Bodyweight exercises

Why bodyweight exercises?

In the times of hyped up exercise machines and ever growing fitness industry a lot of people have forgotten about the essential reasons why they should exercise and develop their bodies. I personally believe that bodyweight exercises are one of the best ways to prepare our bodies for real life challenges.

Modern exercise units are developed for isolated muscle training. This type of training is strictly targeted to the chosen area and helps muscles to grow faster but at the same time our bodies aren’t working as a complex unit anymore. This kind of exercising technique is not suited for real world applications. Outside the gym we have to use our own body by being able to completely control and move it as we want to.

How it works

Bodyweight exercises are complex. While you are doing one movement and concentrating on a specific muscle group other muscles are also involved. Like when you are doing push-ups. The aim is to train your chest but at the same time you are training your abdominals, triceps, and legs and improving your sense of balance.

Scientific studies have proven that training with excessive weights is suitable only for people over 16 years because of the impact it can leave on their skeleton structure when it's not fully grown and stabilized. If someone starts to lift heavy weights in early teens he may grow up to 3 inches shorter than he was supposed to. Regarding bodyweight exercises there are no age restrictions.

Besides, bodyweight exercises strengthen our inner muscles that surround the spine, reducing the risk of spine deformation and injury. Whereas, modern exercise units usually support the back, thus the core region has little or no work to do.

1001 exercises to choose from

Many people who have started to exercise recently or are thinking about starting to exercise don’t take bodyweight training seriously. Training with bodyweight exercises is considerably less popular than lifting weights and using training programs designed for bodybuilding. Due to the lack of information people don’t think that it’s possible to build strength and muscle mass by using bodyweight exercises only. People often think that there are just a few bodyweight exercises for them to do like push-ups, pull-ups, squats and crunches.

In reality there are more than 100 push-up variations and many more other bodyweight exercise variations. If you want to build endurance go for more repetitions. If your aim is strength and muscle mass try harder exercise variations. There are literally up to hundred or sometimes even more variations for each bodyweight exercise.

If you think that doing 30 regular push-ups is something impressive you are mistaken. Try doing some advanced exercises like mole hole, dive bomber or side to side push-ups. To be honest the exercises that we bodyweight training enthusiasts call advanced are nothing compared to the exercises that gymnasts do.

There are many different bodyweight exercise training programs out there. Unfortunately many of them don’t do the job. The times when traditional push-ups and pull-ups where considered the best way to prepare ones body for real life applications are long gone. During the last couple years I have found only few training programs that I’m fully satisfied with.

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Benefits of bodyweight exercises

By training with bodyweight exercises you will get a lean, athletic physique. By training with natural methods and eating healthy you will develop the body that you’re supposed to have. The bodybuilding cult doesn’t represent health, functionality and the way a healthy and fit human body should look like.

For example gymnasts train with bodyweight exercises. They have tremendous strength, flexibility and body control. They look very athletic but they don’t have excessively huge muscles. Despite that you probably won’t get huge and bulky there are many benefits from doing bodyweight exercises:

1. You are less likely to injure yourself by performing bodyweight exercises than lifting weights.

2. You are performing different movement patterns and learning how to control your body properly. Improving you strength, stamina and endurance at the same time, not just isolating one specific muscle group in order to get it as huge as possible as it would be with fitness machines.

3. Bodyweight training is very adaptive. You can customize your training to achieve different goals. From muscle endurance to muscle building, from increasing your explosiveness to achieving greater flexibility.

4. Bodyweight training has no age restrictions. Young or old, child or granny, you can still work out and find a suitable training program.