"Strength training in a gym and doing bodyweight exercises seemed to confer roughly equivalent benefits. "
So no, bro, you don't have to lift.
Just buy a yoga mat and start doing press-ups / sit-ups / dips etc
That what we were told in the military back in the noughties and it makes sense; wherever you are in the world you can still do your daily sets. No need for weights and bars; a bath towel on the floor of a hotel room suffices.
The single most important thing is to do something that loads your muscles. Lifting weights is great. Bodyweight exercises are great. Swinging a kettlebell is great.
Too many beginners get caught up in picking the right program, or acquiring the right gear, or planning the perfect routine. It's far more important to just get started with something. Anything. You can optimize as you go and research more, but focus on making it a consistent habit first and foremost.
The paper defines gym-based strength training as "working out at a gym/weight training/exercise biking". That is, participants in the study were merely asked if they had done one of those three things in the past four weeks, and if they had, they were considered to have done "gym-based strength training".
This is of course already flawed methodology: using an exercise bike consists of a very, very large number of repetitions of a very, very sub-maximal load. This is not gym-based strength training in any form.
Checking whether you've engaged in the activity "working out at a gym" is also a very poor indicator of having participated in consistent and effective strength work. The vast majority of individuals do stupid shit and make no progress, year-after-year.
So, I suspect the reason that the two categories confer roughly equivalent benefits is because when you perform both in an ineffective and poor manner, all you're really doing is exercising (not training), and the exact form of exercise becomes irrelevant.
If you were to do a study that was tightly controlled/regulated and consisted, say, of doing a linear progressive overload program (where you see untrained individuals gain tens of pounds of muscle and put on hundreds of pounds onto their squats) I theorize you'd see very different results. The physiology of a muscular individual who squats over 400 lbs is very different from the physiology of a skinny individual who does push-ups every morning and morbidity is rooted in physiology.
Finally, there is no bodyweight exercise in existence that can provide adequate loading of the posterior chain/lower-body. The musculature is too vast/large and doing a bunch of air squats doesn't provide adequate stress to introduce an adaptation in all but the most untrained of individuals. Adequately stressing the smaller musculature of the upper body is easier--especially at first--but even here adaptation quickly slows due to the inability to effectively load the body in a progressive manner.
So no, bro, you probably have to lift. And yes, bro, once again we see that the entire field of exercise science is basically nonsense.
I followed your premise, but it leads to this conclusion which doesn't seem to follow. As you pointed out, the study poorly defined what counted as exercise. That said, that leaves a gap in terms of, what further benefit does lifting bring, that any other form of moderate exercise doesn't already? As you say, the physiology of both people are very different, but now we don't have a good study on if the physiology of strong weight lifters means you'll be healthier and live longer, obviously you'll be stronger, but what does that do to your health?
Their is bodyweight for the posterior and lower body other than air squat.
- Pistol squat, shrimp squat, sissy squat, nordic curl, bridge, sprint and many more.
And the progressive overload can be done by exercice variation, you do an harder one.
Exemple: incline push up -> push up -> diamond push up -> pseudo planche push up -> push up on gymnastic ring -> bulagarian push up on ring -> one hand push up.
The current bodyweight fitness is way way past just increasing rep on easy exercice.
Just buy a yoga mat and start doing press-ups / sit-ups / dips etc
No, don't. Seriously. If you want a long term routine to build strength and stay healthy (which is what we're talking about here), you can't just say "do exclusively upper body pressing for the rest of your life". Floor exercises are great, but none of them work your posterior chain in any meaningful way, which is almost always a weak point just due to modern life of constantly hunching over a keyboard. It's also very difficult to give your legs adequate intensity. It's not impossible, but it's hard.
At a bare minimum you need a bar for pullups. If you want to avoid barbells that's totally fine, but you need a real routine with a clear progression that isn't going to leave you with serious muscle imbalances after a year. https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/ is a good place to start if you really do want to do bodyweight strength training (although even they recommend barbell squats and deadlifts).
To second this, I slowly built up doing leg raises/push ups/planks since high school as a habit, I've never skipped more than one day at a time - it's astounding how good of shape I am in now, without ever having to go to a gym or worry about having the time.
Start super small, and increase when it feels too easy. That's all! You can skip every other day if you need, but never twice in a row. Then it becomes a habit in my experience.
After 3 years of lifting weights with compound exercises, I got bored, and now having so much fun with bodyweight, it's been 2 years now.
You can Google Handstand push up, pistol squats, full planche, high pull ups. Those kind of skills/balance/freedom of your body can't be reached with only lifting weights. Those are my new targets skills, I've been practising, and I'm having a LOT OF fun progressing toward those goals.
I still do squats and DeadLift from time to time because BodyWeight doesn't strength legs/back as much as I wish, becauseI think they're still important exercises to be solid.
Body weight exercises alone are boring but they become so much more enjoyable when combined with some demanding martial arts like boxing, kick boxing, muay thai or mma. The gains become obvious within a matter of weeks if you practice at least 2 times a week. Your lats and abs stand out very fast!
I believe it is that you are focusing more on one set of muscles with resistance bands or iron which makes it easier to enter into the "flow" state.
Bodyweight exercises involve so many different groups of muscles that it is hard to deeply focus on form and enter "flow". For example the moment I maintain my core perfectly straight on a pushup, my ankles may move out of alignment.
I prefer barbell and kettlebell exercises to bodyweight exercises myself, but I'm a little jealous that bodyweight exercises look cooler and can be demonstrated anywhere at any time in fun ways.
Gymnastics requires a lot more training and skill than lifting up and putting down iron. There are far less body weight exercises that you can do without specialized equipment than with dumbbells or barbells, because with bodyweight exercises you always have to push, never pull (with exception of pullups). Bodyweight exercises also generally take much longer to reach fatigue than weightlifting.
That's why I think weightlifting is better for the average person for health, although whatever gets one to actually exercise is what one should be doing!
Really depends on the person, I think. I would lose interest without being able to easily see progression week after week in the form of increasing weight on the bar. At least in the beginning.
r/bodyweightfitness has a great program [1] where you track your progression by moving from easy versions of exercises to very difficult versions - for example [2] from vertical pushups to incline pushups all the way to pseudo planche pushups.
I've made some progress on this, and it's quite satisfying. But I do agree that I'm having trouble getting the habit to stick, compared to when I used to lift. I have a sneaky feeling that this is more about having a gym outside of my regular work / living spaces than a weakness of the program itself though.
Comments
"Strength training in a gym and doing bodyweight exercises seemed to confer roughly equivalent benefits. "
So no, bro, you don't have to lift.
Just buy a yoga mat and start doing press-ups / sit-ups / dips etc
That what we were told in the military back in the noughties and it makes sense; wherever you are in the world you can still do your daily sets. No need for weights and bars; a bath towel on the floor of a hotel room suffices.
The single most important thing is to do something that loads your muscles. Lifting weights is great. Bodyweight exercises are great. Swinging a kettlebell is great.
Too many beginners get caught up in picking the right program, or acquiring the right gear, or planning the perfect routine. It's far more important to just get started with something. Anything. You can optimize as you go and research more, but focus on making it a consistent habit first and foremost.
The paper defines gym-based strength training as "working out at a gym/weight training/exercise biking". That is, participants in the study were merely asked if they had done one of those three things in the past four weeks, and if they had, they were considered to have done "gym-based strength training".
This is of course already flawed methodology: using an exercise bike consists of a very, very large number of repetitions of a very, very sub-maximal load. This is not gym-based strength training in any form.
Checking whether you've engaged in the activity "working out at a gym" is also a very poor indicator of having participated in consistent and effective strength work. The vast majority of individuals do stupid shit and make no progress, year-after-year.
So, I suspect the reason that the two categories confer roughly equivalent benefits is because when you perform both in an ineffective and poor manner, all you're really doing is exercising (not training), and the exact form of exercise becomes irrelevant.
If you were to do a study that was tightly controlled/regulated and consisted, say, of doing a linear progressive overload program (where you see untrained individuals gain tens of pounds of muscle and put on hundreds of pounds onto their squats) I theorize you'd see very different results. The physiology of a muscular individual who squats over 400 lbs is very different from the physiology of a skinny individual who does push-ups every morning and morbidity is rooted in physiology.
Finally, there is no bodyweight exercise in existence that can provide adequate loading of the posterior chain/lower-body. The musculature is too vast/large and doing a bunch of air squats doesn't provide adequate stress to introduce an adaptation in all but the most untrained of individuals. Adequately stressing the smaller musculature of the upper body is easier--especially at first--but even here adaptation quickly slows due to the inability to effectively load the body in a progressive manner.
So no, bro, you probably have to lift. And yes, bro, once again we see that the entire field of exercise science is basically nonsense.
I followed your premise, but it leads to this conclusion which doesn't seem to follow. As you pointed out, the study poorly defined what counted as exercise. That said, that leaves a gap in terms of, what further benefit does lifting bring, that any other form of moderate exercise doesn't already? As you say, the physiology of both people are very different, but now we don't have a good study on if the physiology of strong weight lifters means you'll be healthier and live longer, obviously you'll be stronger, but what does that do to your health?
Their is bodyweight for the posterior and lower body other than air squat. - Pistol squat, shrimp squat, sissy squat, nordic curl, bridge, sprint and many more.
And the progressive overload can be done by exercice variation, you do an harder one.
Exemple: incline push up -> push up -> diamond push up -> pseudo planche push up -> push up on gymnastic ring -> bulagarian push up on ring -> one hand push up.
The current bodyweight fitness is way way past just increasing rep on easy exercice.
I recommend the Recommended routine on reddit /r/bodyweightfitness to start: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
Sprints?
No, don't. Seriously. If you want a long term routine to build strength and stay healthy (which is what we're talking about here), you can't just say "do exclusively upper body pressing for the rest of your life". Floor exercises are great, but none of them work your posterior chain in any meaningful way, which is almost always a weak point just due to modern life of constantly hunching over a keyboard. It's also very difficult to give your legs adequate intensity. It's not impossible, but it's hard.
At a bare minimum you need a bar for pullups. If you want to avoid barbells that's totally fine, but you need a real routine with a clear progression that isn't going to leave you with serious muscle imbalances after a year. https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/ is a good place to start if you really do want to do bodyweight strength training (although even they recommend barbell squats and deadlifts).
To second this, I slowly built up doing leg raises/push ups/planks since high school as a habit, I've never skipped more than one day at a time - it's astounding how good of shape I am in now, without ever having to go to a gym or worry about having the time.
Start super small, and increase when it feels too easy. That's all! You can skip every other day if you need, but never twice in a row. Then it becomes a habit in my experience.
IDK about you, but bodyweight exercises are much more boring that lifting iron.
After 3 years of lifting weights with compound exercises, I got bored, and now having so much fun with bodyweight, it's been 2 years now.
You can Google Handstand push up, pistol squats, full planche, high pull ups. Those kind of skills/balance/freedom of your body can't be reached with only lifting weights. Those are my new targets skills, I've been practising, and I'm having a LOT OF fun progressing toward those goals.
I still do squats and DeadLift from time to time because BodyWeight doesn't strength legs/back as much as I wish, becauseI think they're still important exercises to be solid.
Body weight exercises alone are boring but they become so much more enjoyable when combined with some demanding martial arts like boxing, kick boxing, muay thai or mma. The gains become obvious within a matter of weeks if you practice at least 2 times a week. Your lats and abs stand out very fast!
Agreed, for whatever reason I get bored to tears doing most bodyweight exercises.
Strangely even adding something as simple as a resistance band to the exercise makes it more enjoyable.
I wonder if there is any sort of reason for this phenomenon - I doubt we we are alone!
I believe it is that you are focusing more on one set of muscles with resistance bands or iron which makes it easier to enter into the "flow" state. Bodyweight exercises involve so many different groups of muscles that it is hard to deeply focus on form and enter "flow". For example the moment I maintain my core perfectly straight on a pushup, my ankles may move out of alignment.
Yeah, I really tried, especially during this lockdown, but it was just too demoralizing.
I prefer barbell and kettlebell exercises to bodyweight exercises myself, but I'm a little jealous that bodyweight exercises look cooler and can be demonstrated anywhere at any time in fun ways.
There are way more body weight and gymnastics movements than lifting that you might do as exercise...
Gymnastics requires a lot more training and skill than lifting up and putting down iron. There are far less body weight exercises that you can do without specialized equipment than with dumbbells or barbells, because with bodyweight exercises you always have to push, never pull (with exception of pullups). Bodyweight exercises also generally take much longer to reach fatigue than weightlifting.
That's why I think weightlifting is better for the average person for health, although whatever gets one to actually exercise is what one should be doing!
Make sure it's rusty black iron, not chrome plated or plastic filled with sand.
Really depends on the person, I think. I would lose interest without being able to easily see progression week after week in the form of increasing weight on the bar. At least in the beginning.
r/bodyweightfitness has a great program [1] where you track your progression by moving from easy versions of exercises to very difficult versions - for example [2] from vertical pushups to incline pushups all the way to pseudo planche pushups.
I've made some progress on this, and it's quite satisfying. But I do agree that I'm having trouble getting the habit to stick, compared to when I used to lift. I have a sneaky feeling that this is more about having a gym outside of my regular work / living spaces than a weakness of the program itself though.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/exercises/pu...
That was the trick for me. Seeing constant measured progress is a great motivator.
I do bodyweight work now, but it's strictly as support for my other athletic goals. It's just too boring to me to do for its own sake.
Do you (or anyone) have a recommended bodyweight routine?
The recommended routine from the bodyweightfitness subreddit is aptly named: https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
Not an expert here, but this is what I do and enjoy: you need just 4 exercises: push, pull, legs, abs.
Push: work towards 1 arm, 1 leg pushups
Pull: pullups on a bar (not chinups) Some people can do a 1 arm pullup but I'm far from that.
Legs: work towards pistol ups (=1 leg squads)
Abs: ab roller and/or leg ups with feet touching top of bar
The first 3 are the top of their class. For abs you can choose from a lot of different ones (dragon flag etc.)
I'm getting older (41), so I shifted from 3 times a week going all out, to every day training while not pushing myself to the extreme.