The fitness industry is filled with gimmicks and gadgets, scams and unrealistic promises. Just take a cruise through your neighborhood on a Saturday morning and you’ll see the detritus of unrealized weight-loss dreams in yard sales peppered with abs machines and other lonely, little-used fitness equipment at bargain-basement prices.
The stuff doesn’t work.
Or the people who bought it didn’t know how to use it properly or eat right during training.
Or they simply lost motivation after the first week it was out of the box.
You’ll find no such bull between the covers of this book, no wacky claims or suspect fitness gadgets. It’s a garbage-free zone. In fact, it’s pretty much an equipment-free zone. This book is all about getting back to the basics by using tried and proven bodyweight training tactics to get you moving, feeling, and looking better. It’s about taking the time to establish a sound fitness foundation that you can build on for the rest of your life using natural exercises you can do wherever you happen to be. It’s about you versus gravity. When you think about it, exercise machines—even old-school barbells and dumbbells—are relatively recent inventions. They became mainstream only after the golden age of bodybuilding in the 1960s and ’70s. In contrast, human beings have been using their body weight (and formal calisthenics) to be strong and fit for centuries. In society’s constant quest to evolve and innovate, we sometimes overlook the brilliance in simplicity.
This book promises results through logic and simplicity. Machines and weights have their place, but just consider all of the incredible benefits to be had by training with nothing more than what God gave you.
THE TOP 10 BENEFITS OF BODYWEIGHT TRAINING
1 Bodyweight Training Can Be Done Anywhere
I like to call bodyweight training “a zero-excuse fitness experience” because it eliminates so many of those common excuses for why you can’t exercise today.
Consider this study from Marquette University in Milwaukee, which surveyed 1,044 college students to measure the motives and barriers to exercise. The top excuses students gave for blowing off exercise: lack of time, lack of energy, dislike of exercising in public, facility limitations, and lack of knowledge about how to use fitness equipment.
Bodyweight training vaporizes all of those excuses. A bodyweight workout doesn’t cost you a penny. When you use your body for resistance, you don’t need to join a gym and feel intimidated about working out in front of angry dudes wearing sweat-stained Megadeth T-shirts. Most bodyweight exercises can be performed in a 6-by-6-square-foot space (basically the length of your body) anywhere, including the privacy of your own home. You don’t have to waste time and gasoline driving someplace to work out. Wherever you are—home, work, vacation, business travel—that’s your workout facility, and you can keep up with your training without skipping a beat.
All this leads to a related point about anywhere, anytime training. Bodyweight workouts are sustainable. In other words, they are easy to stick with and do for the rest of your life. I believe that if something isn’t sustainable, it’s questionable, especially when it comes to scheduling workouts or committing to a diet plan. What’s the point of doing something for 30 or 90 days if you know that there’s no way you’re going to keep doing it on day 31 or 91 and beyond? Unfortunately, when most people start a fitness program, they rarely take a look at the big picture. Nor do they consider what’s next after completing the program.
Bodyweight training is easy to sustain because it eliminates opportunities to say, “That’s a hassle, and I’m done.”
In my years of training people, I’ve discovered three simple truths.
Most people can commit to high-intensity exercise several times per week.
Most people can find at least 10 minutes and up to 30 minutes to squeeze in a challenging workout.
Most people can commit to doing some low-intensity activity every day.
But here’s the key: The exercise has to be ultraconvenient, and that’s the big plus for bodyweight exercise and what makes it easy to sustain for the long haul.
2 Bodyweight Training Bodyweight Training Is Efficient
When you train with weights and machines, you often have to adjust the loads during your workout, and that takes time. Whether it’s sticking the pin through a different hole in a weight stack, adding weight plates to a barbell, or grabbing a new pair of dumbbells, you lose precious moments while changing weights instead of burning fat, torching calories, and building muscle. Bodyweight exercise significantly reduces transition time, allowing you to seamlessly make an exercise easier or harder or switch between exercises quickly for shorter rest periods between sets, resulting in greater overall training density. The greater your training density—that is, the amount of work you complete in a certain period of time—the leaner and stronger you will be.
Plus, remember that when working out at a gym, you often have to wait for machines to open up or for other lifters to finish with the set of dumbbells you need. There’s no waiting game with bodyweight exercises.
3 Bodyweight Training Broils Body Fat
The best exercises for fat loss are resistance-training moves that:
•Work multiple muscle groups at once.
•Allow you to easily alternate between exercises that work different parts of your body.
•Can be made easier midset to allow you to keep working without stopping and resting.
•Can be done anytime, anywhere with minimal space and equipment.
The Bodyweight 8 exercises featured in this book hit these criteria.
The best way to do these exercises for maximum fat loss is to use alternating set formats with minimal to no rest between movements. Short rest periods, typically 30 seconds or fewer, release key fat-burning hormones like growth hormone while allowing you to burn more calories per minute. This approach is known as metabolic resistance training because it provides the maximum body-fat-broiling effect in minimal time, boosts cardiovascular conditioning, and delivers a postworkout afterburn that can elevate your metabolic rate for several days after completing your workout. There are several ways to set up alternating sets.
SUPERSETS
Alternate between two exercises.
TRISETS
Alternate between three exercises.
CIRCUITS
Alternate between four or more exercises.
All these options act like kryptonite to belly fat because they keep your heart rate up the whole time. It’s like getting the same aerobic benefits as running but with the added muscle-building benefits of resistance training.
A study reported in April 2010 in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research showed that alternating between two opposing muscle groups (such as biceps and triceps or chest and back) burned roughly 30 percent more calories per minute than traditional straight sets of the same exercise. There was also a greater increase in postworkout metabolism. Try it yourself: Alternate between Pushups and Pullups without rest instead of just doing consecutive sets of Pushups with rest periods in between. These supersets allow you to do more work in less time. Another way to superset is by alternating between upper- and lower-body exercises or even unilateral exercises of the same movement like Lunges on your left and right leg.
Bodyweight circuit training boosts postworkout fat burn, too. In a study published by the American College of Sports Medicine, researchers constructed a 12-station circuit of alternating upper- and lower-body exercises in which participants performed 30 seconds of work for each move with only 10 seconds of rest between them. The circuit lasted 7 minutes and was completed two or three times for a full workout duration of only 14 to 21 minutes. Results showed that this type of training was ideal for busy people looking to burn fat, build muscle, boost cardio conditioning, and even improve key health markers like insulin sensitivity.
The featured fat-frying workout in this book, the Bodyweight Burners, incorporates this metabolic-resistance-training approach to help you get leaner and fitter faster than you ever thought possible.
4 Bodyweight Training Builds Brawn and Trains Your Brain
Where machines simply train your muscles, bodyweight exercises build brawn and train your brain. Exercise machines were created in an attempt to better target and isolate a given muscle group. They were created to simplify exercises to the point that all you had to do was sit down, select a weight, and perform a set movement on a predetermined, fixed path. Machines were made to be foolproof, so that even a caveman could do it. While this certainly made exercising easier (and sexier), and it certainly helped gyms sell more memberships, ultimately this trend didn’t invite your brain to the fitness party.
Consider the Lat-Pulldown machine. When you perform a machine Lat-Pull, because the movement is set by the rigid structure of the machine, all of your body’s key joint stabilizers don’t need to activate to help you safely execute the movement. The machine compensates for your joints by taking your central nervous system (your brain) out of the equation. You don’t really learn the movement but simply go through the motions. So even though you get a big muscle pump and it will burn oh so good, there is virtually no functional carryover to real-world movements. Plus, because you don’t train your muscles to stabilize your joints in free space, you increase the risk of injury both during day-to-day activities and in sports. You end up being all show and no go.
Now, let’s take a look at the Chinup, the body-weight alternative to the machine Lat-Pull. With your body as your barbell, your brain needs to communicate with your muscles to execute the movement with perfect form through your natural, pain-free range of motion. Yeah, there’s a lot more going on in this bodyweight exercise, and your central nervous system is called into play every step of the way. What’s more, because your body is basically flopping around underneath your grip on the bar, the Chinup activates a greater number of muscles.
Researchers at James Cook University in Australia compared muscle activation in subjects doing both Chinups and Lat Pulldowns and found that the Chinup required far more work from the biceps and spinal erectors than the lat-machine exercises because of the instability created by the bodyweight exercise.
SECRET WEAPON FOR WEIGHT LOSS
THE PUSHUP
Bodyweight exercises are so effective against body fat that your Pushup skills may predict your success at keeping the weight off. A Canadian study reported in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise traced the relationship between musculoskeletal fitness and weight gain in a group of individuals for 20 years. Researchers found that the number of Pushups a person could complete (one of the measures of musculoskeletal fitness) was significantly related to how fat they would become over the years. It turned out that individuals who performed poorly in a Pushup test were 78 percent more likely to gain 20 pounds over the next 2 decades. The authors attributed this connection to the fact that those who excel at Pushups are probably more likely to engage in other bodyweight activities that burn fat.
5 Bodyweight Exercise Prepares You for Life
Bodyweight movements are natural, functional, and athletic. They ready your body for the way it’ll be used every day. They teach you how to properly sit down into a chair and build the strength and coordination to help you stand back up. That might not seem like something you need to practice doing now, but how about when you are 87? You’ll be glad you did them. Bodyweight exercises prepare your body for going up and down staircases and hills. They’ll improve your reaction time to catch yourself when you trip and prevent you from doing a face-plant. They’ll make you better at sports while developing all 639 muscles in your body to their fullest potential. Now you’ve got show and go! By focusing on movements instead of specific muscle groups, you develop the entire neuromuscular system, not just your muscles. You develop better overall body awareness and coordination.
Bodyweight exercises are more dynamic than barbell lifts and machine exercises. They warm the muscles and prepare them for action while they strengthen and tone. A study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that cadets at the US Military Academy who performed such bodyweight exercises as Squats, Pushups, and Lunges sprinted faster, jumped higher, and threw harder than those who did a static warmup. Why? Study coauthor Danny McMillian says that dynamic moves trigger nervous-system activity, allowing more muscle fibers to be engaged for action. Other studies show that dynamic bodyweight exercises result in more coordinated and forceful muscle contractions.
6 Bodyweight Training Is for Beginners and Experts
One of the biggest myths in fitness is that you can’t build serious strength or significant muscle mass with bodyweight exercises. The fact is that all your body knows is time and tension. Time describes how long the muscles are placed under a given tension, and tension describes the amount of muscular force that is required to execute a given movement or hold a certain position. Though most people think that the only way to get super strong and muscular is to do heavy weight training, all you need to do is select intense-enough movements that require you to create maximal force and activate more muscle fibers. It’s the unique combination of high-tension exercises and sufficient training volume (amount of work or sets/reps completed) that is the key to building strength and muscle, regardless of whether the exercise is equipment based or equipment free.
Now, if all you do is the same floor Pushup for as many reps as you can over and over again, like most people do when it comes to body-weight training, then you will never build serious strength or muscle. That’s because you’re not increasing the relative intensity of the exercise, you’re just adding volume. So, yeah, doing endless reps of Pushups will not help you build as much strength and size as heavy Bench Presses for 5 to 10 reps. But selecting a Pushup variation (like a Feet-Elevated Pushup or a Single-Arm Pushup) that sufficiently challenges you for that same 5 to 10 reps will get you to your strength and size goals. As with any type of training, you must constantly push yourself with more challenging bodyweight exercises in order to progress. Greater intensity produces greater results. (For real-world proof that bodyweight exercise alone can develop strength and amazing physiques, look at gymnasts who perform feats of strength with nothing but their bodies on rings, parallel bars, and pommel horses.)
The beauty of bodyweight training is that it doesn’t require any equipment to start, and the basic moves are the perfect place for beginners, women, and endurance athletes who may not have had much strength-training experience. But that’s not to say that bodyweight training is only for novices. When you progress like a pro, as I’ll show you in Chapter 3, you’ll be able to make any exercise harder or easier based on your goals. Whether you’re using harder movements for fewer reps to develop strength and boost muscle mass or easier movements for higher reps to accelerate fat loss and improve your conditioning, your body is the only tool you’ll need to get the job done.
7 Bodyweight Training Is Fun and Full of Variety
The fun in training comes with consistent progress and always having something special to shoot for. There’s no denying the instant gratification that comes with using heavier weights in the gym, but I’d argue that you can use bodyweight training to get the same level of satisfaction and more. That’s because the pursuit of overcoming gravity is an endless one.
Lots of people can do a regular Pushup, but how many people do you know who can do a Single-Arm Handstand Pushup? At the time I wrote this book, I knew I couldn’t, though it’s one of my goals, and I’m working on it. There are literally dozens of small wins and progressions that come in between the basic Pushup and the most advanced Pushup on the planet. These freakish fitness feats will take years of dedicated practice to achieve. But I’m a firm believer that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward. Plus, with bodyweight training, you’re always striving to perform more advanced skills—skills that apply in the real world and that you can show off to your friends and family—where with weight training, you’re just trying to keep adding more weight to the bar.
The fun in training also comes with variety. There are hundreds of different ways to perform every key movement in this book using the progression principles that I will teach you: loading, stability, body angle, tempo, range of motion, complexity, and metabolic demand. There are hundreds of ways to construct workouts using these same exercises based on your fitness level, goal, and schedule. Progressive bodyweight training kicks boredom to the curb and will help you bust through any potential fitness plateau. In the end, bodyweight training provides a sound training system that you can use for the rest of your life without ever repeating the same workout (if you don’t want to). The options are endless. You’ll never get bored.
8 Bodyweight Training Builds Balance and Prevents Injury
Sound bodyweight training builds structural balance—that is, a well-balanced body where the muscles on the front of you are in proportion with those on your back side. You achieve structural balance by paying an equal amount of attention to pushing and pulling movements for the upper body and knee- and hip-dominant movements for the lower body. Unfortunately, our sedentary, seated lifestyles combined with the fact that most people prioritize their mirror muscles (those on the front side of the body) have led to structural imbalances that negatively affect our posture, change our bone and joint positioning, and cause movement that leads to pain.
Too much pushing without enough pulling results in rounded, forward shoulders and hunchback posture, which cause shoulder pain. A study from Nova Southeastern University found that weight lifters, especially those who did behind-the-neck Presses, were more likely to suffer shoulder injuries due to muscle imbalances. The researchers found that weight lifters were likely to focus on the deltoids, upper trapezius, and internal rotators (i.e., pecs and lats), missing the shoulder external rotator and lower trapezius. This creates an imbalance and decreases mobility, putting weight lifters at a higher risk for injury.
Too much squatting without enough bridging or hip hinging results in quad dominance, weak glutes and hamstrings, tight hips, and ultimately knee pain. Consider the issue of imbalances between your two quad muscles: the vastus medialis and the vastus lateralis. A study from the British Journal of Sports Medicine estimates that 25 percent of the general population and 60 percent of the athletic population suffer from knee pain where imbalance between these two muscles is a key contributing factor. And yet there’s an easy fix for this: namely, the bodyweight Lunge. A study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research suggests that Lunges, which target the inner and outer thigh equally, can correct the imbalance.
It’s worth mentioning that you can’t just train your upper body and neglect your lower body, and vice versa, as that will also result in structural imbalance. After all, the vast majority of your muscle mass and metabolic potential resides in your lower half, so if you don’t pay equal attention to your legs and hips, you’ll never get as lean as you can be. In addition, all athletic movements are driven through your hips, and that’s why I always stress to clients that it’s all about the glutes! Being top heavy will affect your posture and balance and cause pain in your back and lower body. Spend at least an equal amount of time or more on your lower body if you want to be truly fit and injury free.
Bodyweight training also bulletproofs your joints by taking them through full ranges of motion. In particular, it develops strength and stability at extreme joint angles, like full flexion or extension, where most injuries occur. For example, the king of lower-body bodyweight exercises is the Pistol Squat. It requires you to stand on one leg with the other leg extended out in front of your body as you squat down until your hamstring rests on the calf of your supporting leg, and then hold this position with ease before standing all the way back up. To accomplish this feat, you need the perfect combination of strength, mobility, and stability. Once you can do it, you’ll have an elite level of athleticism that most professional athletes can’t display.
9 Bodyweight Training Strengthens Your Core and Unloads Your Spine
One of the most unique aspects of bodyweight training is that every key exercise is extremely core intensive and targets your abs way more than the machine or barbell alternatives for that same movement.
Pushups beat barbell Bench Presses and machine Chest Presses because your back is unsupported and all of your muscles surrounding your hips and trunk need to kick in to stabilize your spine and prevent your lower back from hyperextending. In fact, a Mayo Clinic study found that Planks, specifically Side Planks, are effective at building abs without stressing your spine. The aligned spine throughout the exercise reduces injuries without sacrificing increasing abs strength. As you progress to more advanced Pushups by narrowing your base of support and reducing points of contact with the ground, all of the muscles between your hips and shoulders need to work together to prevent spinal extension and rotation in multiple planes of motion. Many top fitness experts agree that if you can perform a Single-Arm Pushup, you have all the core strength you’ll ever need.
Bodyweight Squats are much easier on your spine than barbell Squats and machine Leg Presses. These heavy external loads put a ton of compressive forces through your spine, and ultimately your lower back is the limiting factor in how much you can lift. A study from the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that when performing a weighted Squat with 60 percent of their body weight, lifters hyperextended their lumbar spines, risking serious injury. With a bodyweight Squat, you can progress to staggered and split-stance foot positions to shift the weight more to one leg or the other. This provides the necessary strength and muscle-building stimulus without adding additional stress to your spine. Ultimately, you’ll build up to the Pistol Squat, which has you squatting your entire body weight on one leg with no excessive forces on your spine. Plus, single-leg-stance exercises require all of the muscles on the inside and outside of your trunk and hips to activate and stabilize your knees and spine.
Pullups trump barbell Bent-Over Rows and machine Pulldowns for multiple reasons. One, hanging from a bar decompresses your spine and lengthens your body. This is critical, considering that we put compressional forces on our spine all day as we sit, walk, and stand. Two, any time your arms are overhead, your core has to work harder to stabilize your spine. Even if you can’t do Pullups right away, the bodyweight Row will still beat the barbell Bent-Over Row because it puts your spine in a safer position while working the entire back side of your body. Though Pulldowns require you to place your arms overhead, they also have you sitting down, often with your knees anchored to the unit, providing you with more stability and leverage to perform the movement, ultimately letting your abs take a break. When you perform Pullups the way I teach them in this book, from a hollow-body position with the legs fully extended, you will be amazed how sore your core will be the next day.
10 Bodyweight Training Sculpts Striking Symmetry and a Perfectly Proportioned Physique
Looking good is one of the most powerful motivators when it comes to working out with consistency. Sure, you want to move better and feel better, be healthy, and have energy to attack life with vigor, but being a lean, mean fitness machine does a hell of a lot for your self-esteem and confidence. Though any integrated exercise and nutrition program can improve your looks, there is no better solution than body-weight training to maximize your genetic potential—to develop the most natural, aesthetically pleasing physique possible.
You won’t look supernatural, you’ll look super and natural. Rather than resembling a hulking beast that takes up too much space or some weirdly proportioned Picasso painting, you’ll appear as a ripped warrior who can move with grace. Bodyweight training has been used to build some of the most attractive physiques the world has ever seen in gymnasts, boxers, mixed martial artists, soldiers, and the great warriors of centuries past. You’ll sculpt the shoulders of a superhero, making your waist look smaller from every angle. You’ll develop legs of steel, making you as athletic as you appear. You’ll forge a firm and fierce midsection, making you a target for endless questions like:
“How many hours do you work out per day to look like that?”
“I take it you haven’t eaten a carb in the last decade, right?”
“Are you Photoshopped?”
Bodyweight training will turn you into a Greco-Roman statue. Men, you’ll sculpt striking symmetry and a perfectly proportioned physique. Ladies, you’ll carve a classically beautiful physique and a flawless figure. You will look the best you possibly can. You will look timeless.