Its easy to forget that and think that your body needs load, load, and more load in order to make gains in muscle and strength. But its not the only way to train. Truth be told, some bodyweight workouts can spur serious growth. Especially when it comes to training your chest, you can get a no-to-minimal-equipment pump if youre doing the right moves and attacking your training correctly. Just check out this I ripped through a few weeks ago.

This is especially important because of how most people think about bodyweight workouts. Very often, people think they can only get a quick sweat when it comes to no-equipment training, that they cant build muscle. But thats only because theyre not using all the tools at their disposal.

In this session, youll train your body from multiple angles, challenging yourself in ways you never thought possible while only using your bodyweight.

The thing you lose when you train with only bodyweight is the ability to load your body aggressively. You cant bench 225 pounds, or even 135 pounds if you dont have, well, 135 pounds worth of extra weight lying around. And no, on a more advanced level, theres no substitute for that lack of loading.

That means your focus must shift and you have to find other ways to create metabolic stress on your muscles. And even with no gear, you still have three key tools at your disposal:

Time Under Tension: You can continue to slow down your reps. Doing so will cause each rep to take longer, and itll give you a chance to lock in good form. Whenever you do return to loading more aggressively, youll take this new form and the ability to create total-body tension into your more advanced movements and be better for it. The key is appreciating time-under-tension, and daring to actively utilize it. If youre doing, say a pushup with a 3-second eccentric contraction, dont just lower down slowly, but squeeze abs and glutes hard as youre doing so. Create full-body tension on every rep, instead of just surviving the tension on the bodypart youre training.

Unilateral Ideas: You can only bilaterally load your body so much, but unilateral and offset bodyweight moves are a great way to make bodyweight go farther. They're going to tax your core that much more, and they'll also subtly load muscles on one side of the body more than the other. No, it's not a 225-pound bench press. But done correctly, it can push you to create serious muscular tension.

Dropsets: Technique dropsets are a great way to add challenge to any movement. In this situation, youre shifting from a more challenging technique at the outset of a set to a simpler one when fatigue sets in. This works great with weights, of course, but it can be used with bodyweight too. Its especially useful when training chest. If youre advanced at training, the basic pushup is easy fare. But standard pushups can be challenging on the back end of a dropset if youve done, say, archer pushups or typewriters right before. The video below offers a nice breakdown of dropsets and how to do them.

Superman Hollow Rock Series

Finish with 2 sets of core work.