Building Muscle with Bodyweight Calisthenics - What Has Worked

Conventional weightlifting and bodybuilding dictate that you lift heavy weights in a gym, divide up body parts, isolate, keep your rep range fairly low (never more than 12 and often down to 2 or 1), rest a lot between workouts, and eat small, frequent meals with high protein, high carb and low fat.  So, for example, Monday could be chest, shoulders triceps, Tuesday would be back and biceps, Wednesday would be legs.  Then repeat.  In the golden age of bodybuilding, the 1970s, they did the same split twice a week and took Sunday off and it was chest/back, shoulders/arms, legs.  Nowadays they rest longer between repeating body parts and eat a lot more.  Reps start at 12 and work down to 6 or 4.  Go to failure, so you need help on the last reps.  Bodybuilding meals nowadays seem to be all about chicken breast and broccoli (for whatever reason).  Also, never train on an empty stomach and never skip meals or your body will start devouring its own muscle.

I have, generally speaking, found the opposite of all this stuff in the first paragraph to be effective for me.  I find that really interesting and somehow very motivating.  I also believe that what works for one will not necessarily work for others and you have to figure out your best approach.  This may take years.

What has worked for me is to spend a good portion of the day and night not eating, sticking with high (good) fat, moderate protein, low carb.  No sugar.  No grain.  Binge and cheat sometimes.  Fast.  I also like to work out fasted and often don't need to eat right after.

I work the whole body every day.  When do I rest?  At night when I go to bed (a quote stolen from Hannibal for King)!  Weightlifters speak of "chest day" or "shoulders day".  For me, every day is "body day".  Does a gymnast selectively work certain parts of the body?  Does he say I'm only going to do the pulling part of rings today because I worked chest and shoulders yesterday?  Does he go to failure?  No, because he needs to do it again and again today and he needs to avoid injury.  Gymnasts sure look good.  The movements are bodyweight and functional.  The form is excellent and they do it a lot.

I almost never do fewer than 8 reps a set and some sets are 45, 50, 70, even 80 reps!  I find that the "lighter" I keep it (e.g., incline pushup for 45 reps a set, rows for 25 reps rather than pullup for 12) the bigger my muscles get.  Low weight / high reps seems to build muscle for me.   "Heavy" movements like pullups and dips keep me generally at the 12-15 rep range (or lower depending on form and speed), still high reps by bodybuilder standards but the lowest I go.  This builds strength but not necessarily as much size.  But all of this overall has built more muscle on me than weights ever did.  And I used to pyramid with barbells, separated body parts and trained the same one only once a week, and would eat frequently.

Nowadays size is not so much of a goal for me so I don't keep it light all the time.  I mix it up.

For me there are only four main exercises:  squats, dips, pullups and pushups.  Everything else in the bodyweight arena is a variation of one of these.  I'm talking about exercises here, not necessarily skills.  And there are about a million variations.  This is a good thing.

For about 2 months I did this every day (you need to build up to this):

10 pullups, 12 dips, 25 squats, 15 pushups (usually Russian, sometimes diamond) as one superset - go from one exercise to the next with little rest between the exercises but as much rest as you need after the 4th in the series.  Repeat this 8 times a day, either all in one session or broken up throughout the day.  All together it takes about 40 minutes but you'll sweat and therefore can't really do it in office clothes.  2, 2, 2, 2 can be done in office clothes, even a tie.  I built a LOT of strength on this but not much size.  Which is fine; it's a foundation.

The last few days I've been doing this, or something like it, each day (this is my "high reps low weight" approach):

Regular pushup - 40
Russian pushup - 30
Diamond pushup - 25
Dip - 18
Close dip - 12
Tricep press - 20
Knee pushup - 35
Wall press - 50

Squat - 50
Close foot 3 second pause squat - 25
5 second pause squat - 12
Alternating lunge - 10
Bodyweight "Deadlift" - 8
Pistol squat - 4
10 second pause squat - 6
Assisted squat - 50

T Bar Row - 50
Full weight body row wide - 25
Full weight body row narrow - 20
Neutral grip pullup - 15 (ok form, not strict)
Narrow grip pullup - 14
3" pause narrow pullup - 6 (strict)
TBar type of row - 40
Curl type of row - 30

This looks like a lot but it's one day's workout and takes, again, about 40 minutes. A few weeks in a row of this and you WILL get bigger. If that's what you want. (Build up to it. I've been doing this for years.)

For a while I was doing a variation where I would try to take as long as I could to do three reps of each exercise. Here's my max:

Pushup: 51 seconds (one set of 3 reps)
Squat: two minutes and 7 seconds
Dip: 36 seconds
Pullup: 26 seconds

This is TOUGH. I will go back to this soon to try and beat it. If you want to see how it might compare to doing lots of sets and reps in terms of strength and size, you can read about Time Under Tension. I don't read much technical stuff; I prefer to try things and see how it feels and see what works.