Top 3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Bodyweight Training

Whether your gym membership is getting too expensive, you’re hitting the road and have nowhere to work out, or just want to spice up your routine – the truth is, using your own bodyweight is a powerful stimulus to supplement – or even at times completely replace – exercise selection in your current training program. A few tips to get the most out of your bodyweight training:

1. Using basic combinations of traditional exercises that you’re probably already familiar with – pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, squats, lunges, etc. – and variations on these exercises can provide a very powerful training stimulus. In a previous post - Body Weight Workout - you can find a great example of a workout designed along these lines.

2.For an even more potent combination, you can add in other elements – such as a cardio element like running, biking, or swimming – into a giant circuit for a great effect. For example, we might run ½ mile, do 25 pull-ups, run another ½ mile, do 50 push-ups, run another ½ mile, do 75 sit-ups, and run one final ½ mile, followed by 100 bodyweight squats. This is much harder - and probably more beneficial for most people and their fitness goals - than doing the exercises on their own – or even just running 2 miles on its own.

3. Mix these workouts into your regular routine on a bi-weekly basis for a 4 week period and see how you like the results! You will see improvements not only in the exercises themselves – how many pull-ups you can do, for example – but also in your overall fitness level.