Saturday, May 16, 2020

Bodyweight exercises: misconceptions and mistakes

Bodyweight training has been a popular form of exercise for decades, especially when it comes to group exercise classes and exercise videos. It can certainly be an effective form of exercise, but body weight training programs are often designed without really considering the different types of people doing the workouts. Bodyweight exercises are generally supposed to be appropriate for everyone, but that's not exactly true.

Since body weight exercises do not use external resistance (weights, bands, etc.), people generally do not think they have a numerical difficulty or weight value. As a result, body weight exercises are considered to be essentially one size fits all and a person's weight is the correct amount for the exercise. There is a major flaw with this way of thinking, because bodyweight exercises carry weight just like any other form of resistance training. The difference is that, instead of supporting or supporting an external weight, the resistance of each exercise is determined by a percentage of your body weight.

Therefore, each exercise has a numerical value of resistance / weight, although you will not know the exact amount when performing the exercise. The important thing is to realize that each bodyweight exercise places a specific amount of stress on your muscles and, as with any other type of exercise, the difficulty of bodyweight exercises should match your skill level and goals appropriately. . If the difficulty of the exercise is not correct for your muscles and joints, then you will not achieve the correct training stimulus การออกกำลังกาย.

Some programs address this problem by including weights, bands, or other forms of external resistance in workouts, allowing you to adjust the difficulty of the exercises to match your skill level. On the other hand, many workouts only focus on the use of bodyweight exercises, as they can be performed almost anywhere and little if any additional equipment is needed. This is done to make workouts attractive to a broader audience, as these exercises can easily be included in almost anyone's routine.

However, the fact that an exercise can easily be included in your routine does not necessarily mean that it should be included. Bodyweight exercises can be of any level of difficulty, from very easy to incredibly challenging, and workouts consisting of bodyweight exercises alone often have erratic fluctuations in exercise difficulty. The creators of these workouts often use simple program designs that encourage everyone to do the same exercises. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the design of the program, it is a horrible way of doing things.

Would you ever consider following a trainer who led a random group of people to the gym and had everyone perform bench presses weighing 75% of their body weight? Hopefully not, because 75% of a person's weight would be too much weight for some people, too easy for others, and it could be a decent weight for some people. Any good coach knows that this would be a bad idea, but this is essentially what people do when they perform bodyweight exercises in groups or with a video. These workouts can be easy to incorporate into your training routine, but they do not take into account the actual level of difficulty required to perform each exercise relative to your skill level.

For a more specific example of why this is a problem, let's take a look at one of the most popular bodyweight exercises: the lunge. Many people perform lunges because they are effective, do not require equipment, can be done anywhere, and appear to be simple. However, the lunge is a fairly complex exercise that requires strength and stability and many people do not have adequate amounts of both to perform correctly. Lack of strength puts too much pressure on your muscles, and lack of stability means that you will have problems in ways that could lead to problems in the future.

On the plus side, bodyweight exercises can always be made easier or more difficult by doing things like changing your body position, limiting range of motion, or performing a different variation of exercise. The problem is that these variations are rarely discussed with bodyweight training, because it is easier to go with the one-size-fits-all approach. There is an illusion that body weight exercises are easier or simpler to perform...

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