You’re doing bodyweight workouts and want to progress faster, that’s good because it means you’re focusing on progressing and not just on exercising to exercise.

 

 

In order for you to understand bodyweight strength and how to progress, it’s important to first break it apart into two areas.

  1. General strength progression
  2. Bodyweight strength progression

 

How To Progress Strength Overall

To progress in strength, staying in the 4 to 8 rep range has been shown to be a sweet spot for getting stronger. Going higher in reps can create hypertrophy and other muscular endurance but that won’t help you progress as quickly as staying in the strength progression sweet spot.

Start with a weight that will allow you to do 4 reps maximum. Then, the goal is to do 5 reps next time. And 6 reps the next workout. So forth and so on. When you can do 8 good reps you bump up the weight 5 to 10 pounds. That will probably reset your max reps to around 4 again. Repeat, consistently adding weight, and over time that’s how you progress in strength with traditional weight.

 

How To Progress Strength With Bodyweight Training

Now that you how to progress with weights, how can you apply that to bodyweight training when there is no external weight?

You do a harder variation of that exercise. There are multiple ways to do this but it depends on the exercise you’re trying to improve with.

Introducing The 3 Core Elements:

  1. Push-ups
  2. Pull-ups
  3. Squats

These are The 3 Core Elements because each one works a different group of muscles. Altogether, they hit most major muscle groups.

With each one of these, you can do harder or easier variations depending on your skill and fitness level. Then, wherever you start from you can go up from there progressing in strength.

For example, let’s look at push-ups.

Here, you can see me doing regular push-ups. If you can get 8 push-ups with good form then you can progress to the next variation, which is the decline push-up.

Same thing with the decline push-up, if you can 8 good reps here you move on to the next variation. Then, you step it up to plyometric push-ups.

You continue that until you can do one-arm push-ups. If you’d like to see the full variation of push-up progressions, you can check out my YouTube video here that I made. This video goes through the push-ups from a leaning push-up all the way to the one-arm push-up. I show you how to do each style along the way.

That timeline may take you months to years to be able to do depending on where your current fitness level is.

Keep in mind, that’s just the timeline and variations for the push-ups. The pull-ups and squats each have their own regressions/progressions. Again, you can check those out on my YouTube channel here.