats you can do single leg squats if you're really Advanced and very strong you can do calf races on any staircase that you have around or even some kind of ledge or curb with a stick for balance it's that easy so that takes care of a ton of leg exercises and a ton of pushing exercises but what about anything for the back of the body what about the pulling stuff well all you need is a tree with quite a few large branches relatively low to the ground look round for trees you're sure to find one of them somewhere and then you can do all sorts of pulling you can do pull-ups you can ratchet your feet down lower and do face pulls pulling the bar to your face to hit your delts and your biceps and your traps you can do inverted rows on the lower branches to hit the rest of your back you can even do inverted curls you position yourself just under a tree branch you grab it underhand and depending on where you put your feet it's going to allow you to leverage you could do almost no gravity at all and you'll be able to curl your body into the branch thus doing an inverted curl that takes care of a large fraction of your body pretty damn well not ideally not optimally but way better than you thought well I don't have any equipment that means I can do zero exercises or you can do a ton now what you may be thinking at this point is saying okay great that you've listed all the exercises and certainly there are a few more but what if I run through all these I mean I got like one month or two of training a mesocycle i deload ideally I want to switch some exercises out but there's nowhere to go like you don't have any equipment you just push up as a push-up but that's not true so that's Point number three by modifying your foot and hand positions you can create new exercise variations that you can feed into your program so that you don't have to get super bored training with no equipment squats can be narrow stance medium stance or wide stance push-ups can be narrow medium or wide you can put your feet up on a chair for push-ups and all of a sudden do decline push-ups which are really really hard and hit your front delts and triceps a little bit more than they hit your chest there's a ton of ways in which to put your feet and hands into different places including with pulls pull-ups wide medium grip narrow underhand all kinds of options for you even if you have the Bare Essentials of the ground and a tree if you cannot get access to a tree I'm sorry but a tree is required for part of this or at least something you can hang on to that's a chest to eye level and then if that's good enough you can do rows off of it you can do pull-ups off Etc the way you do the variations is this you pick a variation at a time you say okay I'm going to do push-ups chair dips I'm going to do bodyweight squats lunges some rows and some pull-ups and that'll be a good exercise for me a good exercise routine stick to one kind of grip for all those those are wide grip push-ups let's say those are wide stance squats wide pull-ups there's just the theme is wide randomly after those exercises a few months later get a little stale and you want to switch it up switch over to medium grip for a lot of the stuff or narrow grip or underhand or whatever it is so continue to use the variations as long as they feel good and you're making progress on them and as soon as they sort of sputter to a stop you can then switch that way if you have three variations wide narrow medium even if you use one of them per month it means you don't see the next one until three months later which is usually long enough time for your body to feel real fresh about it but typically it takes two or three months for you to really run out of steam out of variation which means when you come back to wide stance squats it could be six months or longer after you last did them and they're really going to feel different they're going to feel new they're going to feel fresh and you're not going to feel encumbered by this total lack of variation in your program which which sucks right that's what you solve with a gym you have tons of toys to play with in the just a tree and the ground there's just not a lot of stuff to do not a lot of variation next question number four what do we do about progression because this is a tough one in in the gym with weights progression is almost implied you just lift more weight but in a situation where you're lifting your own body weight mostly outside or in a enclosed room with a tree in it that's interesting perspective on that how exactly are you supposed to progress well got a couple of hints for you first of all you can add reps let's say you're getting really close to failure for sets of 12 in the push-up over time seeks to go to 13 14 15 16. if you can do sets of 16 in the push-ups everything being equal after you were able to do sets of 12 at most you got more muscular and stronger and healthier typically we say don't go over 30 repetitions because anything much lighter than that isn't optimal but with workouts at home or workouts on the go with zero equipment optimal is pushed aside a little bit and possible is fronted as the variable that is best and if it grows some decent amount of muscle for us or it makes us healthier in some other way we'll take it so what I would say if you're training at home try to make your lifts challenging Enough by leveraging your body against yourself in such a way that you can do less than 30 reps of them percent but potentially you'll have to go up to 50 repetitions per set and that's totally fine because it still has muscle growth potential and for those of you folks in your first two or three years of training it has a lot of muscle growth potential so adding reps is great and now we know you can add up to as many reps this would make 50 Reps for an exercise the thing is 50 strict good high quality push-ups is something almost nobody can do and almost everyone that says they can do it you actually watch them try to do it and you're like that is the worst technique I've ever seen that's all half reps you're bouncing off the ground you're not locking out your elbows do real push-ups and they're like oh I got 27 like exactly so even if you're in really great shape just adding sets and Reps to push-ups to pull-ups to bodyweight squats adding repetitions can go up for a long time and if you can really do 50 reps of those movements a lot of times you're an unbelievable shape and it's kind of like mission accomplished another way to take what I just said is this if you think you're in too good of shape to get some beneficial effect from working out with no equipment you're probably wrong you probably can challenge yourself even with no equipment at all here's another way to challenge yourself reduce the rest time typically you would do a bunch of push-ups and you would stop and rest for two or three minutes but now because you can't put weight on your back for push-ups or you can't do the bench press it just has to be push-ups at home or push-ups on a at an outdoor setting where it's just the ground you might rest for one minute or even 30 seconds or even as soon as you get your breathing back relatively to normal then you go again that repeated challenge to the muscles greatly sums up how much metabolites are in the muscles the byproducts of their efforts and those byproducts have been linked to hypertrophy improvements to muscle growth so if you can challenge yourself with rest times shrinking them on the margins a little bit every time you come in for let's say a month or two that's going to take a workout where you do seemingly the same number of reps and make it way way way harder giving you more of a muscle growth stimulus which is really really good another thing to try is Maya wraps instead of resting two to three minutes between sets have some exercises in which you do 20 reps of body weight squats close to failure it was really challenging you rest for another five or ten seconds and you go again maybe hitting five to seven reps a few times over and over with minimal rest that can fry you up in the best way possible causing a lot of growth stimulus at the gym when you go train you may only need two to four sets of heavy resistance barbells and dumbbells and machines in order to drive home a muscle growth stimulus that's cool that's really good that's why we go lift weights because they make a challenge for us in a small amount of time however when you're training by yourself with no gym at all you may have to do more sets you might have to do four or five or six sets eventually at the end of your program potentially in a short rest time scenario because each set isn't heavy enough to drive the best adaptations for you to get as much muscle as you can but we add more sets constrain the time we end up working just as hard except we do more sets and Reps and less weight it takes the same amount of time as we do at the gym but you cram more work into that and thus you are able to get a very similar comparable response in muscle growth training so someone can train at home and say well hey I did six sets of bodyweight squats and it really got my legs sore somebody training at the gym could have done three sets and got their legs just a sword get them to grow just as much so there's not really a solution with this added sets uh recommendation it is a solution in some sense but it's going to require you to do more work you guys can kind of see where this is going through adding reps through decreasing rest time through introducing things like Maya reps through adding sets we're making the stimulus harder because making it hard on your body is how you make progress another really quick question you could ask yourself theoretically before you start trying to put together a program that has no equipment to access you can really ask yourself the question of how do I make the lack of equipment hard on my muscles because that's what's going to get them to grow and it's going to get you to lose body fat and get stronger and all those great things another thing you can do is to decrease the mechanical advantage that you're experiencing if you're really strong in your squats from uh completely flat foot you're using your glutes your adductors your quads then you're doing more than sets of 50 that's not really doing anything for you anymore what you can do is try some squats squats a luncheon essentially push your hips forward and your knees have to touch down gently on the ground all the time that creates a crap load of mechanical disadvantage for your quads takes your glutes mostly out of the equation and all of a sudden as far as quads that's concerned that's a mechanically disadvantageous lift it's harder for the quads that's a good thing because as the quads try really hard they struggle and that's when they grow so a lot of times you want to ask yourself the question of how can I make this exercise more difficult on myself put myself in a position which I can't lift as much weight so that I have to try harder to lift the weight that I have because the weight is your body weight it's constant another one is single leg squats does take some balance to do and you can't hold on to a chair to do them but if you figure out that balance you get something to hold on to it's a really tough exercise all of a sudden you're very challenged in the mechanical disadvantage there is you took one entire leg out of the equation stuff like that can really really help you Point number five and the last point for this video the critical factors to making gains inside the gym or out are as follows and these are mostly tuned for outside the gym with no equipment you want to make sure you check a couple boxes one you want to get close to failure often in the same workout with heavy weights getting close to failure for one set of hack squats in the machine in the gym that might be a really good stimulus but with your body weight you might have to do three four five or six attempts at something sets in succession in which each one of those gets you close to failure then you're going to have a hell of a pump in your quads a hell of a burn and you're going to know you did something we have to repeat the stimulus more often because we have less load easy fact to understand next one is to take limited rest time if your lungs are good to go if you're not breathing heavy anymore you're ready to do your next step that'll save you time in your workouts it'll also hit the muscles in a fatigue State making things more challenging for them thus driving up their metabolites that they produce and probably driving up muscle growth as well if you're in a position where you're doing two or three sets of something and you're like man I wish I had a gym I could really hit my back better try three four five or six sets slowly working up over time in that manner for your back training and you may find that well you know with just body weight inverted rows and pull-ups two three sets like I do with the machines that heavy weight at the gym they don't do much but four or five sets man they really do light me up and that's providing great growth so don't be afraid to add some volume you can recover from it because the loading isn't that insane you'll be totally good to go lastly just to think about this try to go in there and make things tough for your muscles make your muscles try really hard make them have to slow down during their movement you know that last set of bench press or last rep where you're really slowing down to push it you should take your push-ups and your tricep extensions and your pull-ups so far in your training that they start to grind and if you can get your muscles to grind you can probably get them to grow folks if I can be of any more help please check out the comments below ask a few questions I'll try to answer them I'll see you next time training for muscle growth is never going to be the same