Bodyweight training - not as lame as I thought - part 1

Bodyweight training is a pretty broad topic, and can refer to everything from the most basic of drills to the sort of mind bogglingly outrageous feats of gravity defying awesomeness that rack up YouTube views in the millions.

I must confess to having been a bit of a bodyweight snob for most of my training career. In the past any time a wiry little guy claimed to have higher levels of relative strength than me, my standard response was "so does an ant."

Relative strength refers to a persons strength-to-bodyweight ratio. So a 50 kilo girl who deadlifts 100 kilos has higher levels of relative strength than a 70 kilo girl who deadlifts 110 kilos. Even though the second girl has higher levels of maximal strength, make sense?

But the truth is there are plenty of examples of people who employ bodyweight training almost exclusively, are incredibly strong by any definition and have the physiques to show for it. Gymnasts.

This fact has led to quite a lot of talk online and elsewhere about bodyweight training being "it." Some claim it is a more effective and safer form of training than weight training. Like most overly dogmatic points of view I feel this is flawed.

Firstly , I'm not a big fan of the argument that states "x athlete trains like this, so if I train that way I'll look like them"

Even forgetting about genetics (a huge factor), professional athletes perform a far higher overall volume of work than us mere mortals will ever be able to match. This huge volume of work, rather than the individual exercises themselves, has a large role in building these physiques. Put simply, athletes train more frequently than you, do more work per session than you, and recover better than you. If you just barbell squatted and bench pressed with that kind of volume and managed to recover from it you'd get pretty strong too, so it's not just the exercise selection.

My point is, if we want to assess the effectiveness of something we should look at the principles behind why it actually works. There are no magical exercises. Your triceps don't know if you're benching or doing a press up. Muscles can't discern between the resistance imposed by your own bodyweight and that of a barbell, so let's not suddenly drop bench pressing from our arsenal in favour of press ups just because gymnasts have big pecs.

Having said all that, bodyweight training does have some advantages and lend itself to certain styles of training which, when applied properly, can help take your physique to the next level.

They are,

1- portability - this is an obvious one. You may not get to the gym multiple times a day every day. But with a bit of luck you should always have a working pair of arms and legs attached to your torso. Bodyweight training can be done any time, anywhere. Thus lending itself to...

2- frequency-Since you always have your body , it's easy to train frequently with bodyweight exercises. All other factors being equal, if you train something more frequently you will get better at it. Learning the tougher bodyweight movements should be thought of as practising rather than training. If you're practising a new language, you don't do two hours of intense practice and then give your brain a few days to "recover", you practice as frequently as possible while staying as fresh as possible. This is the exact philosophy that should be applied to building strength with bodyweight movements.

Where this "as frequent as possible" idea tends to come unstuck is when we introduce fatigue into the equation. You see, you cannot train an exercise to complete failure AND train it frequently. The need to avoid muscular failure and high levels of fatigue lead us nicely to....

3- self limiting- the tougher bodyweight exercises such as the lever, the single arm press up and the planche , are pretty hard to overtrain. The need to employ whole-body tension and the technical difficulty of such exercises make them tiring for reasons beyond straight-forward muscle fatigue. You just get to the point where you can't do another rep correctly, and that's where you stop.

So, do we need to drop all barbell training and train naked in the woods as Zeus surely intended? Good grief no. Weight training is awesome, always has been always will be. But if you want to add some new, fun and effective exercises to your regime that will build muscle, strength, stamina, flexibility and overall fitness, I highly recommend taking bodyweight training seriously.

So, over the next few blog posts I'll be introducing you to some of the tougher bodyweight exercises, showing you how to perform them and how to implement them in your training.

Stay tuned.

Zack