Welcome to the Get Fit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy, and in today's episode, you're going to learn

whether you can build muscle with body weight only exercises.

Now, earlier this summer, in the episode How to Build Muscle with Body Weight

exercises, I reported on the results of a new study that showed that just flexing your muscles,

the same way as you would if you were, say, posing in front of a mirror, or flexing your abs,

or doing a front double biceps pose, or doing a body weight squat through a full range of

motion, was just as effective as traditional weight training

when it came to building muscle. Now, in that episode, I noted that actual strength gains were

greater when you load with weight versus non-loaded, but the research is still taking a closer

look at for anybody not wanting to be limited to using, say, dumbbells and kettlebells and resistance bands

and barbells and clunky machines to build muscle, and for people who want that portable,

highly versatile body weight-only option. Well, now there's this new study. It's another

low-load high-rep study and also a 2017 workout strategy that I'm delving into, and I want to look at some of these new resources

so that we can discover the latest on whether you can build muscle with body weight-only

exercises and find out if you need to actually, say, lift heavy weight to build muscle,

or if you can rely on your own body.

So let's first take a look at the latest study.

It's called effects of rest intervals and training loads on metabolic stress and muscle hypertrophy.

It was published really recently and in it 20 young athletes who are part of a university

gymnastics club participated. And these folks had at least a couple years of experience with

weight training and they were randomly assigned to a short rest, low load group that did 20 reps of their exercises with 30 seconds of rest between exercises, or a high load long rest group that did eight repetitions of their exercises with a three-minute rest between exercises. So 20 reps and 30 seconds of

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