Bodyweight Training Is A Great Bodybuilding Tool

Bodyweight Training is any exercise that uses your own body weight as resistance. These exercises are great for warm ups before a strenuous activity to get the blood flowing to the muscles or can be excellent for fat loss when put together in a circuit.

Bodyweight Training And Lifting Weights

Bodyweight training before lifting weights is great for warming up the muscle before you put a lot of stress on it. For example, if you were to work out your chest with a heavy bench press routine. Doing 10 to 20 push ups before your bench press will prepare your chest muscles for that strenuous routine.

Another example of using bodyweight exercises as warm ups before a strenuous activity, such as running, would be performing jumping lunges and burpees. The jumping lunge will loosen up and stretch the leg muscles. The burpees will warm up the lower and upper body. Burpees are great for getting your blood pumping throughout your entire body. These bodyweight exercises reduce the chance of cramps that are common when running without any preparation.

Bodyweight Training And Fat Loss

Bodyweight Training for fat loss can be done by combining 3 to 6 different bodyweight exercises to create a circuit. This is where you can get creative and compliment the routine to meet your physical demands. The duration of each exercise and the time you rest can be left up to you. And, how many times you wish to repeat the circuit.

For beginners, I would recommend doing three different bodyweight exercises, each with a duration of 30 seconds for the execution and 30 seconds rest after the completion of each bodyweight exercise. Repeating each circuit a total of 3 times would be a nice starting point to see where you are physically.

Here is a sample of a beginners bodyweight circuit…

• Jumping jacks = 30 seconds
• rest = 30 seconds
• Jump squats = 30 seconds
• rest = 30 seconds
• Running in place = 30 seconds
• rest = 30 seconds

As you progress and get physically stronger, you can do four things to make this bodyweight circuit more challenging…

• Increase the exercise time
• Decrease the rest time
• Add more bodyweight exercises to the circuit
• Add more sets to the circuit.

Bodyweight Training Final Thought

The sky is the limit when it comes to bodyweight training. Don’t be discouraged to take full advantage of all the benefits it has to offer.

Henry Chervenka

Bodyweight Training related information.