Yes. Whatever exercise you were thinking of when you asked this question yes. Stop limiting your mindset to “maybe” or “it’s not as effective”. You know what’s not effective at building muscle? Your attitude. It may require some modifications, additional weights, bands, accommodating resistance but it can and will build muscle but it’s on you to discover how. As an example people will argue that Pistol Squats aren’t an effective or efficient exercise to build massive legs since the stabilizer muscles that help you with the balancing portion would give out well before the quads and glutes would ,thus they believe this limits your chances of getting a pump or occurring enough local muscle fatigue to build muscle. However although a valid argument it does not mean the Pistol Squat won’t build muscle mass. In fact if we take this same movement, load it up with a weighted vest or backpack and increase our stability by holding onto two chairs, wall or objects to assist our balance then we can really drive the muscles to failure without worrying about our balance giving out before our quads. The catch is you have to use a light of a grip on whatever you’re assisting yourself with as possible, we want to get the most out of performing the movement so we have to limit the assistance to really force our muscles to reach the growth we desire.
Get Moving!
People often ask me what’s the best way to get back into shape? The first thing I tell them is to get moving again, start carving out 15-20min a day to complete your workout. What you need to get motivated is to put the work in and the motivation will come, people often think to get motivated to get into shape you have to feel inspired to do so everyday and out 120% effort to make progress but this simply isn’t the case. The best way to adhere to the goals you set out to achieve for yourself is to put the work in with the amount of effort you can give it every day you train, whether it’s 50% or 100% effort, show up and put the work in and results will come. Thank you for reading, have a great week!
Can you Build Muscle with Minimal Equipment?
The short answer is yes, yes you can build muscle with minimal or no equipment at all. Is it easy? Not exactly. So how do we do it? First we’ll talk about what our goal with training at home is in order to maximize muscle growth at home with training and then I will discuss one technique to implement into your training at home in order to build more muscle and not have to do 1000 bodyweight squats to feel the stimulus in your legs. The goal with at home training that we need to be thinking about is hitting muscular failure, activating those high threshold motor units every set. So, we must push ourselves to our very limit every set since our equipment is minimal and often the weight is only light. Even if this happens after many repetitions your muscle fibres will still illicit the high threshold motor units in response to this intense training. So what are high threshold motor units and how do they work? In short, there are low threshold motor units and high threshold motor units, the key to size and strength is in the high threshold motor units, they activate during heavier sets or when the low threshold motor units start to give out during a set and more motor units need to be recruited, thus the high threshold motor units kick in. The low threshold motor units can be thought of as slow twitch muscle fibres and high threshold motor units can be thought of as fast twitch muscle fibres. If you want additional info about it, google Henneman’s size principal. OK so you get the idea now that you just have to keep reppin’ until your HTMU kick in, right? Is there a way I can train with lower rep ranges and get this same effect though without having to do 3 sets of 1000 bodyweight squats or resort to only training unilaterally? Yes. The technique we’re going to implement is called pre-fatigue sets and as the name suggest we are going to do exactly that, pre-fatigue our muscles in a superset using an isolation exercise and then train our compound movement in order to get the muscles firing faster and reduce the reps we have to perform on our compound movement. A quick example of this would be this superset:
A1 Band Leg Extensions
A2 Goblet Squats
With this superset we have leg extensions as our pre-fatigue movement, and Goblet Squats as our main compound movement. So instead of having to do 100 reps of Goblet squats before you feel your HTMU firing now it’ll be more like 8-12 or 15-20 reps before you really start to feel it in your quads after pre-fatiguing your quads with the leg extensions movement. This is just one of the many ways to build muscle at home without the use of heavy weights while still maximizing gains. More weekly tips on building muscle at home soon.
How do you push for more mobility?
How do you push for more mobility?
Simple every time you do an exercise that targets mobility at a certain joint such as the ankles or hips or knees, you need to push yourself to go further into the depth of it every rep. If it is causing you pain to go further and you really can’t go any further into depth try making it easier part way through the rep to where you can’t go any further. So what do I mean by that and how do we do that? A Simple way to put it is if you were performing a barbell Squat and you added chains to the bar when you’re at the bottom of the Squat the weight is lighter and thus easier but as you ascend the rep the exercise becomes heavier. We want to cause the same effect with any exercise were using to gain mobility in so for example going from a skater squat into a reverse lunge stance BUT when you start to press back up off the floor lift your back leg up while you press from the floor with your front leg in order to make the movement more challenging to further develop strength in that desired ROM. In this specific example you might initially start by dropping your back leg at about a quarter skater squat depth and it’s always your toes that touch the ground first, eventually you can change the difficulty by making it your knees and toes that touch the floor at the same time and then just your knees. From the bottom position it might be that your knee always comes up first but eventually both your knees and your toes will come up off the floor together in order to increase the difficulty in the movement. Thus overtime your mobility will improve vastly and be much stronger in that bottom range so even though when you started you couldn’t even get past a quarter skater squat now you can do full skater squats to depth with no stress on the knees, hips or ankles and build up some necessary strength for the Pistol Squat.
Read more about the Pistol Squat in my next blog post where we discuss what exercises are effective in getting you your first pistol squat.