A lot of you may or may not have any fitness equipment around. So the question that you may be asking yourself is if you can get fit with no equipment. This post will answer that question and give you some strategies to get started and progress your fitness using only your bodyweight.
Body Weight Fitness
Body weight fitness is doing exercises that you can literally due anywhere with little or no equipment. It can include classic exercises like push ups and pull ups (pull up bar needed) to complicated exercises like planks (pictured above) and single leg squats.
Body weight exercises are infinitely variable without adding any equipment, so you can change things up and keep the excitement about working out. Any exercise that you can do without the use of external force can be included in body weight exercises. Exercises can include calisthenics (jumping jacks, mountain climbers, burpees, etc.), yoga poses (warrior, child's pose, cobra, etc.), plyometrics (jumping, hopping, etc.), and typical gym exercises (squats, lunges, sit ups, etc.).
Progressing Body Weight Fitness
You can progress body weight exercises in many ways. You can add more reps (do more), add time under tension by pausing (holding the bottom of a squat or the middle of a push up), slow down (work on moving slowly to increase muscle activation, increase time (do it for longer), and add explosive movements to your exercises (jump squats, clapping push ups, etc.)
You can still injure yourself with just body weight fitness exercises if you are not progressing carefully and tracking your progress.
Establishing a Baseline
The most important thing you can do before you start any training program, whether it is body weight or not, is to establish a baseline. A baseline will give you a starting point. In things like CrossFit, they repeat some workouts a few times a year so you can measure your progress. A good way to establish a baseline is to use a workout that has either a set amount of time to complete it or requires a certain number of repetitions to complete it.
Here is an example baseline workout (you can use this to start or make up your own):
Max Squats in 1 minute (record your number)
1 minute rest
Max Sit Ups in 1 minute (record your number)
1 minute rest
Max Push Ups in 1 minute (record your number)
1 minute rest
Max Burpees in 1 minute (record your number)
In this workout, you get to see how many reps you can do. By recording your number (in your phone, in a google sheet, in an excel spreadsheet, in a notebook, etc.) you are allowing yourself to track your progress. Do your fitness regiment and recheck your progress by doing this workout once per month (Ideally on the same day like March 3rd, April 3rd, etc.).
How You Can Vary Your Workouts at Home
There are a few things you can do to vary your workouts at home to stay interested. You can:
Use Tabata Programming - 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest for 4 minutes of one exercise.
Use Tempo Programming - Slow descent with a pause at the bottom.
Use High Intensity Interval Training principles - perform ratios of work to rest (you can change these ratios regularly or daily). Example work:rest ratios are 1:1, 1:2, 3:1, etc.
Change the time of your workout - add 10 minutes to your workout, or workout for only 5 minutes, but as hard as you can for the entire time.
There are plenty of other ways, but these 4 will give you a good start!
So the answer to the question of getting fit with bodyweight workouts is a simple, but loud, YES!!
BodyFix PT and Performance is developing a bodyweight fitness program. If you would like to get on the mailing list as this is released please reach out to info@bodyfixpt.com.
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