Body Weight Training - Handbalancing, etc.

[makaveli_uk]

Does bodyweight training not only make you stronger, but give you noticeably bigger muscles?

[eman-resu]

Well, it's really not any different than lifting weights. It's just a fixed weight so if it's enough to make your body adjust your muscles will get bigger. You can add a weighted vest to increase the weight over time and it's no different from lifting weights.

Pretty much your body just adjusts to handle whatever you do. So if your body is light enough that doing pushups doesn't require bigger muscle, if you do tons of reps and still stress it other stuff will happen like changes in muscle fiber types and vascular diffusion.. you will get more capillaries going into the muscle.

Capillaries - 1. These microscopic size blood vessels are not actually part of the muscle cell. Instead, capillaries physically link the muscle with the cardiovascular system. Each muscle cell may have from 3 to as many as 8 capillaries directly in contact with it, depending on fiber-type and training. One square inch of muscle cross-section contains 125,000 to 250,000 capillaries! The volume of blood forced through the heart’s aorta (about the diameter of a heavy duty garden hose) is spread so thin among the billions of capillaries that red blood cells must squeeze through in single file like soldiers marching along a path. Distributing the blood flow through such an immense network of vessels is critical so every individual cell maintains a supply line and waste removal system. This and other “infrastructural challenges” are the price multi-celled organisms (we humans) pay for our complex organization. Endurance exercise increases the demands on nutrient supply and waste removal, but also stimulates the growth of more capillaries. Endurance training improves the delivery and removal function of this fantastic network of vessels. The total number of capillaries per muscle in endurance-trained athletes is about 40% higher than in untrained persons. Interestingly, this is about the same as the difference in VO2max between well-trained and untrained people. In contrast, strength training tends to decrease the capillary to muscle fiber diameter ratio. This occurs because muscle fibers grow in diameter, but the number of capillaries essentially remains unaltered.

Source:

[Trrmo]

Does bodyweight training not only make you stronger, but give you noticeably bigger muscles?

You need to eat more calories than you burn if you are gonna gain muscle, which will mean some fat gain as well. If you arent doing this you wont get bigger muscles not matter what training you do.

Will depend on the type of Bodyweight exercise you do as well, if you can do much over 15 reps you will get more muscular endurance than size. To build muscle you need adequate rest and not train the same muscle too frequently (minimum 3 day rest before you train the same bodypart).

So doing bodyweight training can give you noticeably bigger muscles if you have adequate food intake, rest, right rep range and you are progressively increasing the workload.