No equipment? No problem!

Bodyweight exercise always seems to get a bad rep. Last one out on the field at rugby training? 10 burpees! Step out of line in taekwondo class? 20 press ups! If this type of exercise has been ingrained in our minds as punishment, well of course people aren’t going to choose to do it. Then of course there’s the point of view of the fitness industry and their suppliers. If everybody trained using calisthenics who would buy the next piece of miracle equipment guaranteed to help you achieve all your goals without even taking it out of the box?

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying by any means that all fitness equipment is useless, that would be absurd. For many sports it’s essential, Olympic and power lifting for instance.  What I am saying is that training with weights and equipment is not the only way to burn fat, develop power or increase strength and muscle mass.  If you want proof, just check out gymnasts. 

There is a wealth of benefits to bodyweight training;

1. The first and most obvious is that you can do it absolutely anywhere. You don’t need any equipment, just enough space to lie out flat on the floor and you’re good to go. What’s more, it’s an efficient way to work out and make the most of your time, no more waiting for specific weights or for the bench to be free.

2. It is better for your body and joint health. Your movement is not restricted to a path dictated by a machine, meaning less stress is placed on joints in awkward positions and exercises are generally more comfortable. There is a reduced chance of injury through using a weight either too advanced for you, or when you are already fatigued.

3. The fact that you are not restricted in your movement patterns also means that bodyweight exercises are often more functional in design, more closely mimicking sport specific actions or daily activities. For example, pull ups are more suited to climbing than a lat pull down machine, while press ups and burpees lead to increased speed in getting up should you hit the deck while playing football.

4. Calisthenics can be used to achieve an array of fitness goals; it’s just a case of applying the exercise in the most appropriate ways.  Want to develop speed and power? Try adding box jumps, sprints and burpees. Looking to burn fat? Intense bodyweight circuits with squats, lunges, press ups and bodyweight rows are more effective than any treadmill. How about building strength and muscle? I’ll grant you this one can be trickier and requires a bit more thinking. Unlike traditional weight training, to make an exercise more difficult you can’t just add weight to a bar. So what do you do when an exercise becomes too easy? It’s about leverage. Because we can’t realistically add more weight to our body, instead we need to put our body into a less optimal position to create a greater challenge. E.g.

* Normal press up with shoulder width hand placement to a diamond press up where your hands are directly underneath your chest. This reduces the amount of force you can produce through your chest meaning that your triceps have to compensate, making the exercise more difficult.

* From normal pull up to a wide grip pull up, your arms are taken out of the equation so more emphasis is placed on your back alone to pull yourself up.

This principle can be applied to almost all bodyweight exercises in order to make it more challenging. A second way of increasing the difficulty is to perform the exercises unilaterally – one handed press up, one handed pull up and pistol squats.

5. Endless progressions! Once you’ve mastered the basic exercises on some of the more difficult variations there are plenty of other challenges to progress to. The first of these is combining exercises together, the classic being a muscle up, where you combine a pull up and a dip in one movement. As well as gymnastic levers such as planche, front lever and human flag. These look fricking awesome, definitely a head turner.

6. Pretty much all bodyweight exercises are compound movements this means multiple muscle groups are activated leading to increased calorie consumption, great for anybody looking for fat loss and also for stimulating muscle growth. In addition, all movements require a degree of body stabilisation meaning your core is challenged with every exercise allowing you to develop amazing core strength.

However, there are limitations to bodyweight exercise;

1.  You’re not going to be a body builder or a strong man competitor. For body builders it’s simply too difficult to achieve the same volume of work. A lot of body builders isolate certain muscles and work them independently to achieve maximal growth. Because pretty much all body weight exercises are compound movements the likelihood is that you would fatigue before you reach the same load for a single muscle group. Strongmen train with insane amounts of weight and it is beyond anything you could achieve with your own bodyweight.

2. Everybody knows how difficult a pull up is and when that’s considered a basic of bodyweight training it’s evident that there is a fairly steep learning curve when you are beginning this type of training.  The progressions between each exercise can also be challenging which can sometimes leave people feeling disheartened or bored, if they feel they are progressing too slowly. It’s not the type of training for everyone and you have to understand the importance of short term goals and dividing your progress into smaller achievements.

3. Measuring is difficult as you’re not just simply picking something heavier up each time. You can obviously just count more reps/sets, but when progressing onto different exercises it’s simply a case of challenging yourself as much as possible in every workout. It’s a much more personal progression.

Despite this, the benefits of callisthenic training greatly outweigh the limitations. Bodyweight exercises can easily be incorporated into any current routine or used as a workout in their own right to provide an effective and functional training programme. Why not give it a try.