When I look back on my elementary school gym classes, I realize now that these teachers had it right. Classes would consist of chasing each other around the gym as a warm up, which was followed by some form of skipping, jumping, throwing, pushing, pulling and climbing.That was the extent of it. It seemed like hard work at the time, but we became comfortable with our bodies by learning how to move them through space. These moves are what best resemble every day life activities and transfer to overall athleticism. Bodyweight training which is a test of relative strength is what beginners need to strive for in their first year of training before moving on to free weights. Relative strength is exactly what it sounds like. It is the maximum amount of force that one can exert in relation to their body size or weight. I have seen many guys come into the gym, stack a bunch of weight on a bar or plates on a machine and perform numerous repetitions. On the flip side, if you were to ask them to perform a proper push up or chin up, they would be unable to complete more than one or two. This scenario is all too common. Don’t fall into this trap.
A question I often get asked by clients is whether bodyweight training is effective for adding muscle ? Absolutely. Look no further than the physiques of gymnasts we see at the Olympic Games. They spend countless hours balancing and moving their bodies through space under extreme amounts of tension. For a beginner trainee any bodyweight exercise that provides sufficient tension will result in strength gains. At the onset, strength gains are due to enhanced neural efficiency (the brain becomes more efficient at sending messages to the working muscle). After the initial 3 to 5 weeks of a strength training program, hypertrophy (muscle growth) becomes the dominant factor in strength gains.
As bodyweight exercises begin to get easier there are always ways to make them more challenging. Training unilaterally (one limb at at time), changing angles to create a mechanical disadvantage, using rings and other suspension devices like the TRX or Jungle Gym XT are options that provide greater instability and the excess tension necessary to make these exercises more challenging.
Bodyweight training will not beat up your joints like common weight training exercises do. They allow your body to move through a more natural range of motion. The problem with machines that you will encounter in commercial gyms is that they force our bodies to move in one fixed plane. Either left, right, up or down. Our bodies are not designed to move like this ! They want to move slightly up, then over, a bit to the right and then back up again. So your joints end up in a compromising position, where your stabilizer muscles are bypassed because no balancing is required and your muscles end up growing in an unbalanced way which leads to weaknesses, imbalances and injury.
The best part about bodyweight training is that it can be done anywhere at any time and it requires minimal space. You can train in your basement, backyard or a local park, weather permitting. This works out great for people who are short on time or are intimidated at the thought of having to exercise amongst a large group of people. If you are starting from ground zero, learning the basic technique for push ups, pull ups, planks, bird dogs, squats and lunges is where you need to start, If you are unfamiliar with the proper form to execute these moves, there are a number of videos on YouTube you can watch that demonstrate them all very well.