Shock Muscles Into Growth | Sci-MX

Is your regular weight training routine feeling old and boring? Have you stopped experiencing a good 'pump' from your workouts? Have your muscles stopped growing?

Doing the same weight training routine for longer than six weeks could cause the connective tissue that keeps all your joints intact to wear down. To protect itself from injury, your body has evolved to reduce muscles’ capacity to contract against resistance when joints are weakened, effectively making your muscles weaker.

Read on to find out how performing body weight exercises for a few weeks can help strengthen connective tissue, hit different muscle fibres and shock muscle into a new phase of growth - ‘breaking through the plateau’ as they say.

Press-ups

Often overlooked, press-ups are a classic body weight exercise which can be infinitely varied to work more than just your chest. By moving your hands closer or further apart you will hit different muscle groups and place emphasis on sculpting specific areas.

Wider hand placement will hit the width of the chest especially the outside area. Hands closer together will attack the inner chest and triceps more. Increase stress on the muscle by adding in a decline by placing your feet up on a chair and you’ll change the angle of attack again and shock those muscles further into action and growth. 

Done well and in a variety of forms press-ups will hit your chest, triceps, core and upper back.  Wherever you place your hands, make sure your body is in a straight line; do not sag or drop your hips. Lower your chest until it almost touches the ground, bending at the elbows. Push up strongly, and repeat the movement. Try lowering for 3 counts and pushing up for 1 count.

To add some extra stress and build really explosive power, start with your hands together with index fingers and thumbs from each hand touching each other to form a diamond shape.  Lower yourself down into the press-up then as your chest touches your hands, drive up explosively so your hands leave the floor - clap them together once - and then lower yourself back down under control.  Repeat. 

Tricep dips

A great exercise to really isolate the triceps, you can do this with just two chairs.  Place your hands shoulder width apart on one chair and put your feet on another.  Position the chairs so that when you lower yourself your bottom just brushes the chair your hands are on as this will help isolate the force in the triceps.  If the benches are too far apart your shoulders can come into play.

Starting with your arms straight, lower yourself slowly down between the chairs until your bottom is just off the floor, arms at about 90 degrees.  Then focusing on contracting just the triceps, push yourself back up with control and power, squeezing the triceps at the top of the movement for 1 second before repeating.  Try to avoid rolling your shoulders forward as you raise up - just focus on contracting the triceps.  Lower yourself back down at half the speed you pushed up with to stress the triceps in both contraction and extension.  Alternate these with close-hand ‘clap’ press-ups to really smash your triceps.

Pull-Ups & Chin-ups

Another fantastic body weight exercise worth its weight in gold.  By alternating between an over-hand (pull-up) and under-hand (chin-up) grip you’ll respectively target the lats and shoulders or the biceps more so this is a great exercise.  Wide grip pull-ups with over-hand grip will tax your lats, shoulders, back and core helping to build that coveted v-taper.  A narrow grip chin-up with under-hand grip will shift the emphasis to your biceps more. 

Technique with either hand placement is key - start with arms fully extended and raise yourself up until your chin is above the bar.  Hold for 1 second then lower slowly back to fully extended arms.   Most guys cheat at pull-ups and chin-ups (only going half way down or less) - if you can master the technique you’ll draw admiring stares from other guys in the gym.  The more of these you do the better at them you’ll get and you’ll be developing some real, raw power and strength as well as building some killer tone and muscle.

Air squats

Using your own body weight for resistance, squat down deep and power up, pushing the hips forward slightly at the top of the movement. Air squats should be performed quickly, with good form. Do enough of these and they will deliver a cardio benefit along with muscle gains to the quads, glutes and hamstrings.

Walking lunges

Step forward into a lunge and drop down deeply (but don’t let your knee touch the floor). Perform the next lunge with the opposite leg and continue with alternating legs, "walking" forwards as you lunge. Do as many as you can: a great challenge is to build up until you can "walk" around a football pitch or playing field. These will target your quads, but do enough of them and you won't need anyone to tell you that!

Squat jumps

Drop into a squat with your feet slightly wider than hip width. Power up and jump into the air, landing softly and dropping into a squat. Repeat without pausing at the bottom of the movement. Combine these with air squats or walking lunges for a great lower body workout.