Thread: Muscle for poor people

I went through a time period where I was broke for about a year, half of that with no gym membership, but I was still able to put on muscle and get stronger.

So I thought it was appropriate (especially as a Socialist) to share my experience on how people who struggle economically can still put on serious muscle and build strength.

So here are my tips.

1. High tension with bodyweight drills: Many people think once you get past 20 pushups pushups are useless for building muscle or once you get base 20 pullups you gotta add weight, not true, learn one arm pushups, hip pushups, hand clap pushups, hand clap behind the back pushups, panche pushups, trx xtrap pushups. For pullups you have one arm chins, one arm chin progressions (like one arm and a couple fingers), rope/towl chins, levers and so on.

So unless you can do 20 one arm pull ups, and 25 panche pushups or one arm one foot pushups, bodyweight drills are not too easy and you don't have to resort to high reps.

2. Buy TRX straps, or find a way to make something similar: the retail price is $200, but believe me, its one of the best things you'll buy, it'll give you a full (mainly upper body) workout for everyone from someone that can barely do a pushup to people with a double bw bench and tripple bw deadlift. Also a chinup bar will serve you very well.

3. Find a steep hill: one problem with mainly bodyweight drills is its gonna be hard to get your lowerbody, and running just isn't gonna do it, but short steep hill sprints will definately put on muscle for your legs.

4. Frequency and Volume: When your doing mainly bodyweight drills your taxing your Central Nervous system a lot less than if you were doing heavy weights, which means you can train more often and more without overtraining, and if you CAN train more and more often without overtraining its better, almost all overtraining comes from taxing the nervous system NOT from muscle fatigue.

5. Keep reps between 3-18ish: More or less the hyperthrophy range, once it gets too easy to do say 5 sets of 16 chinups with a 45 second break in between sets, make it harder (see 1), this applies with all sorts of training though.

6. Buy food in bulk: To put on muscle you need a good amount of food and protein, buy in bulk, but you probably allready know that if you struggle economically.

7. Cheap sources of protein: Beans (black beans) or Lentils and nuts (almunds), eggs, Cheese Quesadillas, ground beef, canned meat, you should be getting about 2 grams per kg of weight for muscle gain, which is definately doable on a budget, also get a filter and drink lots of tap water, also protein powder may be economical, if you can get a relatively cheap whey protein powder.

8. Change focus for different muscles: Say you want to do more of your lats, to pullups (palms facinsg away) thumbless keeping your body as horizontal as possible, or strap rows focusing on pulling your elbows back, if you want to do your biceps more do chinups (palms facing you) keeping your body as verticle as possible focusing on bending your eblow, one arm pushups are one of the best tricep drills period, as ar hand clap pushups for the chest. For trx shoulder flies focus your energy out, to focus more on your lower traps focus your energy back. Point being you don't need a million different drills for all the different muscles, sometimes you just need to do them in a different way.

9. If you do have limited access to a gym, Lift heavy: Lets say your friend has a membership, or you can afford a limited membership, when you can get to the gym, do things like heavy deadlifts, low rep clean and presses, heavy low rep benches and squats, things that you could'nt do at home.

10: If you work a heavy manual job, take that into account with your training: If you don't I'd say you can train 6 times a week with just bodyweight (you'll be fine), if your working a heavy manual job however, you may need a little more rest.

I hope these little tips help someone.

Good post, many good tips. Another good (cheap) tip is to use incline angle (feet up) to increase/alter push-up resistance, use sturdy furniture or stairs for a lift, not a flimsy or folding chair. Many learn to use their prison bunk as gym equipment. ;-)

Yeah, a lot people that have been to prison learn to train without weights.