Fitness Friday: Body-weight workout tips

FORT MYERS, Fla. – You don’t have to lift weights to get fit. Your body can’t tell the difference between lifting a barbell, a dumbbell, a kettlebell, or its own bodyweight. It only knows how hard it needs to work in order to move the resistance it’s up against. Simple bodyweight exercises like the Squat and Push-Up can be a great choice for getting stronger, building endurance, burning fat, and getting in the best shape of your life.

Wink News Fitness Expert Mike Drumm is here today with his Body-Weight Workout Tips and to show us all how to make some simple movements tough!

Your body is the most effective muscle-building tool on the planet, but it’s all in how you use it. Both men and women can sculpt chiseled physiques without ever lifting a weight when training like some of the fittest people in the world: boxers, gymnasts, soldiers, etc. Body-weight training develops and even incentivizes an entirely different body type than weightlifting does.

Work on your Diet

Extra mass becomes a limiting factor for both performance and athleticism. Carrying around an additional 20 pounds is like wearing a weight vest. So the incentive is to get lean as quickly as possible, and exercise alone won’t do that. You also need to dial in your diet. Tracking what you eat is the most important thing you can do! Focus on total calories, understanding portion sizes and how those relate to your macro nutrient goals. Consume your carbs around the times you need the most energy (your workouts) and great place to Start is by cutting sneaky sugars, particularly in the form of empty liquid calories and condiments.

Make Easy Moves Hard

The reality is that your muscles can’t tell the difference between your body weight and a barbell. They know time and tension that’s it. As long as an exercise is sufficiently challenging, you don’t need to add weight to trigger muscle growth. If your goal is to increase strength, then most of the body-weight sets that you do should be challenging in the 5- to 10-repetition range. Once you get the basic movements down, it’s easy to make any body weight exercise harder. Here again, just like your diet, your focus should be on consistency.

Form is Everything

Every rep of a body-weight movement recruits more muscles, better engages your core, and places a greater demand on your nervous system than most weight-based exercises and machines. That makes technique all the more important. You want to put yourself in a position that maximizes your training effect while minimizing wear and tear.

Interval Training: The MOST efficient workouts, try alternating between these moves

Master Fewer Moves 

Next to lack of motivation, the biggest roadblock for people who are just starting a fitness program is exercise ADD. When you constantly switch things up, you never fully master the skills associated with executing an exercise perfectly. You also never fully realize its fat-burning and muscle-building potential.