Tag: body weight exercise

The short answer: Yes.

Body weight training is just how it sounds. You aren’t using any external weights like dumbbells or free weights. Your body alone provides the resistance to work your muscles. Some popular examples include squats, planks, and pushups. These exercises do build your muscles, and for many of us, who are trying to tighten, strengthen, and benefit from the many health benefits of building muscle, this can be enough.

Simply put, Muscle size increases when you continually challenge your muscles to lift, push or hold resistance or weight. This process is known as muscle hypertrophy. So when your body struggles to hold you in a plank position, your shoulders, abs and legs are all working hard and with repeated work, muscles get larger.

All strength training has benefits, whether using body weight or external weights. Some positive outcomes include:

• Helps support your joints
• Helps maintain healthy blood sugar
• Improves your heart health
• Enhances your brain health
• Reduces Stress
• Improves confidence
• Strengthens your immune system
• Improves energy
• Helps manage body fat
• Reduces risk of injury
• Increases ability to perform physical tasks
• Strenthens your bones

Training using only your body weight has some additional benefits:

• You don’t need any equipment, so you can do it any time, anywhere, with no expense
• Body weight tends to be safer as the tension needed to hold weights can lead to injuries like tears in muscles or ligaments, as well as muscle sprains and joint pain
• There is often more flexibility with movements when using body weight. If you’ve incorporated these into your workouts, you know that there are many different versions of planks, squats, and sit-ups. There is less variety with weight bearing exercises
• Many weight bearing exercises work multiple body parts, requiring fewer moves and less time
• Bodyweight moves help improve balance and coordination

Here are some body weight exercises that are popular:

• Biceps: chinup and pullups
• Triceps: chinups, dips
• Chest: pull ups, pushups
• Shoulders: pushups, planks
• Back: chin ups, pull ups, dips
• Legs: squats, calf raises, lunges
• Abs: crunches

Its easy to see from this list that many body weight exercises use multiple muscle groups.

If you want to continue to build muscle mass with your workouts, you would have to continue to challenge your muscles. To do this using body weight you can increase reps and/or intensity, i.e. working faster or longer. But at some point you will see your results plateau, as you hit a ceiling with the amount of challenging you can do with body weight alone. If you’re happy with your progress, the good news is that you can maintain your muscle by continuing with the body weight exercises. However, if you want to continue to grow your muscle mass, you will need to use weights.

Incorporating weights into your workout also has some unique benefits. Some benefits of weight bearing exercise:

• Continuing to challenge your muscles by increasing weight, means continued muscle growth
• Strengthen your bones, reducing risk of osteoporosis
• increase your muscles ability to use glucose, which aids in preventing diabetes, and help normalize levels of insulin, possibly assisting with fat burning
• Strengthens tendons and ligaments, which can carry over to other activities like running
• Faster results
• It’s easier to tell when you’re improving/getting stronger as increase the amount of weight
• Greater assistance if athleticism in a different area is a goal (i.e. basketball, tennis, ice skating)

The decision to use body weight or actual weights will not be the same for everyone. It clearly depends on your goals, and how much time and equipment you have. Many professional athletes incorporate both types of exercises into their workouts, and this may be the best idea as doing so will ensure you take advantage of all of the benefits of both types of workouts.