Calisthenics is bodyweight training. Utilizing exercises like Pull-ups, Push-ups, Planks, etc are calisthenics. Today, you will find out why Calisthenics doesn't build as much muscle as weightlifting does.
Calisthenics uses your body weight and involves compound exercises. It requires a lot of movement, making it better for losing weight and defining your muscles. With weightlifting, you use external weights like dumbbells. It involves isolated exercises that increase the size of a muscle group.
Can bodyweight exercises build muscle?
Yes, bodyweight exercises can build muscle if you use the following principles: increase reps, decrease rest times, perform variations, train to failure, increase time under tension, and implement mechanical drop sets.
You'll need progressive overload in order to continuously build muscle. If you've plateaued, or stalled on your muscle-building progress, you need to add more resistance to your training. This is the only way you can start building new muscle. You need more damage, and that comes from heav[ier] weights, more reps, increasing the intensity, or focusing on tempo.
Body Weight vs Weightlifting Training
Bodyweight exercises and lifting weights both will help with building muscle strength and enhancing muscle endurance. However, weightlifting goes a step further. i.e, weights are better when it comes to building muscle mass and targeting specific muscles.
With weight training, you can specifically target and isolate any muscle group - to make that specific muscle stronger or bigger.
Weight training causes hypertrophy much more than bodyweight training (calisthenics).
- With Calisthenics, you'll promote overall body strength since calisthenics requires more than one muscle group to perform bodyweight training.
- A major benefit of calisthenics is that it involves compound exercises. This means it uses multiple muscle groups at once.
Why You Aren't Building Muscle Using calisthenics
When going about calisthenics, the body adapts to the stress, movements, and pressure you go about when doing bodyweight movements. Over time, your body becomes adapted to this "stress" so it will no longer build muscle or strength. To combat this, you need to add more resistance; Increase reps/sets, tempo/time under tension, etc. Same as weightlifting; once you adapt to certain weights, you have to increase the weights & reps in order to achieve progressive overload.
Progressive overload is needed in general when it comes to developing muscle and/or strength. From doing calisthenics, there are only so many things you can do to go about progressive overload. That is why, weightlifting, in my opinion, is superior when it comes to building muscle.
The reason why you aren't building muscle or getting bigger is that you aren't providing enough damage or stimulus to the muscles, therefore, you won't grow. Or simply, you aren't eating enough to build new muscle.
For beginners, Calisthenics isn't recommended for building muscle. You can achieve better & faster results from weightlifting. Calisthenics people aren't here to build muscle, but rather to develop pure raw strength & power.
Most calisthenics people aren't huge, nor have defined muscle groups like Bodybuilders do. Some calisthenic physiques have impressive abs, arms & whatnot, but compared to a Bodybuilder, bodybuilders have more muscular definition.
In Conclusion,
Weight lifting is the best bet when it comes to developing overall muscle, and strength. Calisthenics or bodyweight training can build muscle, and strength but isn't optimal for Bodybuilding (gaining muscle as fast/efficiently as you can). When utilizing calisthenics, you have to increase the reps, and sets, or add Resistance to your training in order to achieve progressive overload for a hypertrophic response, whereas with weight lifting, you're already causing micro-tears (damage) when performing the reps. You can specifically isolate any muscle group when going about lifting weights, but with calisthenics, you cannot. As a Bodybuilder, calisthenics is only important for raw strength - it's not useful for building muscle.
