Total Body Transformation

The Best Household Items You Can Use to Create Challenging Bodyweight Exercises

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If you want to train your strength using just your bodyweight, then there are a vast range of different exercises you can use. One of the best parts? You don’t need any equipment to get started.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that bodyweight training always means ‘without equipment’. Often you’ll use equipment to enhance your bodyweight routines and perhaps the most obvious example of this is a pull-up bar or a dipping station. With either of these two items, you can get a much more intensive and effective workout in and thereby build muscle faster.

bodyweight

But it’s not just pull up bars and dipping stations you can use. In fact, one of the great things about training with bodyweight is just how versatile it is. Anything you can hang off of or lean on can become a piece of equipment to train with and it will surprise you just how much of a difference something like that can make.

Here are some pretty compelling examples…

Chairs

Chairs can easily become dipping stations if you position two opposite one another. At the same time, they can also provide something for you to put your back leg on when doing lunges, or they can allow you to jump straight up onto them. Likewise, chairs can be arranged in a triangle in order to do an ‘increased range of motion push-ups’. These are simply push-ups, except you are dipping down further than level with your hands.

Cans

Take two cans of coke and you can create very convincing push-up stands. Place one palm on each and you now have to engage your forearm strength as well as your balance and core in order to perform a push up as normal!

Towels

A towel is actually an incredibly versatile piece of training equipment. Hanging from a doorframe, this can provide something for you to hold while performing neutral grip pull-ups which will also train your grip. Likewise, you can use it to perform tricep extensions in the same position or you can trap it in a door and lean back in order to perform leaning back rows.

Punch Bag

A punch bag is an actual piece of training equipment that can be fantastic when combined with a usual bodyweight workout. This is an example of resistance cardio and one of the best ways to build muscle, burn fat and get your hormones pumping. What makes a punch bag so effective is that you are accelerating through the movement. This means that you’re engaging all those fast twitch fibers just as you would when lifting heavy weights!

Skateboard

Instead of an ab roller, consider using a skateboard. You can then also use this to perform crawls along the ground (for pec training) as well as many other wonderful exercises that require one or two limbs to slide along the ground or move independently from the rest of your body.

And this is just scratching the surface! Take a look around you and see what else can be turned into a piece of training equipment!

Total Body Transformation

Why Mechanical Drop Sets Are the Secret to Successful Bodyweight Training

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If you’re looking to build more muscle, burn more fat and generally get into the best shape of your life then bodyweight training has an awful lot going for it. This is a way to work out that will allow you to train anywhere, to build better ‘strength to weight ratio’ and to increase the challenge as you progress. You don’t need any equipment, you don’t need any instruction… just drop and give me 20!

But that said, there are ways and ways of using bodyweight training and unfortunately a lot of people don’t approach this in the right way.

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Total Body Transformation

Other Types of Exercise That Incorporate Bodyweight Training

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Bodyweight training has an excellent number of pros. This is an alternative to work out that will enable you to expand your ‘strength to weight ratio’ thereby becoming more agile, more acrobatic and more potent. You’ll be fast such as a coiled spring and powerful in a functional way that equates to real-world usefulness.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect training modality. And one of the major complaints you’ll often listen from people who use bodyweight training is that they don’t like it for the reason that it’s ‘boring’. Doing press ups can get old rapid and unfortunately just isn’t quite so challenging or exciting as lifting 100K through your head. It doesn’t turn heads in quite the same way and the progress can often feel a lot less remunerative.

climbing

But that’s why it’s such a good thing that you can utilize bodyweight training as part of a more fun or interesting task or even sport. Let’s take a look at a few of the splendid ways you can assimilate bodyweight training into your habit without it feeling such as a dull physical exercise. Here are a few great examples…

Rock Climbing

Rock climbing is one of the most impressive bodyweight workouts there is and it’s extraordinarily fun and remunerative whether you’re going to do it seriously or just as a fun hobby. Rock climbing involves utilizing your forearms and grip strength so as to cling to the tiny cracks in the rocks and this can rapidly build you Popeye-like proportions. From there, you’ll then be utilizing your lats and your biceps to pull yourself up against the wall and scale it like Spider-Man. what is better, you’ll additionally be holding yourself in position for long periods of time utilizing your legs alone.

This rapidly builds a many more quadriceps and hamstring strength so as to you’ll be getting a really full body physical exercise.

Bouldering is an excellent way to take the first steps with this. Bouldering effectively signifies that you’re climbing smaller rocks that present a challenge for how to get to the most recognized. There’s no rope and you use a crash mat – for you to turn up at a climbing center and just get started!

Other Types of Climbing

Don’t have a climbing center near you? Not sure you fancy the idea of climbing up the close by cliffs? an excellent alternative is something called ‘traversing’ which is basically sideways rock climbing. Here you never get that high up and as a result, you don’t require a rope. As long as you have a few kinds of natural cliff or wall you can try it yourself!

Or how about climbing a tree?

Hand Balancing

Hand balancing is a lost art that is markedly rewarding and challenging. being prepared to go from a pike position to a handstand needs a ton of muscle power and control, and also balance. When you pull it off even though, you’ll have a party trick that’s far more impressive than lifting 100KG and that you can actually do at a party!

Total Body Transformation

Gymnastic Rings Are a Fantastic Purchase for Home Gym Owners

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If you work out from home, then one of the most incredibly powerful pieces of kit you can buy is gymnastic rings.

Gymnastic rings are rings attached to straps that can hang from your pull up bar. From there, they then enable you to perform dips, inverted push-ups, bodyweight rows and much more.

rings

They do everything that TRX does in other words – and more seeing as TRX isn’t good for dips – but they cost a fraction of the amount. You can get them on Amazon for $20-40! Plus they’re easy to pack away when not in use and can be taken with you on holiday or anywhere else.

Take a look at some of the things you can do with gymnastic rings for inspiration and to demonstrate just how powerful and versatile they are.

Dips

One of the most obvious things you can do with rings is the dip. A dip simply involves gripping one ring in either hand and then gradually lowering yourself in the middle. This is an excellent way to train the pecs, shoulders, and triceps and it also requires a lot of balance and stability.

What’s interesting about dips is that you actually can’t do them as well on TRX – despite it costing a lot more!

Flyes

You might not have expected this but you can actually perform flyes using gymnastic rings. All you need to do is to lean forward holding one in each hand with your arms apart in a cross position. Now bring them together in the middle to push your body-weight back up. This is an excellent way to train your pecs and your grip at the same time.

Pull Ups

Using rings to perform pull-ups is quite a lot different from not using rings. That’s because this has your hands facing inward which makes it a neutral grip pull up instead of a regular pull up. As a result, you’ll hit the lats at a different angle, while the wobbly nature of the rings will force you to engage your stabilizer muscles to keep the rings steady and prevent your body from rolling.

Inverted Push Ups

Inverted push-ups are surprisingly not a form of push up… but rather another form of pull up! The reason they have this name is that they are effectively push ups turned upside down. Here, you’ll hold onto the rings which are dangling a bit lower and then perform pull-ups for your upper body only, with your heels resting on the floor. This allows you to lift a smaller amount of weight during pull-ups, which thereby trains your lats but also allows you to use this as part of a drop set. In other words, perform as many regular pull-ups as you can, then switch to this to carry on.

Lunge

Performing a lunge with one leg looped into a gymnastic ring is a great way to make it a lot more difficult. This requires more balance again and stimulates the production of more growth hormones as a result.

Total Body Transformation

The Weirdest Bodyweight Exercises That Everyone Should Do

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The thing that many people don’t realize when they begin working out is that surely anything might be a physical exercise. As long as there’s a few resistance involucred and you’re utilizing your muscles to a few degrees, then it’s training.

And that signifies that you can think outside the box when we refer to bodyweight workouts. You don’t just have to do pull ups, push ups and squats… verify out a few of these utterly weird but additionally rather nice bodyweight exercises!

exercise

Calf Jumps

Calf jumps are an alternative to train the calves that is explosive and splendid for initiating microtears and power in the reduced portion of the legs. To execute calf jumps, you easily stand with your legs directly straight and then jump. The caveat? Your legs have to also hold on straight in the course of the duration of the jump. What this signifies is that you’re incapable to engage the upper leg muscles, thereby forcing your calves to do all the work in an extremely plyometric manner.

Hollow Rock

The hollow rock is an extraordinarily weird ab exercise but one that has progressively become more and more extended. The idea is to restore your body in a concave curve with your buttocks planted on the field and then to rock back onto the arch of your back. You then rock back and forward without moving any of your limbs and the only alternative to do this is by powering the movement by means of your abs. It’s an excellent fun exercise that has you rocking back and forward and it’s a great alternative to build core strength.

Abdominal Shifters

This is one that you possibly won’t wish to do in a gym for the reason that it looks completely bizarre! principally, you’re going to be lying on the field and maintaining your core tight but with a slight concave arch in the torso. Now you’re going to rock back and forward and as you do, you’re going to slightly rotate until you’ve gone a full 360 degrees. You’ll look such as a fish flapping around on the beach but it’s an amazing and fun alternative to build the abs and transverse abdominis.

Lizard Crawl

There are countless variations of crawl exercises but in spite of how you do them, they’re excellent for building strength in the core, the pecs, and the shoulders. What’s more is that they can additionally help you to develop ‘cross lateral communication’ and thereby improve your proprioception and agility. Don’t worry too much about that, just try crawling along the field, torso raised just above the floor, maintaining your arms continually bent and moving forward one step at a time.

Elbow Curls

This is the perfect exercise for people who wish to train their biceps but don’t have any equipment (even a pull-up bar). To execute this, lie on the field on your side with one arm pinned under your leg and with your legs bent forward. Now grab your leg from underneath and pull your upper body into a twisting sit-up position. This will train the bicep using bodyweight and there’s no requirement for a bar or dumbbell!

Total Body Transformation

The Complete Guide to Building Awesome Abs

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Abs are the one muscle group that almost everyone wishes they had and that almost everyone wants to make more impressive. The abs are often considered between the ‘sexiest’ muscle groups and are a sign that any person is slim, toned and athletic.

At the same time, building superb abs gives you strength and performance pros that can bleed into every other aspect of your physical capacity.

abs

That’s for the reason that the abs provide your core and give you the strength to stabilize yourself throughout other movements.

But the trouble is that numerous people have no idea how to go about building their abs. With that in mind then, read on and we’ll check up on what produces the difference between a 6 pack and a beer abdomen.

Body Fat

The first thing to identify is that you require to lower your body fat percentage if you’re going to have visible abs. You can have the strongest muscles doable here but if you don’t reduce your body fat percentage, then they still won’t be visible.

Note that you can’t target fat loss. This signifies that one of the most crucial keys to building visible muscle here is to keep in mind that you assimilate CV so that burn fat in addition.

Engaging the Abs

Another thing to identify is that you require to actually engage your abs throughout exercise. numerous people will implement ab exercises but won’t actually be training their abs so much as their hips. The hip flexors can implement a notably similar job to the abs by folding the body in half but evidently they don’t have quite the same visual appeal (if you inquire most people).

In short, if you are executing sit ups and leg raises in order to your body folds at the waist, then it’s not training the abs. as a substitute, you require to actually roll the abs and curl your abdomen round by means of the movements.

The Different Ab Muscles

Making life more confusing is the fact that you actually have lots different muscles in the mid section. The ‘abs’ as numerous of us think about them (the 6 pack) are defined by your rectus abdominis – the muscle plate that sits on the front of your abdomen and has the 6 indentations we all want to accomplish.

Meanwhile although, you in addition have the transverse abdominis. The goal of this muscle is to provide support for the reduce spine as well as to ‘hold in’ the abdomen. Training this muscle is not only crucial for performance, it also assists you to create flatter abs. You can hit this muscle by utilizing the myotatic crunch (a crunch performed through a bosu ball in order to your back goes past flat) or by utilizing the ‘cat vomit’ exercise that involves sucking your abs in while on all fours to develop an ‘ab vacuum’.

Finally, you have the obliques. These sit on either side of the rectus abdominis and give you more definition here and also the capacity to torque. Train them using twisting sit ups and similar movements.

Total Body Transformation

Why Bodyweight Training Outdoors is the Ultimate Workout

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A word that gets thrown around a lot at the moment when it comes to training is ‘functional’. What is ‘functional’? Well essentially, this term refers to the idea that some types of exercises provide real-world and usable strength, whereas others do not.

One of the exercises often called functional is the deadlift because it involves squatting down to pick something heavy up off of the ground using all the muscles in the leg in unison as well as muscles in the back.

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Total Body Transformation

More Ways to Engage Muscle Fiber Without Weights

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When building muscle, there are a few things that make an impact on your progress. One is how much you are able to pump the muscle with blood and metabolites. When you train and your muscle is tense, this forces blood and hormones like testosterone and growth hormone to collect there.

Now the muscle will be ‘occluded’ meaning that blood will pool and all the signals will be sent to encourage more growth.

The other thing that matters is the amount that you recruit and use your muscle fibers. The more you tear your muscles (called ‘microtears’), the more they’ll be forced to work to repair themselves and grow back bigger and stronger. Simultaneously, using your muscle fibers in any capacity can improve your ‘mind muscle connection’ and thereby help you to increase the amount of control you have and your ability to engage muscles as you need them.

This means that the actual amount of weight you’re using doesn’t really matter. As long as you are challenging the muscles, you can use no weight or lots of weight.

This is why body-weight training works but it’s also why there are more options available to you if you want to get more creative with your weight training. Here are some examples:

Self-Resistance

One way to challenge yourself during a workout is to provide the resistance yourself. This allows you to precisely control the amount of resistance you’re up against and thereby to strengthen muscles accordingly.

To do this, you simply need to grab hold of one arm for example with a free hand. You then prevent that free arm from curling with the other arm and thereby provide yourself with the necessary resistance you need to grow.

Self-resistance is a great way to train if you don’t have access to any equipment and you’re travelling but it can be tough on the joints and not particularly enjoyable so it isn’t a good long-term solution!

Dynamic Tension

One way to train your muscles is through something called static contraction. This simply involves tensing and contracting your muscles as much as you can even without any movement just to recruit muscle mass and just to control your mind-muscle connection.

When you use dynamic tension, this takes this one step further by including movement. You simply need to go through movements like curls but while tensing your biceps. There are no weights but the tension combined with the movement provides essentially the same thing.

Speed Training

Finally, another option is something called ‘speed training’. This involves curling weights and using your muscles in other ways but as you do, you will be going through the movement as quickly as possible. This in turn means that you’re using the same amount of power in the muscle fibers in order to accelerate. The weight isn’t there but you’re still required to produce just as much force as though it was – and as a result you can get similar benefits from this kind of training!

Total Body Transformation

How to Train Your Legs With Body-weight Exercises

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Training the legs is something of a hot topic among bodybuilders and athletes. Gym goers who ‘skip leg day’ are often referred to unfavorably and for good reason; training the legs has knock-on benefits throughout the entire body whereas leaving them out tends to make you look dis-proportioned and odd.

The question then is why so many people leave legs out of their routine in the first place. And the answer is a) legs are boring and b) legs are hard to train.

legs

The simple fact of the matter is that your legs don’t have hands attached to them. And this means it’s harder to pick up a weight, thus meaning you have to load yourself up some other way and involve the whole body. That instantly reduces the number of exercises available to you and means that leg exercises necessarily take up more space and leave you a lot tireder.

And it also makes it much harder to train your legs with body-weight alone. But there are ways. Read on to discover some of the best of them…

Jumping Squats

One of the simplest ways to train your legs with your body-weight alone is to use jumping squats. This simply means that you’re squatting down and then jumping at the apex. This is a simple exercise and you wouldn’t think that it would make a huge difference – but it is great for building up power and can quickly create a burn thanks to the amount of acceleration involved.

Box Jumps

Speaking of which, box jumps require even more power to launch you high enough into the air – especially if you stack them high. This is in some ways just as challenging as a squat and a great way to build hamstrings, quads, calves and hips.

Jumping Lunges

This is simply a lunge where you jump, switch legs in mid-air and then land with your legs in the opposite position. Doing this is a great way to build strength in the hamstrings and again involves jumping to create more acceleration.

Lunge Walking

Simply walking by stepping from one lunge into the next. This is a surprisingly effective workout because you’re plunging so deep in between and spending the majority of your time under tension.

Single Leg Squat

Another way to make the squat more challenging with just body weight is of course to do it on just one leg. This then requires twice the strength and also forces you to balance a lot as well. A more advanced version is the ‘pistol squat’ which requires your foot to be flat on the ground while the other one is pointed straight out in front of you, toes facing up.

Side Squat

This is between a squat and a lunge and involves stepping out to one side, lunging deep and then stepping back to the middle before repeating on the other side.

Sissy Squat

Finally, a sissy squat is a squat you perform by leaning back and going up on your toes. Your knees point forward and you lean back like Neo. This is tough on the joints so more of a party trick to be used springily!

Total Body Transformation

A Ten Minute Full Body Workout That Anyone Can Use

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When it comes to building muscle, losing fat and moving into shape, the biggest trouble for most people is easily sticking to their training goals. This is called ‘adherence’ in the industry and easily means your skill to adhere at a training program long sufficient to see the results that you require.

Even a poorly designed physical workout can help you to create muscle and get results if you adhere at it. And it is much better to perform a bad workout for a long period of time than it is to perform the best workout possible for a day and then give up.

workout

But this is something a many people don’t surely consider when they plan to get into shape. Too often they will come up with habits that involve training for an hour each session, 5 times a week. If you’re previously feeling too tired to be especially active, if you’re previously stressed with work… trying to fit in 5 hours of exercise a week is a immense ask. This is especially true when you think that you’re possibly going to have to travel to the gym additionally, get washed, change clothes… etc.

This is where a body-weight physical workout can come in so handy. And this is specifically true if you use a physical exercise that hits the entire body in a single session, only takes ten minutes and can be completed anywhere. Use this physical workout first thing in the morning before work and before you go in the shower. Train in your boxers in order to not develop more washing. Now you have a behavior that surely is just 10 minutes and that no one must have any trouble sticking with.

What does that physical workout look like? Here it is:

Three Exercises to Rule Them All

This physical exercise is generated up of 3 exercises that together will train the entire body while additionally providing a few cardio benefit. Those 3 exercises are:

  • Pull Ups
  • Press Ups
  • Jumping Squats

Perform each exercise to failure and then move straight onto the following exercise when you finish without break. You can rest after the jumping squats for one minute before commencing the behavior again and going for 3 sets. It should take around 10-15 minutes.

This behavior hits all the radical muscles in the body for the reason that it emulates a more involved split that bodybuilders use called PPL (Push, Pull, Leg). Pull ups hit the lats, the biceps and the abs. Push ups train the pecs, the triceps and the shoulders. And jumping squats hit the entire reduce body and provide the cardio.

Now this physical workout isn’t going to be sufficient to help you create massive muscles overnight. It can burn fat and it can tone your muscles and harden them. But in order for you to surely train you require to use heavier weights performed more steadily and for longer.

So use this as a tool to kick off your new training regime and to get into the pattern. additionally, use it every time that you can’t fit a full behavior in.