How to Build Muscle Without Weights

HOW TO BUILD MUSCLE WITHOUT WEIGHTS

Dateline: 08/23/00

Hey Paul why would anyone want to workout without weights? Everyone knows that using weights and machines is the fastest most efficient way to gain size and strength. While this is true, there are many reasons why someone would want to, or even be forced to train for a while without the benefit of using weights. Someone working long hours trying to support his family may not have the time to get to a commercial gym, and may not have the extra space or money to set up a good home gym. Also, someone who has to travel quite often for business might prefer getting a good workout in his or her hotel room rather then wandering the streets of South America asking "Donde esta el gymo?".

Let's face it there are times (vacations, etc.) when all of us can't easily get to a gym. There are also many trainees (beginners or athletes training for boxing, baseball or some other sport) who aren't trying to get a lot of muscular bulk but want the type of strength, endurance and definition that calisthenic exercise offers. These exercises can also be preformed anytime, anywhere and you can do them over your entire life to keep fit.

The idea behind this course is - If for some reason you do workout without weights, what is the most efficient and result producing way to do it? You can use these exercises in many ways: To build muscle, to maintain muscle you already have, in combination with your weight training to add variety and a change of pace, as a warm-up or pump-up routine, to ease back into training after a layoff or injury, etc., etc.

Very early in my training career I started thinking about how to make calisthenics more result producing. The original reason was to help out one of my best friends at the time, who also happened to be the person that inspired me to start training by seeing the great progress he was making. Let's call him Joe, mostly because that was his name, I believe he prefers to be called Joseph these days but back then he was still good old Joe.

Anyway, one day Joe's father forbid him to workout with weights anymore, he gave Joe some reasons for this decision but I think the real reason was that he didn't like the idea that his 15 year old son was getting a little too big and strong to be easily controlled and he better do something about it before he gets any bigger. The funny part was that his father didn't object to him doing push-ups or other freehand exercises, only weight training was forbidden, I'm sure he figured that at best Joe would be able to maintain the muscle he had but he wouldn't get any bigger. Joe was very distraught by the situation, convinced that his muscles were doomed to waste away to nothing, but I was sure there was some way to make those exercise more intense and maybe he could even gain some size. I came up with some ideas and tried to tell Joe about them but he didn't seem too interested, his attitude was like "Hey, I know more about training then this guy, I'm the one who got him started. And besides I don't have time to listen to this I'm too busy feeling sorry for myself and performing satanic rituals to curse my dad-''.

Joe never used my ideas but I did many times over the years, whenever I used calisthenics, and always got good results. I got even more ideas, a few years back, after reading the famous "Dynamic-Tension Course" by Charles Atlas. I found an old comic book and decided to write to the address and see if the course was still available, much to my delight it was and I ordered it. I ordered it mostly as a collectors piece and novelty item, like owning a part of American pop culture. Who could forget those great advertisements like, "The insult that made a man out of 'Mac'.", "Who else wants a He-Man body?" or "In just 7 days, I can make you a Man.", I was also curious as to what was this Dynamic-Tension method exactly. I have always believed that - Only a fool thinks he knows everything and that a wise man never stops learning., so there was a possibility that I could find some good information in this "old, outdated course". I read the course and found it quite interesting, I was slightly disappointed to find out that Dynamic-Tension is really just some calisthenics and some isometric exercises. And while I'm sure they would do a lot for 198 lb weaklings", what can they do for someone who's already fairly big and strong? This got me thinking again about the same thing, how can these exercises be made more intense. Since then I came up with a few more ideas and now it's time to end the history lesson and share them with you.

THE TECHNIQUES

(1) The first technique is to just