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.
