BEST No-Weights Strength Building Workout

I'm trying to do a full body strength training workout that doesn't involve me going to the gym. I'd like to know if it's possible to build muscle based on your own body strength going against itself (plus I have 3 and 5 pound handweights but I don't know if those will help any).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

You can achieve a functional level of strength by doing body weight squats, push-ups, pull-ups, and dips -- the latter two can be performed with household furniture.

If you search Youtube for "body weight exercises," you can watch people demonstrating proper form for the above exercises and get lots of other ideas as well.

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Typical body weight exercises can be sufficient for some body parts/muscle groups, but it's going to be hard to get a full body workout with no equipment. 5lb dumbbells aren't going to be much benefit, at least not for long.

You need to really stress your muscles. and I mean REALLY stress them. Probably like you've never done before. It's not like carrying groceries, it's like carrying 1 end of the couch.

If you're serious about it, I'd look into suspension trainers.

I _love_ suspension trainers. My primary means of exercise.

I like Lauren's Be Your Own Gym...convenient app for my iphone and workouts are about 35 mins long, 4-5 times per week.

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You can do a lot to burn calories, increase functional strength, and overall fitness doing bodyweight exercises alone. Adding muscle MASS however is a completely different animal that requires hypertropher training, something that can only be done with weights. If you're looking to "get big" then you need weights. Otherwise bodyweight trainign will do just great.

Wrong.

Getting big is a byproduct of nutrition and applied resistance.

Did you happen to catch the rings at the Olympics. Those guys are ripped. And get that way via the rings, weights are totally unnecessary. On top of how big they are, they are in actuality as small as they can possibly be, since extra muscle mass is bad when it comes to Olympic level gymnastics.

In the upper body resistance is essentially unlimited. If you think that you will run out of resistance, use your google-fu and look harder. There isn't as much info out there for the super hard stuff, primarily because hardly anybody can do them or are even close.

The lower body is a little harder, as you will run out of resistance and will have to move toward explosive movements or weighting low leverage positions. Shrimp Squats and Glute Ham Raises are about as hard as it gets in the lower body (BW leg extensions are technially possible, but they require a solid apparatus and require very high strength to even try). Pistols are pretty well known and easy to weight; since they are single leg squats you don't need nearly as much weight to get to very high resistances. You can weight a glute ham raise easily with a small weight held overhead. Explosive exercises though have unlimited resistance (pistol jumps onto objects, and hill sprinting for example). A weight vest can be added to increase the load for explosive exercises.

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