The Advantages and Disadvantages of Bodyweight Exercises

Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to any exercise. Bodyweight exercises have a couple on either side, but the advantages tend to supersede the disadvantages.

The major disadvantage with bodyweight exercises you will run into is the fact that you’re always working with a set weight (the weight of your body). However, there are ways to combat this disadvantage.

You can always add extra weight to your body. Throw on a bookbag with 20+ pounds of books in there. You can change the angle at which you are doing an exercise (try a pushup with your hands at your hips, it’s a lot harder) or you can incorporate tougher bodyweight exercises, like the planche pushup (this is a pushup with your feet off the ground and most people can’t do even one rep of these; training is required to master this exercise).

Though you can’t vary the weight you’re using when doing bodyweight exercises, there are still advantages to them. For starters, bodyweight exercises are perhaps the best way to improve your functional strength. Think about it, all of the bodyweight exercises are natural (no equipment is needed, with the exception of a pull-up bar or wall). They utilize movements that you need to use to function.

Bodyweight exercises are also the best way for a person to get into shape if they don’t have access to a gym. Like I said, with the exception of maybe a pull-up bar and maybe a wall or, if you like variety, a swiss ball or something of that sort, you don’t need any equipment.

With this said, let’s return to perhaps the only disadvantage of bodyweight exercises and consider some alternative methods for increasing the resistance and load in these exercises. Since the last edition of River Weekly focused on pull-ups and pushups, we’ll take a look at these two exercises specifically.

If you’re looking to strengthen your back, pull-ups are the exercise for you. Let’s say you’re a novice on the workout scene. If you want a strong back, you can start off doing a pull-up workout that includes supine pull-ups (lay on the floor under a bar and pull your sternum up to the bar), horizontal pull-ups (same thing as the supine, except your feet are on a bench), squat pull-ups (start in a squat position and pull yourself up while straightening your legs), jump-ups (a pull-up with a jump to get you started) and negatives (jump up or stand on a chair so that you get your chin above the bar and slowly let yourself down)

After you master these exercises, you can move on to regular pull-ups with perhaps some changing grips worked in. And then you can start incorporating variations like the straight leg pull-up (legs straight out and pull up), gorilla pull-ups (pull your knees to your chest while pulling up), pull-ups with a clap at the top, weighted pull-up, etc. Eventually, you may find that you’ve gotten strong enough to do one-arm pull-ups.

Pushups are a chest exercise, and if you’re looking to get stronger in that area, you can do it with the pushup. Let’s start at the novice level again. Pushups on your knees are the classic “easy” way to start. Once you feel like these are too easy, move on to the real thing. Then start changing your hand position. Do diamond push-ups, wide arm push-ups, and then you can venture into the world of the pushup from the hip, which is really demanding. Along with the pushup from the hip, you can try some explosive pushups or elevated wall pushups (put your feet on the wall and do pushups), and maybe one day you will master the planche pushup.

Basically these outlines illustrate that you can compensate for the bodyweight exercises’ shortcomings by progressively doing more difficult exercises. There are some who think that you will have a tough time getting stronger with bodyweight exercises, because of the lack of variety in the weight you use. I disagree. I have been adding more and more bodyweight exercises into my workouts, because I would like to be able to do a planche pushup. Right now, I bench press 200+ pounds, yet I can’t do one planche pushup. This just goes to show how strong you have to be (functionally as well as brutishly strong) to do some of these bodyweight exercises.

Happy training!