 First question is from Jamie Mendes PR. How can you progress using body weight training and still make gains? This is actually a good question because I'd say the challenge with body weight resistance training is exactly that like how do you? Progressively large part the body. How do I increase the resistance when my body weight is no longer sufficient? It's for the exercise. It's only I think it's it's only a difficult question when you you think of it in the context of Progressive overload is always adding more weight There's many ways that you could progress we overload the body without and we did a whole episode by the way dedicate to this I think it was like called nine nine different ways that I think it was a nine way nine different ways to progress we overload the boat something like that maybe Doug could look it up while we're talking but That that's why this seems like a difficult problem. It's like oh god Well, I can't what am I gonna do keep wearing sandbags on the second You don't have to overload the body all the time of that. Here's one slow down slow down the tip Down so the tempo down or incorporate isometrics to do to slow down the tempo pause at the bottom and hold for five seconds increase the reps at speed go something that's Explosive, right? So there's a lot of different ways that you can overload the angle get more gravitational forces. We're gonna against you Yes, so you do have to get a bit creative. It seems because it's not just like just adding a load is gonna go ahead and Provide that that type of progressive overload you have to get you have to work with the other acute variables the other factors there tempo You know intensity with you know like holding in like you mentioned with the isometric training and with you know difficulty that way Yeah, I do want to I want to add something else though because I think that's part of it But I don't think that's the main thing actually I'm gonna disagree a little bit Not that you guys are wrong or totally right, but I think the big one is that most people don't know More than the basic calisthenic exercise or body would exercise so people know push-ups pull-ups You know sit-ups lunges, but they don't realize that like with a pair of rings There is a whole bunch of very very challenging high tension High resistance body weight exercises that you could do And there's just a whole bunch of them. So I would say like, okay Yes, there's your traditional exercises and yes, you can progress those like I could go from a body weight squat to like a pistol squat For example, which dramatically increases the load, right? I could do Push-ups elevated bring them all the way down to the floor Maybe even elevate my feet like that's one way to do it But you grab a pair of rings which are very inexpensive or you could use just suspension, you know trainers Which are very similar and now you've opened up a whole plethora of different exercises where you can really make the resistance High and advanced. I mean look at look at gymnastics. Yes, that's probably your best example of how they figured out how to Make the intensity increase the intensity and also like progress you into Moves that you couldn't achieve before so, you know now I can I can do a muscle up. Yeah, you know just from Starting off being able to do good pull-ups to where I could get, you know, my body up higher and higher or get like You know ring dips where I have to go super low so I can work on all the transitions Which then build strength to then accomplish even new feet So I really think this is just it's a lack of understanding how you can overload the body because I see this even forget body weight This is a question that I think the average lifter gets and their their answer always is a different machine or adding load all the time Yeah, but there's I mean you could keep squat push up body body row or pull up and and Manipulate that so many different ways to keep over on the body when you need to get creative You don't need to go do any crazy exercises You can incorporate like I was saying isometrics in there you can incorporate tempo you can incorporate a plyometrics and explosiveness I think you combine some of those variables like all I mean you could literally not mess with the handful of body weight exercises and just Manipulate all those variables and continue to see results in the body Yeah, and the reason why I think that's the problem is because I see this even with people that have the gym membership and have access to all The equipment we always think that oh to get stronger and you know I got to just keep adding weight to the bar and that's not true Yeah, I mean you make a really good point because at some point even with Traditional free weights the answer is not to add more weight right at some point the risk versus rewards You know ratio starts to become a little bit not so great like when I was squatting 150 pounds for 10 reps and that was a real intense set for me going up to 160 and then 170 like that's there's a lot of Reward to risk right once you get up to for me at least once I got up to 350 400 or more I could add 10 more pounds if I'm stronger But now the risk versus reward ratio doesn't look the same now if my forms off a little bit which sometimes it is My chance of injury goes up So now you know once you get to a certain level you're gonna have to that's right to make it all You're gonna have to look at all these different things like yeah You could add 10 pounds to your 600 pound deadlift But you might be better off slowing down pausing doing you know changing the way that you do the lift To make it more challenging. Here's something that really good lifters know how to do They can take an exercise that they could do for 15 reps to failure and they can fail at five reps If they wanted to just by changing the feel and the squeeze I did this today, you know doing pull-ups I think if I go max out pull-ups and just wrap them out I can get close to 20, but if I really stretch really squeeze hell hard Yeah squeeze your body like super hard doing these making like a more intense like full-body tension work out I mean you can do a lot to these exercises. Yeah, so you just got to get creative with some of that stuff Isometrics is a big one. I tell you what like especially if you have something that's a move in like immovable Like if you have chains attached to the ground or something and you're driving against that Like the force you generate the force you generate you get stronger You just generate more force as long as the chains hold steady You are progressively overloading every time you do a max effort with isometrics and that's a very overlooked Part of resistance training nobody you know isometrics I believe in the future is gonna make a resurgence like everything old that's good Yeah does and people are gonna rediscover the value of it and you need almost no equipment to do it In fact with intrinsic tension you need no equipment at all But if you're more advanced like I said you could use something immovable which is requires so little space and you get tremendous benefits Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe