When you think about building muscles, your first thought may be to lift weights. However, body-weight exercises have a lot to offer to help improve your functional strength, stability, and flexibility. They are also a great way to get started with strength training and add variety to your workout routine.
What Are Body-Weight Exercises?
Body-weight exercises are activities that use your body weight to provide resistance against gravity without any additional equipment, such as weights. Furthermore, many body-weight exercises can be modified so they can be done in many ways to challenge your muscles.
Some more commonly known exercises are push-ups, pull-ups, dips, planks, crunches, leg raises, mountain climbers, squats, lunges, burpees, and jumping jacks. Each has its own movements and works different muscle groups in your body. In fact, you certainly can get an effective full-body workout.
You can combine several of these types of exercises into a single workout. You can also modify them to match your current fitness level by adjusting how you do them, for how long, and how many. With that said, let’s look at some of the pros and cons of body-weight exercises.
The Pros Of Body-Weight Exercises
The great thing about body-weight exercises is that all you need is yourself. You don’t need any special equipment. You can perform them anywhere, such as in your living room, in the park, while traveling, or in the gym.
They are also a great way to improve functional strength since many exercises mimic everyday lifting, bending, and reaching, such as cleaning, running errands, or bringing in groceries. Being capable of doing these tasks is essential to maintaining your quality of life.
Body-weight exercises will become easier after you start doing them regularly. That means you’re making progress. You can also modify each exercise to take it to the next level. For example, you can adjust a push-up to a decline push-up, do fewer reps, and make them harder to complete. As a result, you can shift the load on your muscles and continue to build strength.
Body-weight exercises use multiple muscle groups simultaneously, which can help you get a comprehensive workout in a short amount of time. Additionally, most exercises engage your core, enhancing those muscles that provide stability.
They also help improve your flexibility and balance by encouraging a full range of motion and building on your body’s natural movements. This can reduce your risks of injury compared to the force of lifting heavy weights.
The Cons Of Body-Weight Exercises
Depending on your health and fitness goals, body-weight exercises have limitations. Unlike lifting weights, where you can increase your load, you are limited by how much you weigh. For example, if you’re doing a push-up, you’re bench pressing approximately 60% of your body weight. Therefore, you’ll have to do a variation of a push-up, such as wide-grip, diamond, or decline, to increase the resistance or target muscles differently.
Your progress can more easily plateau because your body is adapting to the movements and your weight. It may be more challenging to push through that barrier and continue to progress by doing variations of your body-weight exercises. This can be especially challenging to build muscles in your lower body. For those who lift weights, they simply add more weight.
Body-weight exercises are great at engaging multiple muscle groups. However, it’s harder to target specific muscles. For example, you can do a bicep curl with weights to target your biceps. On the other hand, a chin-up will not only engage your biceps but also your back, shoulders, and core. Therefore, lifting weights may be better when you want to target a specific muscle group.
The Takeaway
Body-weight exercises are a great way to build and maintain fitness around functional strength, flexibility, and overall health. They are also a good option for beginners or anyone wanting to add variety to their workout routine. However, incorporating other forms of resistance training, such as free weights or resistance bands, may be necessary if you’re looking to build significant muscle mass or maximal strength. Although body-weight workouts or lifting weights have their pros and cons, choosing what’s best for you will depend on your fitness goals.
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