I have always been a huge proponent of including body weight exercises in one’s workout routine. However centering your workout routines around body weight training comes with it’s fare share of drawbacks, which is often not talked about by the Fitness YouTubers. In this post I will talk about the dark side of body weight exercises. We also talk about the most effective way to train.
Benefits of bodyweight exercises
Body weight exercises, often referred to as calisthenics, are a great way to train, as they help you put on muscles, while staying lean. In short, body weight exercises help you get the shredded and lean physique, which we all generally desire. This is because while performing calisthenics, for each movement you are using multiple muscle groups.
Say for instance, you are training biceps. If you perform the chin ups, then even though the primary muscle group you want to train is the biceps but apart from that you are also working your Traps, Lats, Scapular & Shoulder Stabilizers as well as Abdominals and Forearms.
Compare this to the case when you perform the standing dumbbell curls for training your biceps. Here, you are mainly training your biceps and forearms only, with your abdominal muscles helping you stabilize your movement. Thus, the bodyweight exercise for biceps is training more muscles than the barbell curls, As the latter is more of an isolation exercise. Consequently, a body weight exercise also burns more fat.
The often ignored drawback of bodyweight training
However, the nature of bodyweight exercises makes them act as a double edged sword. While they help you train multiple muscle groups at once, this also entails a major drawback. While performing calisthenics, since you are training multiple muscle groups at once, over time this leads to over use injuries.
What I mean is that, suppose you are training 5 times a week and your workouts only involve body weight exercises. So most of your muscle groups get trained multiple times a week with very little time for recovery. Compare this with the typical ‘bro splits’ one performs in the gym, where one is mainly focusing on a particular muscle group at most twice per week. This leads to sufficient time for rest and recovery for the muscles, thus preventing injuries in the long run.
Key takeaway
So the key takeaway from this post is that, if you want to get in shape fast, you must include bodyweight exercises in your workout routine. However, you should mix them up with isolation exercises so that you can train injury free, which in the long term will help build more enduring habits and thus will give better results.
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