Bodyweight exercises may not be the ideal choice to build muscle and strength in your body but if you are a beginner and want to start your exercise in a simple way to build strength and gain muscle then performing bodyweight exercises might be a better decision because you can gain muscle and strength in a safe way without any fear of injuries which might occur with lifting weights or resistance training. Anyway, there are thousands of bodyweight exercises that you can do for gaining muscle but there are some particular basic bodyweight exercises that you have to do must to progress further. They are beginner-friendly, easy to perform and comes with lots of variations for targeting separate muscle groups. Without further ado, let’s know what are the best bodyweight exercises to gain muscle as a beginner.
Don’t Miss: 10 Best Push-Up Variations to Gain Muscle and Strength!
Push Up
Push Up is one of the most popular and best bodyweight exercises that you should definitely not miss if you want a fit, strong and muscular physique. Performing push ups helps you to strengthen multiple muscle groups in your upper body which leads to have a fit and muscular upper body. So, which muscles do push ups help to strengthen and grow? Well, push ups primarily targets chest and triceps but it also targets shoulders and forearms secondarily especially your front deltoids.
However, depending on the different push up variations, you can target specific muscle groups. For example, pike push ups are great for targeting shoulders and upper chest while diamond push ups are best for targeting triceps and wide grip push ups are best for targeting chest. If you are new, standard push up is more than enough to target your chest, triceps and even shoulders to make them strong and muscular.
Pull Up
Pull Up falls in that list of best bodyweight exercises which is tough to start with but when you master it, you will enjoy it’s excellent benefits. While push ups is for your front portion of upper body, pull ups is for your overall back. Not only performing pull ups will help you build your all the back muscles and make them strong but also it will target your biceps to make them strong and muscular. Moreover, pull ups can secondarily target the deltoids and forearms especially the rear deltoids. So, with push ups, you can target the chest and triceps and with pull ups, you can target the back and biceps. And both the exercises can help you get a strong forearms and shoulders. It’s that simple to understand right?
If you are a beginner, try some pull up assistant machines or get help from a spotter to assist you in the pull ups until you get the strength to pull your bodyweight for at least 8 times for 3 sets without any help. Anyway, just like push ups, you can also perform other variations of pull ups to target your preferable muscle groups like perform wide grip pull ups for lat muscles of the back while close grip pull up targets the inner back muscles like rhomboids. If you want to target your biceps more then underhand pull ups or more commonly known as chin ups are the best. But for targeting back and biceps together, standard pull ups are more than enough for a beginner.
Squat (bodyweight version)
Push ups and pull ups covers almost every major muscle groups of your upper body so, let’s take a look at the squat which is obviously one of the best bodyweight exercises for gaining strength and muscle on your legs especially on your quads and glutes. Squats are very easy to perform and master so you can easily try different challenging m variations of squats like side squat, jumping squat and single-leg squats. The more challenging the variation is, the more tension it will create on your muscles to help them grow bigger and stronger.
Sit Up
So, the 3 best bodyweight exercises we have included earlier are enough for targeting all the major muscle groups expect abdominals. For this reason, we have the good old Sit ups. It is not only one of the best bodyweight exercises for toning the abdominal muscle groups but also very easy to master for the beginner and novice gym-goers. When you master the sit ups then you can go for more challenging variations of sit ups namely; twisted sit ups for targeting your oblique muscles of your abdomen and waist area, V sit ups for targeting your lower abs and decline sit ups which is a challenging version of standard sit ups so it also targets all the abdominal muscles properly.
In The Concluding Lines…
Therefore, here we go guys. These are the best bodyweight exercises that you can perform if you are beginner in the world of fitness and muscle building and want to be fit, strong and gain muscle in a simple and safe way without the fear of injuries from heavy lifting. But yes, there will be a point soon when the bodyweight exercises would not be enough for you to progress further because of their limited ability to put muscles on tension.
For this reason, when you gain enough strength and muscle to progress further then you can go for weight lifting and resistance training so that you can progress further without hindering your growth of muscle and strength. But for now, you as a newbie can follow all these bodyweight exercises consistently to progress in your fitness journey. Anyway, we hope you have found this article about best bodyweight exercises helpful enough. If it’s really so then don’t hesitate to express your valuable thoughts in the comment section below. Thanks for visiting and appreciating our work.