The Benefits of Bodyweight Training: Convenience, Accessibility, and Versatility

Strength training is a vital component of an overall fitness program. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends adults perform strength training at least 2 days a week to maintain the muscle mass and strength needed for good health.

Often, when people think of strength training, they think of equipment. And for good reason: there are many different modes of strength training devices: barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance exercise machines. However, moving your own body with either no or minimal (e.g., pull-up bar) equipment is a great tool for building muscle mass and strength. Several celebrities have famously built impressive, muscular physiques using only bodyweight exercises: Herschel Walker, Jason Statham, and Madonna all stand as examples. Look at any gymnast; you will see prominent muscularity developed by body weight exercises.

Bodyweight exercises have several advantages – most notably, they are convenient and accessible; your body is always there! You don’t have to travel to a gym or need any special equipment to do a lot of effective strength work just using your body.

Challenging Your Muscles: Progressive Overload and Variation

The progressive overload principle is a core tenant of effective strength training. Put simply, progressive overload means that you must challenge your muscles with heavier resistance over time to stimulate continued strength gains. One of the main drawbacks to bodyweight exercises is that you don’t have the ability to change the load you lift as easily as with free weights or machines, where you can change eights in increments as small as one kilogram. You can modify body weight exercises to change their difficulty with some ingenuity, though, as we will discuss below. The most common way to increase the load with bodyweight exercises is to increase your repetitions.   

Essential Bodyweight Exercises: A Comprehensive Workout Routine

Effective strength training requires stressing all your major muscle groups: upper body, lower body, and trunk. Here, I will give you some advice on how to progressively increase the resistance on a few bodyweight exercises for each region. I advise starting with a progression you can comfortably perform for at least six repetitions. Add repetitions over time, and once you can do 15+ repetitions, change progressions to the next level.

Upper Body Strength: Push-ups, Pull-ups, and Dips

Push-ups: No equipment is needed! You just need a floor or (for some variations) a wall. Push-ups are a mainstay of bodyweight training and very effectively strengthen the upper-body pushing muscles (chest, triceps, and shoulders). 

Progression: standing push-up against a wall, pushup from knees, pushup, 1-arm pushup against a wall, 1-arm pushup on a bench, 1-arm pushup 

Pull-ups/Chin-ups: Pull-ups require a hanging bar you can use. Pull-ups (palms facing away from your body) and chin-ups (palm-facing your body) are fantastic exercises for strengthening the upper-body pulling muscles (upper back, shoulders, and biceps). They can be intimidating if you don’t have the strength to do repetitions, but that can be worked around. 

Here is a progression: Assisted Pull-up (use bands or a counter-weighted machine to reduce the amount of weight), pull-up, weighted pull-up

Dips: Another good movement to train the upper body pressing muscles