All bodyweight exercise, anyone?
 

Anyone doing all bodyweight exercise for their physical fitness? I'm interested in anyone's advice and experience. I've been impressed by everything I've found about this category of exercise, and it seems to be a perfect match for the Paleo philosophy -- how did the first human beings stay physically fit? How are human beings designed to exercise?

It all fits together, it seems to me. Of course, I'm only barely beginning.

And now, I'm already semi-sidelined because my left knee seems to be inexplicably sore for two days. I haven't done anything drastic at all - pushups situps, some supported pull-ups, and short-distance runs (literally just 1/10th of a mile between every one or two exercises, no long-distance running), and I even ran mostly on earth rather than hard concrete.

I intend to do bodyweight and Paleo as my plan. So, if anyone else here has experience with bodyweight exercise as one's overall physical fitness plan, please chime in!

I am interested in this. Can you give a link or something for more information. I run and swim, but I don't lift weights and I am interested in increasing muscle.

Well, I first started getting interested in this particular perspective on exercise when I clicked on an ad for Matt Furey's program. He is only one of many, and he's not any kind of all-wise guru, but everything I've read indicates he has an excellent program. I have spent very little on his stuff, and have simply looked to a lot of different sources of information on general bodyweight fitness, a great deal of which is free online, quite frankly. You can even find YouTube videos demonstrating bodyweight exercises.

The most powerful core exercises in this general philosophy is really three particular exercises. But there are literally scores of other techniques and exercises one can do, and indeed, you should use a lot of variety. Those 3 primary ones include 1) Hindu pushups, 2) Hindu squats and 3) back bridging.

All three can be done quite badly, so you need to make certain you're getting good guidance on how to do these. Particularly with the squats and bridging, you can injure yourself if you do these improperly.

The general idea here is that human beings aren't designed to stay fit using huge weights or long-distance running. People with blown rotator cuffs, back problems, bad knees and the list goes on... not to mention long-distance running eats muscle along with fat. So, this fitness philosophy is about mastering your own bodyweight, just like the earliest human beings did, through standing and sitting, jumping, climbing, swiming, carrying ordinary objects and running short distances and/or sprinting... sitting up from a lying position, pushing yourself up from a face-down position... natural movements.

Another important difference here is that this totally does away with the idea of isolating muscles. On the contrary, you want to work out several or many muscles and muscle groups simultaneously. When you isolate muscles to work them out, often your various muscle groups end up growing in strength out of proportion to each other. Bodyweight exercise tends to keep your musculature in balance by working out many muscles at once, especially core. Usually, bodyweight afficionadoes don't do long distance running or lengthy aerobic exercise; rather, they prefer short distances at a time, and particularly sprinting, even uphill sprinting. All of this builds strong muscle mass, which alone burns a lot of calories even when you're at rest, and at the same time it doesn't balloon up your muscles. And this general style of fitness often bestows functional flexibility, as well.

This is functional fitness. Someone trains bench presses and they may be able to bench press some remarkable amount of weight. But this is a specific motion, not a range of motion - it's great if you expect heavy trees to regularly fall over your chest, but it isn't necessarily an overall functional fitness. Ask such a person to do a few Hindu pushups and they may run into difficulty, since this requires balanced core strength, flexibility of the spine and legs and shoulders, and a wide range of muscles all being used in conjuction and succession as you move through this fluid motion.

Yet another great benefit is that you don't need to buy any equipment or go to a gym to do this. You can do it anywhere - a park, at home, a hotel room - for free. You can get a few inexpensive items to assist your workout, including a jumprope, a pedometer to measure short distances, a pad to work on, maybe a home chin-up bar, a fitness ball, etc. But it's not absolutely necessary.

When I started to look at all the different kinds of ways to work out and get in better physical shape, this one pretty much just screamed out to me. Free or nearly free to learn and practice this, you can do it anywhere, you can do a pretty decent workout in only 30 minutes, and it generates genuine functional fitness.

For anyone concerned about bridging, this is a challenging thing to work your way up to, and you can start on a fitness ball, which I highly recommend for starting this. Although some people accuse it of compressing the spine, the exact opposite is true - it stretches the spine, especially when done in a proper, full gymnastic bridge that flexes your head backward. I've even seen x-rays on what this does to the spine, as it causes the back part of each vertebra to act on each other as levers, thus causing the vertebrae to spread apart a little, decompressing the spine, which is great for your spinal health. As I said toward the beginning, this can be done right or terribly wrong, so make sure you know exactly what you're doing! If you do this wrong, you will compress your spine and you can injure yourself.

Know your sources and start slow. Frankly, I started in poor shape but I could do about 20 regular pushups to begin with. But "Hindu pushups" are far more challenging, and frankly, when I began, I was lucky if I could barely crank out 4 before collapsing. They are tough! But that's the idea. Challenge yourself, and work your body the way it's designed to work.

I'll try to post a couple links later, when I can. (I'm at work.)

Here are a few links for some info on bodyweight exercise. Of course, there are tons of programs out there, almost all of them offering 95% of the same info, just marketed in their particular way, and they'll charge you a truckload for their full programs. Me, I'm not spending a lot; I'm just doing all the research I can -- the vast majority of this info is available out there for free, if you look for it. Nobody owns these exercises -- Hindu pushups and Hindu squats have been around for literally thousands of years.

Descriptions of many great exercises including bear walking, wall-walking and the tablemaker.
http://www.liveawesome.com/public/department58.cfm

Examples of some workout routines. (Remember, make sure you know how to do the exercises themselves properly.)
http://www.tbkfitness.org/Bodyweight1.html

Examples and explanations of many great exercises, including more advanced ones (with pictures) like handstand pushups.
http://www.frixo.com/sites/fitness/

Some info on former wrestling and kung fu champion Matt Furey, on
http://cbass.com/Furey.htm

Another trainer with more exercises, from kneeling jumps to turkish get-ups.
http://www.trainforstrength.com/exercises.shtml

A whole online community with lots of info & message boards...
http://www.bodyweightculture.com/

The sky's the limit, here. There are countless ways to get fit in this general exercise philosophy, with literally hundreds of exercise. There's no excuse to get bored. Lemme know how it goes!

This sounds like what we used to call isometric exercises and just some sound advice. I won't give up my running because I really enjoy it but I will look into some of these techniques. I have a lot of every day use injuries in my shoulders from hauling kids - this is the kind of thing I need to help with that.

Thanks for the links, Graphite. I'm interested in looking into it, but it's late now. Tomorrow. If I may suggest.....having blown out a knee once.....be cautions of running, jumping, plyometrics and the like until you're SURE your leg muscles are giving the joint excellent support. In the meanwhile, walk really fast, but watch out for anything that involves bouncing on or twisting the knee. Sorry if I'm butting in, here. Feel free to ignore me. lol

AuntWie, that's exactly my plan! I'd rather start too slow than too fast when it comes to risking my joints! Heck, protecting my joint health was one specific reason for choosing this form of exercise, to begin with. LOL (I just have to start slower, since I have been such a horrendous desk jockey for most of my life!)

Well, I'm still a real slug in the exercise department, but this sort of thing intrigues me more than using weights.

Thank you for posting all these links :) I'll be sure to come back to this thread and start looking at some of them.

I don't know if this is useful or not - but I came across the suggestion that if someone's overweight and/or very out of shape - they might need to start with weight training first, in order to *be able* to do the bodyweight resistance training.

Like - you might have to 'train up' a bit in advance.

What do you think of this idea?

Thanks for this - I was about to post the same question. I recently started working on being able to do a pullup. I do not agree at all that people should do weights first in order to be able to do these exercises. For instance, I could lift weights in my arms to prepare for pullups and then find out to my dismay that it is all about the core, which is what happened. I just don't have the abs for it! But only whole body exercises can work all the mucles necessary.

I apologize for not being able to answer anyone's questions expertly - I'm just barely learning this stuff, myself! But, from what I have read and learned so far, I certainly agree that if you are overweight very much, you don't want to dive in 100% with powerful calisthenic exercises (hindu pushups, hindu squats, etc.) You should work your way up if you have much excess weight (as I do!)....

But, that doesn't mean you have to use weights to do it. There are natural calisthenic exercises that can help you work your way up to that. You can do lighter versions of the scores and hundreds of calisthenic/bodyweight exercises, while you shed pounds, particularly to build core strength. At the same time, I don't think using lighter-style weights is "unnatural" either. I believe at this point that the unnatural stuff is when you start really isolating muscles with medium and heavy weights, and especially when you're using weights greater than you'd do with just bodyweight. That is really what is unnatural for how the human body is designed. Our ancestors were capable of being in excellent physical condition without that, and those heavier weight workout styles are what really cause injuries. And isolating muscles very much may or may not make you more prone to injury in other physical activities, but it will at least put you in a more limited condition, less functional, and generally imbalanced in your physical conditioning.

Me, I'm going to try to work my way up without weights, using lighter versions of various calisthenics/bodyweight exercises.

Oh, this is an old thread. Guess I got some advice the first time! Boy do my arms hurt from trying to do pullups.

I'm no expert either! In fact, it's a huge deal just to be going on leisurely walks in the evenings here and there.

Yes, I said it's a 'big deal' to go on a few measley walks. :o

Just the same though, I really do like this idea of using one's bodyweight to 'weight train' somehow.

Thank you very much for posting all this. Much appreciated :)

Sara