Many people believe that to build strength you either need a set of weights or a gym membership. Air squats are fine for the beginner, the thinking goes, but real workouts require equipment.
But is that true? Or can body weight exercises like hip bridges, dips and lunges get you the same benefits as pumping iron?
Research suggests that, for most people, the answer is yes. Your body doesn’t care if you’re doing a bench press or push-ups. “The muscle is agnostic,” said Anoop Balachandran, an assistant professor of exercise science at the City University of New York. “All it recognizes is tension on the muscle.”
That said, there are some advantages for each. Here’s what you need to know to get the best results from your strength workout.
The secret to success is failure.
No matter how you do it, strength training fundamentally requires you to exercise your muscle until it’s nearly exhausted in order to get stronger.
“We generally say that you need to train to the point of momentary failure, so that you’re trying as hard as you can to perform the exercise until you can’t,” said exercise scientist James Steele, head of research at Kieser Australia, a chain of exercise and health clinics.