Bodyweight Exercises

The variety of bodyweight exercises is mind boggling.  Pushups, for example.  You've got regular pushups, pushups with your feet raised, handstand pushups, Hindu pushups, dive bombers, spiderman pushups, close grip pushups, wide grip pushups - whew!  And each one of them is someone's favorite, and someone will swear that this pushup or that pushup offers the fastest or quickest or most efficient way to strengthen, lor ose weight, or increase muscle mass.  So how are you to choose which ones to use in your routine?

You could try various combinations of exercises, based on routines you design yourself.  If you have a lot of experience with the various exercises, this is not a bad way to go.  You are going to know how your body responds to which exercises.  You are the best person to see which combinations give you the best results.  You can vary your routine, switching up the schedule or order of exercises.

Another option is to use a routine recommended by an experienced teacher or coach.  The advantage of this method is that you have a base routine to work from while you learn more exercises, or learn variations on the various exercises.  It also should have the exercises organized in a fashion that will maximize your results.  You need to take care to select an expert that will meet your goals.

Another advantage is that you can select several routines, depending on how you want to use them.  You may have one routine for weight loss, another for conditioning, and another for increasing muscle mass.  You can have a Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, and a Sunday routine (remember - a tremendous advantage of bodyweight exercises is that they can be done every day and on consecutive days).

Finally, the routines from experts provide you a skeleton of a routine that you can add to or switch up, as you develop in your abilities.  For example, you can replace the "regular pushups" in your routine with "Hindu pushups" or spiderman pushups, as you become stronger.  Or you want to take a "muscle building" routine and, with some slight changes, make it more of an aerobic or conditioning routine. 

Bodyeight exercises by their nature fight the body's natural tendency to adapt to stress and plateau.  However, it is still a good idea to use routines from several experts, and to occassionally use another routine for a period of time, to "shock" your body into new growth.

While multiple routines from the same expert may each be different, all the routines will reflect that expert's philosophy or approach to fitness and exercise.  Some experts build their philosophy around a core group of exercises, while other experts may build their routines around aerobic conditioning as opposed to mucle mass building.  By selecting routines from a variety of experts, you will pick up a variety of philosophies and approaches to the use of bodyweight exercises.  Eventually, you will be designing your own routines that fit your body and your schedule.  Having the broadest and deepest body of knowledge and experience at your disposal will assist you in designing the best routines for you.

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It seems that everyone who wants to lose weight is searching for the key, the one thing that will make the fat melt off like cheese off a Philly cheese steak.  Hmmm.... maybe that's not the best analogy.  But there isn't any one exercise or food or even activity that will make fat vanish.  Hard work and proper diet will make it disappear faster.  But there is one bodyweight exercise that will put your mind in a state that demands that you lose weight.  And that exercise is the handstand pushup.

Now, the handstand pushup by itself is not enough.  You need a well-planned fitness routine that fits your life and schedule (so that you will have the incentive and time to actually do it) and a diet that you can really follow.  I, for example, have never tried to figure out if a piece of chicken is the size of a deck of cards. But I have reduced fried foods and late night snacks, and have lost weight quickly when I made those simple changes.

Okay, back to the handstand pushup.  The exercise itself is simple: do a handstand.  Push.  You can only go "up."  Well, you could go over if you lose your balance.  That's why many people do their handstand pushups with their feet against a wall.  If you are going to do this, wear socks.  And don't use the same wall every time, unless you like explaining to your friends why you have "wear marks" on your wall right about head high.

The handstand pushup is one of those exercises that hits many more muscle groups than the obvious.  The shoulder muscle group will become herculean strong after you consistently perform these.   Your pectoralis (chest) muscles, biceps and triceps, and trapezius muscles likewise will pop and explode right before your eyes!  Surprisingly, your stomach muscles get a trmendous workout, by virtue of tightening your core to maintain your balance and your breathing in this awkward position.

What if you can't do a handstand pushup?  There are usually 2 problems: you can get into a handstand but can't push UP; and, you can't get into a handstand.  For the first problem, the solution is to get into a handstand and push.  You won't go UP - but you are strengthening every muscle necessary to achieve the UP.  For the second problem, try "jacknife pushups": get into a regular pushup position on the floor, and walk your hands back toward your feet, keeping your legs straight and raising your rear end up higher and higher.  When you pretty much look like a triangle, start cranking out the pushups.  This will strengthen your shoulder and arm muscles necessary to eventually do a handstand pushup. or 2 or 30.

Now, why did I say way up above that the handstand pushup puts your mind in a state that demands that you lose weight?  Because handstand pushups when you are FAT are unbelievably annoying!  They hurt.  They are hard.  It's difficult to keep your balance.  Handstand pushups really really bring home how much overweight you really are.  And how much easier the handstand pushups will be if you lose weight.  And your mind starts telling you, "Lose weight, so those stupid handstand pushups aren't such an annoying pain!"  And you lose a few pounds, and the pushup becomes a little more tolerable.  So you lose some more, and suddenly you aren't falling out of your handstand all the time.  And now you are in a state of mind to lose weight.

Adding handstand pushups to your fitness routine will really help you both body and mind.  Besides the effect on your shoulders, the improvement in your balance will help your posture and your gait.  And the subtle shift from "I want top lose" to "I need to lose weight" that this exercise creates in your subconscious will help focus your diet and weightloss efforts.

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Bodyweight exercises are the fastest and most efficient way to reach multiple fitness goals: building aerobic capacity, stretching muscles, building strength, and increasing a set of skills. Cross-training with multiple bodyweight exercises achieves all these goals and prevents your body from establishing a "comfort level" and frustrate your gains. Using cross-training forces your body to confront and adapt to new and changing situations, which is the best way to keep your exercise gains advancing.

Bodyweight exercises are exactly what they sound like: exercises that rely on your body weight alone - no weights and no machines that provide resistance. The most common are pushups, situps, and squats. Other examples are pullups, swinging exercises, dips, and bending or twisting exercises. There are hundreds of variations of these basic exercises. Combining these exercises into an intelligent progression of increased resistance, use of varying body parts and muscles, and mixed stretching and resistance, will provide for the fastest and most efficient method of achieving fitness and weight loss.

Bodyweight exercises are stressful on the body (which is how your body achieves growth) without damaging to the body. There is virtually no risk of pulling a muscle doing pushups, as there is with bench presses or flyes. Squats and the many variations work the thighs, buttocks, and lower back, as well as lungs and calves, without running the danger of blowing out a knee or wrenching your back, as there would be with weighted squats or leg extensions or curls.

The range of movement of these exercises also stretch the muscles, without needing to take time in addition to your exercise routine to specifically stretch. The exercises themselves also act as their own warmups. So, for example, if your routine consists of squats, followed by pushups, situps, trunk twisting exercises, and karate kata, there is no need to engage in 15 minutes of warmups or stretching, because the squats will warm you up and the pushups and twisting exercises will stretch most of the muscles you are going to use.

The human body is the most amazing machine ever created. One fascinating capacity of the body is its ability to unconsciously adapt to stress (stress as in "forcing the body to work outside of its comfort zone," not stress as in "Yes, dear, I'll get right on it."). Your body will - without your conscious thought, and indeed, usually in opposition to your desires - rearrange its internal nervous connections and muscle firings to use more or alternate muscles, to relieve the stress your workout is putting on the targetted muscles.

By constantly changing your workout routine, you control and prevent your body from adapting, which allows for constant and steady growth in your workouts. For example, my workout consists of several days of karate kata (formalized series of movements that practice the basic tools of karate), alternating with a day of calisthenics (squats, pushups, mountain climbers, etc.), and a day of an aerobic or yoga routine. Switching among these programs keeps the muscles off-guard but always ready, and also forces my mind to focus on the routine, so that the workout doesn't become routine.

Your primary task is to learn several routines that you can switch and change around. By picking the routines you feel most comfortable with, and that give you the best and most visible results, you can constantly make progress, become fitter, and lose or maintain your target weight. You may have to try several routines, or even develop your own, so this is not a "lose 20 pounds by Monday!!" situation. But once you develop and use these routines, you will find those 20 pounds go away and stay away, while your attitude, flexibility (physical and mental), and ability to handle stress explode.

The key to starting and maintaining a fitness routine and a nutrition program is actually a very simple choice that takes only 30 seconds a day.  Just 30 seconds a day to turn 45 into 20, and 65 into 45.