Bodyweight Squats for Mass

Can bodyweight squat helps you build mass?

Yes and no.

If you’re skinny and have no muscle at all, then any form of exercise will help to add to your frame. This occured to me when I got into bodyweight training after I was about 160 leaving high school. So doing some squats will help you there.

But if you’re already strong and big the answer is mostly NO.

Bodyweight squats by themselves won’t help. Doing another hundred reps when you can already do 300 won’t help you get bigger.

You can move onto more challenging variations like the one legged squat. Done in strict form for sets of 5-10 reps may help to some degree in building a little more mass. You can make it even more challenging by doing jumping one legged squats.

The explosiveness does help. Just look at sprinters over marathon runners and you’ll see why adding more reps is not the mass answer. And that brings us to sprinting. It’s not bodyweight squats but a bodyweight leg exercise and my favorite is hill sprint training.

This is the difference between high reps and explosiveness for short bursts.

But the truth is many sprinters also use weighted squats, which are the king of mass exercises.

You have to realize with bodyweight training for mass you’re sending the body mixed signals. You want to get bigger but the body doesn’t because that will make all the exercises harder to do. The opposite is true with weights.

So yes bodyweight squats for mass works to a minor degree, but if that’s your goal there are much better ways.

Check out the Ultimate Guide to Bodyweight Squats and Pistols to discover how you can build flexibility and stamina for body weight squats and pistols.