The main argument is that bodyweight training doesn’t create enough resistance to provide the necessary stimulus for muscle growth. Firstly, there are bodyweight exercises that require too much strength for most people to do, so clearly, those exercises will be capable of building muscle.
But what about the majority of people who don’t know that stuff and just want to build muscle without a gym?
In this article, we will look at the body of evidence surrounding low-resistance training and try to answer whether or not low-load training can be an effective means of building muscle.
The researchers included 21 studies and the weight of evidence showed that hypertrophy, also known as muscle growth, can be equally achieved across a spectrum of loading ranges (1).
This alone is a good start to convince most people. But for the skeptics, there’s even more evidence:
Another meta-analysis of 28 studies with participants who both did and did not have training experience found that the amount of hypertrophy doesn’t depend on the magnitude of the load used (2).
Another review with 15 included studies showed that low-load training produces similar muscle gains to high-load training in older adults (3).
Obviously, some of the papers in these reviews are the same, but here we have trained research scientists reviewing other trained scientists’ work and coming to the conclusion that low-load resistance can build muscle as well as high-load resistance training.
I mean they’ve convinced me, but maybe you need more?
Ok.
What about more elderly people getting jacked with low loads (4) (5)?
Low-load training is proven to be as good as high-load velocity fatigue training (6) or for triceps and chest gains in a bench-only program (7), or if the sets were taken to voluntary failure by young women (8).
If you don’t care about humans, I even have low-load muscle gains in rats (9).
I could stop here, but there’s a specific population that is going to matter to a lot of you:
What about people with training experience, and will you still see the same results if you’re not a complete beginner?
Four separate studies suggest that low-load training provides similar muscle gains to high-load training (10–13)
And yet another meta-analysis in 2022 paper analysed every paper that looked at the hypertrophy effect of low-load training on people with decent training experience and found “hypertrophic adaptations were similar irrespective of load magnitude” (14).
Ok, that’s enough.
The evidence is saying that it doesn’t matter if you’re new, experienced, old, young, Metallica or Megadeth that low-load training and by extension calisthenics is more than able to build muscle as effectively as high-load training.
A lot of those papers had varying definitions of low-load, but it didn’t seem to matter how low the load got until it was about 20% 1RM where the stimulus to grow was not strong enough. This equates to probably around 40 reps per set before you hit failure. This brings me to a critical point:
What will make or break low-load training is reaching failure during your sets. When I say failure, I mean form failure which is the point in the set after which your form begins to break down, and not total failure – the point where you are physically incapable of performing the next rep regardless of form.
This kind of intensity has to be reached in most of your sets to get the stimulus to induce the muscle growth we’re after.
When you’re training with a heavy load, most of your muscle fibres are recruited from the start of the set (15) but in the context of low-load, as the low-recruitment-threshold muscle fibres fatigue, the higher-recruitment fibres will only then get recruited to finish the task.
Eventually, if the fatigue continues accumulating far enough, almost all the muscle fibres will be recruited and exposed to the tension stimulus we need to induce muscle growth.
That means we have to take these sets relatively close to failure within about 30 reps.
Drawbacks
Now, let’s talk about the drawbacks of training with low load:
First, I have been talking about muscle growth specifically. But for strength, heavy load training is better, and it comes down to a matter of specificity: to get better at lifting weights, you have to lift weights.
However, there are many strength-based skills in calisthenics that will keep you occupied forever.
Another issue is that these high-rep sets to failure are going to be hard. I mean no one said it was going to be easy, but some of the sets are going to make you question your life choices, that’s for sure. Some of your workouts will be mentally draining and the intra-workout discomfort is going to be at times very tough.
If you really want the results, you’ve got to put in the work.
I will be honest: It’s not going to be easy to build the body you want, but hopefully, after all this, you can at least see that it’s possible, regardless of whether you have access to the gym or not.
If you were losing motivation because you don’t have access to a gym, then hopefully this video went some way towards encouraging you to keep going and keep pursuing your goals.
You just have to hold up your end of the bargain and keep putting in the work day after day.
I hope that this helps answer whether or not bodyweight training can build muscle effectively. It can, and you have no excuses to get out there and train!
If you’d like to check out more of what I do, you can support me on Patreon or buymeacoffee; or follow my other shenanigans on Instagram/Facebook/TikTok/Twitter/YouTube. I am @qedfitness on every platform.
Catch ya next time.
Tl;dr: https://youtu.be/r3d7d4XGuIk
Sauce:
(1) PMID: 28834797
(2) PMID: 33433148
(3) PMID: 26302881
(4) PMID: 23999311
(5) Rodriguez-Lopez, C, Alcazar, J, Sanchez-Martin, C, et al. Neuromuscular adaptations after 12 weeks of light- vs. heavy-load power-oriented resistance training in older adults. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2022; 32: 324– 337.
(6) Terada K, Kikuchi N, Burt D, Voisin S, Nakazato K. Low-Load Resistance Training to Volitional Failure Induces Muscle Hypertrophy Similar to Volume-Matched, Velocity Fatigue. J Strength Cond Res. 2022 Jun 1;36(6)
(7) R. Ogasawara, J. Loenneke, R. Thiebaud and T. Abe, “Low-Load Bench Press Training to Fatigue Results in Muscle Hypertrophy Similar to High-Load Bench Press Training,” International Journal of Clinical Medicine, Vol. 4 №2, 2013, pp. 114–121. doi: 10.4236/ijcm.2013.42022.
(8) D. G. A. Stefanaki, A. Dzulkarnain & S. R. Gray (2019) Comparing the effects of low and high load resistance exercise to failure on adaptive responses to resistance exercise in young women, Journal of Sports Sciences, 37:12, 1375–1380, DOI: 10.1080/02640414.2018.1559536
(9) Camila S. Padilha, Paola S. Cella, Alex S. Ribeiro, Fabrício A. Voltarelli, Mayra T.J. Testa, Poliana C. Marinello, Kessi C. Iarosz, Philippe B. Guirro, Rafael Deminice, Moderate vs high-load resistance training on muscular adaptations in rats, Life Sciences, Volume 238, 2019
(10) PMID: 25853914
(11) PMID: 27174923
(12) PMID: 24714538
(13) PMID: 27928218
(14) PMID: 35015560
(15) PMID: 25653899
