Are Bodyweight Exercises as Good as Weights?

  The presumption most people make is to think that bodyweight is zero — when in fact, many beginning exercisers are obese or overweight, and so at a great disadvantage doing only bodyweight exercises. The simplest example is doing a pullup; nine out of ten untrained people cannot do even one pullup — and so that exercise becomes prohibitive to them. But also, nine out of ten of the world’s strongest men competitors also cannot do even one pullup.

So in that simple case, a bodyweight exercise of this type, would be useless to them. The great advantage of weight-training equipment is not that one can add more weight, but can adjust the weight DOWN in that movement to whatever their present weakness is — and build up their strength from there by doing the movement properly, rather than doing it improperly and dangerously from the get-go, and not only not getting any benefit from their exercise, but dramatically increasing their risk for serious injury, or even death.

A few people can do bodyweight exercises productively — because they are genetically gifted in that way. Those are the gymnasts who have exceptional builds for it — but they are not the average person. Those people have a greater than normal power to weight ratio — just like the dancers who can stand on their toes — but everybody else would break their toes or necks attempting to do so.

Those are the prodigies in every human activity, and why it is important for every individual to find out what they are designed and built for — to have this competitive advantage in their undertakings and life. Finding that out accurately and honestly, requires one to lower the bar to where they can perform such movements expertly — as many times as they have to, because it is the precision of form that is the mastery no matter what the resistance and circumstances.

That’s why the world champion lifters will start off with just the bar — and if they do that precisely, will go up in weight — but it is counterproductive just to slap on more weight doing who knows what, and wonder why an injury puts an end to that manner of training/activity. In weight-training, the most productive parts are the beginning and the ending positions — which are avoided by most trainees because that is the truly hard part to get right. That is the full relaxation changing into the full contraction — instead of maintaining a midrange contraction and leveraging the weight up and then letting gravity lower the weight down. We know gravity works very well.

But what we really wish to know — is the state of greatest muscular relaxation, and the state of greatest muscular contraction — that only the heart muscle must act in that way, and because of it, performs the critically important work of pumping blood out to the extremities. When the skeletal muscles act in that way, they pump the blood and fluids back towards the heart — and that rate of flow (effectiveness) is determined by the difference between the relaxed state and contracted state.

When lifting overly heavy weights (including one’s own bodyweight), the muscle has to maintain at least that level of contraction — and if there is no relaxation phase, the muscle will fail rather than persist indefinitely sufficient to complete a task. That is the value and manner of work — and not just one and done, in as sloppy a style as one can get away with. And though many will think it doesn’t matter precisely what one is doing, in everything, that is all that matters — and distinguishes success from failure.

Thus the importance of using as light a weight as one feels comfortable to enable relaxation — is that they can go into complete relaxation, and then extend the range of that movement beyond the normal limits of the bone on bone lockout — that also cannot be accessed unless the weight (resistance) is light enough to allow that extended range of movement. That is largely what differentiates the prodigy from everyone else — their range is unparalleled, rather than their effort. In fact, they make every movement seem easy and effortless — rather than looking as hard as possible. That is the way one is conditioning to be — all one’s life.

For that reason, bodyweight exercises are usually prohibitive — while extremely light weights allow the fullest range from contraction to relaxation — and why the eccentric contraction (lowering the weight slowly) will result in increasing muscle soreness — because thee muscle is not allowed to relax — but maintains its contraction while necessarily holding one’s breath. This does not allow work to be performed aerobically (with breathing), but causes premature failing of the cardiovascular system rather than a neuromuscular failure. That is, one stops because one no longer has sufficient air to continue — because one has disrupted the breathing pattern that allows air to move in and out as required/needed.

Competitive bodybuilders frequently pass out by maintaining constant contraction — which constricts breathing, and looks tense. Most physique photos are taken in this hyper-contracted state — whereas in earlier times, muscularity was expressed in the relaxed muscular state — as idealized in the sculpture of the ancient Romans and Greeks. Muscles convey this natural flow and development.