As trendy as the weight room might be these days, the world of barbells and dumbbells can be a pretty intimidating place. There are gym bros grunting. There’s metal slamming. And the heavy equipment looks like an injury waiting to happen. So what about strength training without all that— using just your own body with moves like air squats and planks?
Officially known as bodyweight exercises, this type of workout can offer legit benefits. For starters, it’s super accessible. “Bodyweight is a great, free option that can be done anywhere,” Kristie Larson, CSCS, founder of Tension, a strength training studio for women in Brooklyn, tells SELF. It doesn’t matter if it’s storming outside or you’re traveling, you can crank out a few push-ups or lunges without any equipment (or even much space).
But can you really grow muscle and get stronger on bodyweight workouts alone? Well, that depends. Here’s what experts want you to know before you ditch the dumbbells altogether.
Bodyweight load can vary
Not all bodyweight exercises are equal. Depending on which muscles an exercise is targeting, and which part of the body is acting as the “weight,” difficulty can vary from totally manageable to brutally hard.
Think about it: “You’re not going to get benefit out of doing bodyweight biceps curls,” Meredith Witte, MS, CSCS, founder of functional strength training platform The Playground, tells SELF. Since the only thing you’d be moving up and down is your forearm and hand, there’s virtually no stress put on the muscle.
Yet doing a push-up requires you to support up to 75% of your body mass, according to a study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. For a 150-pound person, that means moving 112.5 pounds—which is why push-ups are so freaking tough, even without stacking any weight plates on your back.
Then there are lower-body moves like lunges and squats, which also use the majority of your body as the load. But because you’re working some of the largest muscles in your body—like the glutes and quads—it takes a pretty significant challenge to create tiny tears in muscle tissue that rebuild back stronger, leading to gains. “For the average person, bodyweight squats are not going to be enough,” Witte says. “Our legs are very strong, and so they’re going to feel challenged by body weight, but it’s still really not going to be enough to sufficiently build muscle, unless you truly have not worked out before, or you are an older adult who has not been working out.”