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.)
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