Gain Muscle with Bodyweight Exercises

Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast with Jerred Moon! One of the most common questions in fitness is whether it’s possible to build muscle using only bodyweight exercises. The short answer? Absolutely. With the right approach, you can gain muscle, maintain strength, and improve athleticism using nothing more than your body.

Here’s how you can maximize your bodyweight training with the CVD Method: Controlled, Volume, and Dynamic.

1. Controlled Movements (C)

Slow and controlled movements increase time under tension, one of the key principles for muscle growth. By performing exercises like push-ups with deliberate control—taking 3 seconds to lower and 3 seconds to rise—you engage muscle fibers more thoroughly, leading to greater muscle damage and, ultimately, growth.

How to do it:

• Perform push-ups slowly until failure.
• Focus on form over speed to maximize tension.
• Add a weighted vest as you progress for more challenge.

2. Volume (V)

High-volume training with bodyweight exercises helps create metabolic stress, another important factor in muscle growth. After completing slow and controlled reps, switch to regular-paced movements for increased repetitions to add workload to your muscles.

How to do it:

• Follow controlled push-ups with 30–40 regular-speed push-ups.
• Gradually increase your total reps over time to ensure progressive overload.

3. Dynamic Movements (D)

Dynamic or explosive exercises recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers, which have the greatest potential for growth. They also improve athleticism, helping you build functional, powerful muscles that are not just for show but also for performance.

How to do it:

• Try plate push-ups: Start with your hands on the floor, explode upward to land on plates placed nearby, and return to the starting position.
• Incorporate jump squats for leg development or fast pull-ups to target the upper body.

Key Tips for Success

1. Train to Failure: For both controlled and volume sets, push yourself to failure or leave just one rep in reserve. This maximizes muscle engagement and growth.
2. Recovery Matters: Bodyweight exercises are less taxing than heavy barbell lifts, allowing you to recover quickly. Use this to your advantage and maintain high intensity across multiple sets.
3. Dynamic Movements Are Different: Avoid taking dynamic exercises to failure, as this can lead to injury. Focus instead on quality over quantity.
4. Add Variety: You can incorporate a weighted vest or kettlebells to maintain progression as your strength increases.

Final Thoughts

The CVD Method—Controlled, Volume, and Dynamic—gives you a clear framework for building muscle with bodyweight exercises. Whether you’re transitioning from barbell training or just starting your fitness journey, this approach allows you to gain muscle, maintain strength, and improve athleticism without the need for heavy equipment.

So, can you build muscle with bodyweight exercises? Absolutely. Focus on how you train, apply the principles of the CVD Method, and you’ll see results.

Remember: If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Garage Gym Athlete Workout Of The Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: 

How can you gain muscle only doing body weight exercises? And is it even possible? That's what we're going to be talking about today. And this is the garage gym athlete podcast. I'm Jared moon. So let's dive right into it. To answer the question. Yes, it's absolutely possible. So I know personally when I was. First. Doing starting to do more body weight stuff.

I was coming off of a lot of hypertrophy training, a lot of power lifting. So just. Building muscle building strength, a lot of barbell work. And moving to body weight in any capacity. In all honesty made me a little bit fearful. And I'm not scared of the body weight exercise. I was scared of losing a ton of muscle mass. Or losing a ton of strength. Because I thought that that's what it would do. But if you look at a gymnast, They're pretty jacked.

I mean, I wouldn't maybe not their legs, but most of the time they're really Jack. They're very strong. And that's because it's a very specific type of training. And when I saw that, I started to look into more things and I was like, well, maybe you need to train. Like a gymnast. But when you look at a training, like a gymnast, it's incredibly hard.

It's incredibly hard. I mean, a gymnast is just one of those type of activities. And if you pursue that as a fitness, It's like golf. You'll never master it. It takes hours and hours every single day. And it's just not going to be the cup of tea. For most people. You can't really train like a gymnast.

You can't sit in your. Garage or your gym and do these like slow motion exercises for three, four hours a day and try to master them. But you can take the principles from a gymnast. And you can take a print the principles from. You know, gaining strength, powerlifters, and you can take the principles from bodybuilders high perch, free muscle growth and put them into. A solid body weight training program, instill gain muscle and maintain your strength. And once I kind of realized that, and I took some of the simple principles. I've always been able to cycle on to body weight, style training. And. Gain muscle mass and also maintain my strength.

And I honestly just feel so good when I go through a short body weight cycle. I tend to do this a couple of times a year. I might just throw in four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks of body weight, only training. I say body weight only. I'm I will probably throw a vest in there where I might even add a kettlebell. To tax my legs a little bit more things are getting too easy.

As I progress through my program. But it's predominantly 95, 90 8% body weight. When I do go through these cycles. And the framework that I use for doing body weight exercises and still gaining muscle mass and maintaining my strength. Is I follow the C V D method. So C stands for controlled. The stands for volume in D stands for dynamic.

This is how we include and program all of our body weight style. Workouts when we have them in our own programming. And even in our one man system program that we have, these are the principles that we follow. So the first one let's go over it control. This is just slow and controlled movements. So if you think of doing a pushup, you do this pushup. You know, three seconds on the way down, three seconds on the way up, it's just slow and control.

Now. There's no magic to the three seconds. I just said most of the time, I don't even really count. I'm just going slow and controlled. Until I hit pretty close to muscle failure, going slow and controlled. Like I wouldn't be able to do another one or two reps. And you're going to see that throughout my conversation here throughout this podcast is taking things to failure because what's great about body weight training. Is, you can take almost every set to failure. And you'll regenerate really fast.

Like you'll be able to take a short break. And then be able to do more pushups and that's, what's awesome about it because if you're not necessarily trying to just. You know, Get stronger on a barbell. Like you don't have the next set. You don't have to do the same amount of reps as long as you're getting to failure. And with barbell training, going to failure can be incredibly taxing and doing it over and over again can really wear on your body, but it's not the same. When you do that with body weight training. So under this slow and controlled the first part of the method, the see you're increasing time under tension. So that's the principle behind it.

And that's one of the greatest principles in being able to gain muscle is time under tension, where that tension is through slow and controlled bodyweight movements. Maybe you throw a bodyweight best on. Or whether it's slow and controlled with a barbell. Dumbbell or kettlebell. It's one of the greatest principles for gaining muscle mass and you absolutely can do it with just your body weight.

So performing exercises slowly, it increases the time under, under tension. And the extended tension can enhance muscle hypertrophy by engaging muscle fibers, more thoroughly and promoting greater muscle damage, which means when repaired, it leads to growth. So the first thing is you just want to increase your time under tension, slow and controlled. You don't even have to worry about a rep scheme really. I'm just going to keep utilizing pushup as the example. If you did some pushups. And you just do them slow and controlled.

You. You do like, like I said, maybe three seconds on the way down. Three seconds on the way up. Maybe it's four seconds. Maybe it's one second, whatever you can handle and you do about 10 reps, you're not gonna be able to do a ton of reps. Maybe you get to 15. And then you'll notice the more sets you do, you're doing fewer and fewer, but you're getting all that time under tension and that's going to be huge for gaining muscle with a body weight exercise. Now, moving to volume.

So that's V volume is just regular sets and reps. I really think to gain muscle. You also just need volume. You just need more volume on, you know, whatever you're doing, going back to the pushup. You're doing regular speed movements, but you're doing higher volume. And again, body weight exercises. Great for doing higher volume.

Barbell can be taxing. Can break you down. But when you're doing with body weight, you're just doing regular speed movements with high volumes. So going back to the pushup. You'd be doing it at a normal pace with, but with increased repetitions and you're going to get more workload on your muscles. So what this high volume train does is it leads to metabolic stress, which is another key factor in muscle growth. And when you start depleting your energy stores, you're causing a buildup of metabolites and these will stimulate muscle adaptation.

And that's what you want. So we're using all the principles to do body weight, but still. Gain muscle mass. So what does this look like? Well, If I was to do my controlled, say I do 10 slow and controlled pushups. Really slow on the way down really? So on the way up. And then I wait, I recover a little bit.

Now I'm going to move to my volume. I'm doing all this in a single training session. I'm not, I'm not spreading this out throughout the week, because another thing is you can recover like an animal from body weight exercises after you get accustomed to them. And then after I recover a little bit from the slow and controlled, I'm going to go to volume.

And then when I'm doing volume instead of 10 or 12, slow and controlled, I'm doing 30, 40 regular pushups. I'm just hammering them out. It's also good just to be getting better at pushups. So that's the control. That's the volume that's C and V and then getting to D is dynamic. I really liked throwing in dynamic to any program just because I think it helps you maintain athleticism. In your training?

I think that's super important. I think. Losing that dynamic element, losing your athleticism is just, it's really sad. You know, being able to jump and sprint and run. As a human being is great. And I think people should try and maintain it as long as they can, but it also plays a part in building muscle. So when you're doing dynamic movement, you're incorporating explosive or. Plyometric exercises. And what this does, is it recruits fast, Twitch muscle fibers. And fast Twitch muscle fibers actually have a higher potential for growth compared to slow. Twitch fibers.

So dynamic movements can improve muscular power and contribute to overall muscle development by developing those type two muscle fibers. And again, it just helps you maintain that athleticism, that usability of your muscles, not just having the big muscles, it's the muscles for go, not just for show, right? So, if you can add those now, what does that look like?

If we get to the pushup?

Well, you could do something like the clapping. Push-up I'm not a huge fan of the clapping push-up these days, because I feel like it can put a lot of pressure on the wrist. But plate pushups are my favorite. That's what we call them. So if you were to get down into the pushup position and you could put like a 45 pound plate or 10 pound plate you know, like a bumper plate. On the outside of your poems.

So your palms are on the ground. These plates on the outside, you're going to push up as hard as you can. To where you're going to get off the ground and then you put your hands on the plates and then you step down, right-hand step down. Left-hand calmed down. Push up as hard as you can to where you're actually coming off the ground and your hands are landing on these plates. That's my favorite way to do it with. With pushups and you can do this way.

If you're doing squats for your legs, you can do jump squats. If you're doing pull-ups, you can do. Really, you could just do quick pull-ups is what I think a lot of people need to work on before they get any, you know, like start doing pull-ups with bandit bands attached to the ground or anything like that.

You just do a really fast pull up reset. Do another really fast pull-up. So just Gooding in that dynamic fast movement is really important. And so if you can do these three things. You can have slow and control movement. You can have volume and you can have dynamic. Movements in a body weight exercise program.

You're taking all the principles from all these different areas. And you are going to gain muscle mass. And you're even going to maintain your strength. But here's the deal. I mentioned that you have to take a lot of things to failure. And the dynamic portion, you do not need to take it to failure. Like if you're doing three explosive plate pushups for five. Whatever, you're fine.

You want to get that power development? You want to get some increased? You know, type two muscle fibers, but you don't need to take those to failure. Taking anything dynamic to failure is actually a little bit more dangerous. Can lead to injury. But when it comes to volume and time under tension, absolutely take those things to failure.

So don't get too hung up on how many reps should I do? Well, if we're talking about gaining muscle, almost all the research points to how lifting to failure or exercising to failure is what you need. For that metabolic demand to stimulate that muscle growth. Because if I tell you go do 10 slow and controlled pushups. What that's incredibly easy for you.

You need to really challenge yourself. So taking it to failure or maybe one rep and reserve is where you need to be when you're doing the time under tension and the volume sets, but not the dynamic stuff. So now, if you're focusing on how you're doing the movements, meaning I'm taking them to failure, I'm really focused on slow and controlled, and you're doing these three different things, slow and controlled volume and dynamic.

You will absolutely succeed in your body weight training program. So yes, you can gain muscle while doing body weight, exercise exercises. You just have to focus on the CVD method and also focus on how you do the movements. That's it for this one. Remember if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.