Tag Archive for: Bodyweight Workout Routine

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.

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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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The Benefits Of Bodyweight Training

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It’s been close to 10 years since I stopped training at a gym and have been training at home. I train with bodyweight exercises and some isometric exercises. If there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that bodyweight training can work wonders if you’re willing to be motivated enough to stick to it.

I started with a bodyweight workout routine earlier on as a desperate measure to make my workouts more efficient and it quickly became an eye-opener about the vast benefits of bodyweight training.

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The Benefits are as follows:

Very little equipment

If you use your imagination, you can do these exercises without special equipment. All you need is some space and motivation. So bid farewell to time lost travelling to the gym. Get on floor and do push-up, hang from the door way and do pull-ups and squat with your bodyweight. As you get stronger, make these exercises more challenging by adding the single limb variations – e.g. Single arm push-ups, Single arm pull-ups and Pistol Squats.

The Gym is never shut

When you use bodyweight exercises, you are your own gym. You can workout anytime, anywhere.

Keeps you honest

When you training with weights, your bodyweight increases creating the illusion that you are lifting more. In case of a tie in powerlifting, the lighter athlete is selected as the winner. With bodyweight training, this isn’t so, if you get fatter, you will find you bodyweight movements getting worse.

Builds strength and develops joint health

When properly done, the bodyweight training system can develop incredible strength and stamina, often together. The fact that it doesn’t use unnatural loads to develop strength means your joints, ligaments and tendons grow strong too. Unlike in the bodybuilding style of training where the muscle bellies grow far stronger than the supporting tendons thus leaving you vulnerable to injuries.

Bodyweight exercises are natural

This is the most important factor supporting bodyweight exercises. These movements come to us naturally. Unlike bench presses and bicep curls which aren’t the way our bodies were designed to function. Our bodies have evolved over millions of years to be able to move itself, first and foremost; they weren’t really “designed” to lift progressively heavier external loads regularly.

Bodyweight exercises are basic to human nature. The body is designed to move and needs to do so more efficiently. Unlike training with equipment in a gym where it’s just the limbs moving, usually, bodyweight exercises are designed to utilize the entire body as resistance and forces the entire body to participate in the exercise.

The core goal of any fitness training routine should be the improvement of your own physical (joint) mobility and movement. Very few bodybuilding exercises like the squats and deadlifts can give this benefit. However, these movements do place a lot of stress on the joints and spinal column.

There are other reasons that I could mention and they’d make absolute sense to start with hardcore bodyweight exercises. But nothing, at least for me, trumps the fact that it is an incredible time and money saver. You don’t have to pay expensive gyms to workout, no time wasted travelling to the gym and no time wasted waiting for the equipment to be vacated. Nothing trumps bodyweight training when it comes to tackling these issues.