How Many Reps to Build Muscle (BODYWEIGHT EXERCISES!)

What’s up guys? Jeff Cavalier of athleanx.com.

What is the perfect number for body weight exercise for you to do to get the best results from it? It’s a good question here guys is a tricky question. Actually I’m setting you up because that answer should be, it depends and it’s going to depend on a lot of things. When you’re, when you’re working body weight exercises into programming, you have to take into account a lot of different things. Namely the strength level of the person you’re programming it for and secondly their body weight because the body weight is acting as the resistance but there’s so many times there’s so many programs that I’d come across where I see specific numbers being laid out there for you to do on a body weight exercise and it’s doing one of two things. We know it’s doing the service to you but it’s doing it in one of two ways.

Either it’s setting the bar too low cause if it’s recommending 20 pull ups and you can do 30 guess what, you’re not really getting pushed hard enough to cause a in adaptive response. If it’s saying 20 pull ups and you can only do three, guess what you’re being set up for failure, right to fail in a bad way. So what we want to do is I wanted to kind of dip into some of our programming tactics here. One of the ones we use throughout a lot of our NXT program, we observe our advanced monthly program that we have. A lot of our guys have already graduated from x one and x two and also a lot of foundation of what we do with the athletes zero program, which just allowed it to help guys build muscle much more than any other body weight program out there.

So it’s this tactic that we have here. Basically it’s a multiplier effect. So the way you want to really do this, and this is kind of cool because you can actually take a bio exercise by the time this video is done, challenge a buddy and see who does a better job on their, uh, on, on getting to this, this number. I’ll show you how we calculate it. So you take your body of exercise, the first thing you want to do is you want to do that exercise to failure. So whether we’re talking about pushups or whether we’re talking about pull-ups or we’re talking about dips, you want to do your first set, give me your best effort that you’ve gotten. Now, the cool thing again is it may vary from day to day. We know that some days we show up to the gym feeling great, being able to, uh, give us your best effort.

And other days, not so much. So we want to make sure that we’re talking apples to apples. We want to make sure that on the day that you’ve got your best, that we’re going to get the best out of you. So you take your first set, you do it to failure, warm up really, really quickly. You do your first step to failure. Once we got that number, let’s say it’s pushups and I get 50 out, okay, that’s my number. Now how do we get a workout off of that? Well, we look for three different stages or four. We basically got a solid effort. A solid proof for me is a basically a c plus and a c plus B minus c. Plus. We’ve got B minus probably we’ve got 150 so if you do 150 pushups for that workout, and again, the parameter of rest time is important too and I always say, let’s keep this in a minute and a or under.

If you’re ready to go faster then let it go. If your need all 90 seconds then go on 90 seconds. So 150 reps in a of a pushup, it’s a decent effort, not bad. If you want to get like a little blood flow, if you take that number to five times the amount, now you’re up to 250 okay, now you get into a pretty solid workout. That’s a really a pro level workout like we’d like to call it a good, a good effort better than this. This is about a B. If you come here, we got an a minus effort. You’re in the range, you’re going seven times that amount. Give me 350 pushups in that workout. Again, not resting any more than 90 seconds at any one time, but cranking out those reps until you reached 350 okay. There’s a nice solid elite effort, a really good effort.

But if you want to go extreme here we call beast mode. You want to go piece mode 10 times that amount. Can you do 500 pushups? And again, you want to make a workout out of it. Challenge a friend. So both of you get over here, you both do your, your uh, first rep take it. It’s going to play out exactly as I showed you before. You might do 50, he might do 20, but 20 was challenging for him. She are on an equal playing field. So now you both take your numbers and you try to get to, let’s say you set the number of seven for the day, but each year we’re going after the seven times your number. So this guy’s going after three 50. The 20 is going after a a 140 and see who can get there faster. Cause. Now we’ve got the other variable, which is time.

You know what, how much work can be done and not amount of time. So you see guys, when you’re looking at body weight exercises and programming, body weight exercises, you have to consider much more than just the a number. No one can tell you a specific number because they’re going to be limiting you. And as I said, they’re doing you a disservice in their programming. If you want to get the most out of your workouts, you got to be challenging yourself. You’ve got to be working against yourself. Yeah, you can throw in your friend for motivation, you know for a bet, but you’re challenging. You’re working against yourself. You’re working against yourself on that specific day and what your best effort was and where you can take your body. And guys, that’s what we do here at athlete. Next, we push you to the limits and we do it with you and amongst yourselves.

In other words, you’re taking them yourself. You’re setting the bar for yourself and you’re beating yourself. We set challenges up every step of the way to ensure that you do that. It’s a great way to take your results and your workouts to the next level because you’re tapping into that competitive inner drive that allows us never even exposed. When we train, we sort of go through the motions and that’s not the best way to get results. If you want to see the best results, guys, if you want to see it in a body weight only format, then I’d say you got to try the athlete and zero program guys, no bars, no advantage, no bands, no ball. That’s our tagline. That’s it’s there for a reason. There’s literally nothing you use and there’s no bullshit. You got to bring your best effort every single day to get the most out of it.

If you have equipment you want to push yourself that way and then again work your way through. It’s a progression x one x two you join NXT, it’s next level training so you can find all that out the next.com I think you might find this valuable though. Never look at specific reps. The same again, when you’re thinking about body weight training, and instead start thinking about how you can set the bar and then raise that bar every single step of the way until you can smash it. All right. Good job guys. I’ll be back here again a real soon. Leave me a comment and thumbs up below if you like this and whatever else you’d like to see, and I’ll bring it to you.