Bodyweight exercises for strength training
Introduction
Since your own body mass is the only resistance when performing bodyweight exercises many people consider them suitable only for endurance training. There are two basic methods that are used to increase muscle endurance. The first one is to increase the repetition count and the second is to slow down the exercising tempo.
When it comes to endurance training what matters the most is the time put in your training. However, there isn’t a big difference if you perform 60 fast repetitions or 30 slow ones in one minute as long as you are keeping muscles strained and don’t rest between repetitions.
It’s true that your strength will also increase along with endurance when training with these methods, however this isn’t the only nor the best way to improve your strength. The good thing about bodyweight training is that there are many different exercises to choose from. Some of them are so hard that world class gymnasts have problems with executing them. The range of exercises to choose from is more than enough for regular people.
The right way to improve strength is to advance to harder exercise variations. Progressing to harder exercise variations is also a good way to build muscle with bodyweight exercises but the difference here is that when performing strength training you have to advance as soon as you can do 4-6 repetitions of the current exercise with good form. Whereas when building muscle the progression is slower.
Make exercises harder
There are few basic rules you can apply to make almost any bodyweight exercise harder.
Change the position of hands/legs. Making slight changes in exercise form can bring great benefits. You may start with changing your palm placement while performing push-ups or pull-ups. Wide grip push-ups and pull-ups will be harder than the regular ones. You can also vary your feet placement when doing squats.
Change the position of your body. Use gravity to your advantage. When doing push-up place your feet on an elevated surface or lift your buttocks up and perform mole hole push ups. You can make pull-ups harder by leaning towards one hand or the other. You can also try squatting on one leg. In result you will put more load on the muscles you want to train.
Increase leverage. Increasing and decreasing the leverage will dramatically change the difficulty of an exercise. For example knee push-up is easier than traditional (military) push-up and the Lalanne push-up is much harder than any of those. Hanging leg raise with bent knees is a lot easier than the same exercise performed with completely straight legs.
Take away stability. Performing dips or push-ups on gymnastic rings will be much harder than performing these exercises on parallel bars or floor. Your shoulder and core muscles will have to work much harder in order to keep your body in place. The same goes for rope climbing vs. performing pull-ups on a bar. Doing squats on a bosu ball or slackline will require tremendous work from the core region and legs.
Apply plyometrics. This method uses gravity and momentum to increase the load. You can do clapping pull-ups and push-ups, all kinds of jumps etc. Perform explosive movements in a fluent motion. This type of training will provide additional challenge and develop skills necessary to use your body’s full potential.
By putting all these things together you may end up with some really challenging exercises like clapping hand stand push-up and similar exercise variations.
