All exercise is good and beneficial to the body. However, bodyweight exercise has a lot more benefits compared to other exercises. Other than offering a great workout, it can also help you overcome some of the common reasons to avoid exercising such as “I am too busy to go to the gym” and “there’s no space for a stationary bike at my house”.
Bodyweight exercise is a type of exercise is a form of strength training where you apply your own weight to offer resistance against gravity. When doing a bodyweight workout, you are basically using any type of exercise equipment. Common bodyweight exercises include walking lunges, bodyweight squats, pushups, planks and jumping jacks.
Advantages of Bodyweight Exercise
1. Convenient
It doesn’t matter where you are, you are with your body. This means you have all that’s needed to carry out the exercise anywhere, anytime. It can be in the bedroom, kitchen, in a hotel room or anywhere that’s comfortable. It doesn’t require a lot of time or thinking before you get started. This is unlike other forms of workouts where you need equipment or travel to a gym to get started.
2. Effective
Research has shown that bodyweight exercise as resistance training helps in building muscles exclusive of an external load. But there’s more than that. Researchers studied the effects of a 10-week bodyweight exercise on a number of physical fitness parameters in a group of young women and discovered great improvement on seven out of the nine parameters. The highest gains were in aerobic capacity. Muscle endurance also increased by about eleven percent.
3. Builds Balance and Flexibility
When undertaking a bodyweight exercise, your body is stabilizing itself in one way or another. The exercise works to strengthen the muscles and stretch ligaments and tendons. This helps keep your body balanced as you carry on with daily activities such as walking or picking up things in the house. Training your body in such a manner also helps prevent injury.
4. Requires Less Effort
Although it is a good idea to fulfill the physical activity guidelines, small amounts of bodyweight workouts can equally deliver results. In a study conducted on active individuals in their 60s, researchers in Japan discovered that an exercise comprising eight simple lower-body workouts increased the muscle strength and power of participants by at least 10 percent after about 10 months.
5. Can Be Adjusted to Your Fitness Level
At first, it may not be clear how to go about a bodyweight exercise. When using your body as a weight, you may decide to subtract 10 or 20 pounds just as you can do with a machine. However, there are ways you can change moves to reduce or increase the resistance. For example, you can adjust the position of your body such as doing pushups against the wall instead of the floor.
In general, bodyweight exercise has many advantages. They are convenient, effective, and cheap among other advantages.
