Why We Love Bodyweight Exercises

Getting to the gym isn’t always easy.  Sometimes you have only 15 minutes at home before you rush on to the next thing.  This is why I love Body Weight Exercises.  You can get an AMAZING workout in without using any equipment and just the resistance of your own body.

Body weight exercises aren’t particularly complicated and if you can get up out of a chair then you can do them.  You don’t need to know a lot about technique in order to do them effectively and you can make them harder or easier depending on your fitness level.

Lets take the squat for example.  If you have never exercised before, then I would get you to sit on a chair then stand up again.  We’d repeat this exercise until your legs get strong enough so that instead of sitting on the chair you just touch your bottom onto the chair (without putting any weight on it) then stand up again.  The next step is to start moving the chair away until you can perform the movement without the chair.  Once you’ve got the basic movement we can start adding in variations to really strengthen and tone those legs.  You can try narrow squats, plié squats, sumo squats, jumping squats and as you get much more advanced we can start working on single leg squats and pistol squats.  The list is never ending!  We can always make things harder or easier depending on your level.

There is little risk of injury with bodyweight workouts.  If you concentrate on what you are doing, and work to your own level then the exercises are perfectly safe.

We can perform cardio with our bodyweight, we can work on strength, toning, weight loss and flexibility.  You can even increase your lean muscle mass with just your bodyweight!

If you think bodyweight exercises are easy then check out this video – heehee!!

I love being able to just stop what I’m doing and jump into a quick workout, I know I can train while I’m travelling without worrying about whether there is a gym near by and best of all I can encourage my friends and family to join in with me.

Tell me, What is your favourite bodyweight exercise?