Why you should be doing bodyweight exercises.

With everything going on in today’s world, it may be difficult to find yourself a safe and reliable environment to exercise. What if your biggest asset to exercising more was you?

Ever see the bodies of swimmers or gymnasts? Yes, they also exercise with equipment, but most of their growth comes simply through moving their own bodies through space. Bodyweight exercising can provide more benefits than you may realize and there is quite a bit of research to prove it.

If you are doing any sort of pulling, pushing, jumping, or doing any kind of activity using only your weight as the resistance, then you are doing bodyweight exercising.

Bodyweight workouts have been shown to increase individual’s muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and power. If done correctly, these types of workouts can improve joint mobility which can also reduce the risk of injury from activities that requires the body to produce a lot of force like weight training, sports, playing outside with your dog or kids, etc…

Bodyweight exercising can benefit anyone from individuals who are just starting their fitness journey, to those who are top level athletes trying to bring home the gold.

Flexibility and stability

If you are just starting out exercising, you probably need bodyweight flexibility training.

If you are considered elderly or of the older population, you probably need bodyweight flexibility training.

If you exercise using resistance like weightlifting, you probably need bodyweight flexibility training.

Just about anyone can benefit with this type of training as it improves joint mobility as discussed above, but also helps with improved stability.

What normally comes to mind when thinking about flexibility training is yoga. Yoga is great because it combines the use of static and active isolated stretching by holding poses for longer periods of time.

Although yoga is one of the best ways to do bodyweight flexibility, there are many other exercises you can do for short periods if time is sensitive. Simply balancing using your limbs or stretching every morning are different forms of bodyweight flexibility exercises that can greatly improve your daily range of motion. Ways to bring a challenge to these type of bodyweight exercises is to be in an unstable yet safe environment like a balancing beam.

Muscular Endurance

In most cases, doing bodyweight exercises will improve your muscular endurance. This is because individuals tend to do a higher number of repetitions. Muscular endurance is also directly shown to increase bone density and cardiovascular endurance.

Bodyweight exercising doesn’t mean the standard push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups until you die. Other exercises include, but not limited to, walking, hiking, climbing, running, swimming, even gardening.

Muscular Strength

We all know one of the major stereotypes of prison culture is that individuals tend to get bigger and stronger once they are released. Why is that? Well, the body can do amazing things if used properly.

Bodyweight exercises can build muscle if you use the following principles: increase reps, decrease rest times, perform variations, train to failure, increase time under tension, and implement mechanical drop sets.

It is not uncommon among the bodybuilding community to do a form of bodyweight strength exercise in conjunction with weight training in their workouts. Again why? Because it works!

How to do bodyweight exercises?

In most cases, you are all that is required for bodyweight exercising. If you have space to do it, and some extra time, you can have a pretty decent workout with a variety of exercises that can work practically any part of the body.

Take the push-up for example. This one exercise has so many different varieties. The standard push-up with arms at shoulder length apart works the overall chest and utilizes the triceps and other synergists. Putting the hands closer to center places greater emphasis on the inner chest and triceps. Putting hands wider than the standard placement puts greater emphasis on the outer chest and the rear deltoid. If individuals are beginners, they can place knees on the floor which gives them more stability and decreases the amount of force they need to produce. Placing feet on a stability ball while preforming push-ups will challenge individual’s stability. Staggering the hand placements creates a challenge for the individual as well as placing more emphasis on different muscles.

Just like the push-up having many different varieties, the same can be said about other bodyweight exercise like the pull-up, squat, lunge, sit-up, etc.

The tempo at which each repetition is done can also greatly change the effect the exercise can give you. Take plyometrics for example. By using explosive movements in some of the above exercises, you are increasing your overall power which help can help with things like running away from a dog that’s chasing you…or towards.

Whatever your overall fitness goals may be, incorporating bodyweight exercises in your routine can help you get to them.