Bodyweight exercises is becoming more and more popular. I mean take a look at gymnasts and their physique. Most never do any weight lifting and yet they are ripped and extremely strong.
Now doing body weight exercises doesn’t mean you never use exercise equipment. You won’t be using weights or anything, but an exercise ball or a chin up bar are important pieces of exercise equipment and allow you to thoroughly give your body a workout.
The exercise I am showing here requires no equipment at all, however, and you can definitely get started in your program without equipment. But when you do this same exercise on the exercise ball you greatly increase the effect. If you have a ball try this both with and without and you will immediately know what I am talking about.
One of the best bodyweight exercises you can do is a chin up. I have the perfect pullup bar but when it’s nice outside. I like to use a tree branch as it is thicker and harder to use and helps build up the grip.
Pushups are always included and are a mainstay in the military. I was in the army and in just 8 weeks I gained 28 pounds. It was solid pounds. Other than the obstacle course and some other exercise, pushups were one of the basic exercises.
The funny thing is those of us who were skinny gained weight and those who were heavy lost it. All following the same routine and eating the same amount of food.
I’ll get into the various body weight exercises as we go along and am testing a program designed to help add 10 or more chin ups to what I am currently able to do – which is 8. This will impress your friends as supposedly 95% of people are unable to do a single chin up.
It’s astonishing how many exercises someone can do with bodyweight training to either accomplish muscle gain or fat loss. The standards are chinups, pushups and squats, just like in gym class, but there are other impressive movements that will get you stronger when you stick them into your routines.
-Mitchell