It varies between 61-64kg but guessing by how tight or not my jeans are probably closer to 61kg. The gym boss said I really needed to be able to chest pull my body weight for pullups to be doable, and I'm probably 4-6 months off managing that. I didn't really notice my upper body strength going in my thirties but have an office job and rarely lift anything heavier than a couple of pannier bags of groceries up several flights of steps. Last year I mixed cardio with too many lightweight reps which didn't get any results. This year I'm trying something else.
Upper body body weight training is extremely effective for all types of strength types, including maximal strength (evidenced by even low level gymnasts). The main mistake that people who want to go all body weight make is that they fail to understand the methods of progression behind body weight strength, and they completely miss the point. They'll do things like long sets of push ups, chins, pull ups, squats, lunges, and other typical exercises that you see people do in an aerobics class. The problem with this is that they have no real progression of exercises to follow, ones that gradually get harder and harder, and that gradually decrease the leverage. Building the Gymnastic Body by Christopher Sommer has over 200 exercises and progressions. If you want to learn how to become strong using body weight, you must learn the progressions! They are not as simply as adding a pound here and a pound there and not commonly used outside of gymnastics. By the way, I said UPPER BODY body weight strength training and not body weight training in general on purpose! I'm a huge fan of squats, deadlifts, weighted lunges, split squats, olympic lifts, and all kinds of weight lower body exercises. It's hard to reduce the leverage of the lower body, and, in my opinion, if you want to be a great athlete, you better lift heavy! Just my two cents, for what it's worth.
a quick note about weights vs bodyweight before i forget it again. heavier people will gain a lot more benefits out of bodyweight training, because their bodyweight is greater. take two guys with a 30 kilo difference who can both do exactly the same bodyweight feats, and give them weights. the heavier one will invariably be able to lift more, as he will be proportionately stronger. on the other hand, with weights, the weight is fixed, so if both of those guys were equal in lifting volume, the smaller guy would be comparatively weaker. so, yeah, if you're a small person, you should maybe try to progress to weights early on, whereas if you're bigger, it might be worth investing a little time into bodyweight training even if you already lift weights.
I remember reading somewhere that it's actually better to have a mix of weights and bodyweight exercises. Something about a balance between closed and open kinetic chain exercises. I don't remember it very well though, so I could have misinterpreted it.
I disagree. Look at professional gymnasts, for example. They are almost exclusively smaller than the average person, use almost strictly body weight exercises, and possess physiques that very few non-gymnasts do. Additionally, tall people are not excluded, as evidenced by a number of tall and successful gymnasts.
I think what Fish is going on the lines of is if you're a smaller person body weight exercises naturally come easier as you are not moving as much weight than if you're a larger guy. Here's Jesse Marunde doing 21 pull-ups at a BW of 310 pounds. That's a lot more impressive than seeing a guy who's 110 pounds do 21 pull-ups, don't you think? [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAUUTwoimpI"]YouTube - Jesse Marunde 21 Pull-ups[/ame]
what kuma said. i can do pistols with a counterweight and can do somewhat wonky one armed pushups, but i'm still only moving a good portion of my puny 52 kilograms. there are people who weight so much (such as the guy in kuma's video) that they'd move more weight doing normal bodyweight squats and pushups than i do with the one-sided versions.
I think it could also be argued that due to the difficulty in progressing bodyweight exercises when you are really large, weight training might be easier. By this I mean might be is easier to gradually increase the weight on an overhead press than to move to a full handstand pushup. So if you are a large person, progressing your strength solely using bodyweight could take a long time and a lot of commitment (which a lot of people don't have), whereas it is easier to see measurable progress using weights for the same individual. The opposite it also true as Kuma says, if you are 10kg underweight then doing 10 pullups is much easier than for someone who is 10kgs overweight. The conclusion of all this (in my opinion) is that it is worthwhile all individuals combining both weight training and bodyweight training to some extent.
Fish - what I said is extremely related to what you said. Again, I disagree. It's all about relative leverage. A 270 lb guy doing push ups in the standard position is not likely to be working much, if any, harder than the little 140 lb guy doing pseudo planche push ups or even full planche push ups. The opposite would most likely to be true. Leverage is the key, and strength of contraction is the name of the game in resistance training. Of course, I assume that both individuals are in very good condition physically. Kuma - yes, it is; however, it is not more impressive than seeing a 130 lb guy do 20 one arm chin ups.
WAS NOT! *hides behind kuma and sticks tongue out at you* "take two guys with a 30 kilo difference who can both do exactly the same bodyweight feats" *ahem* what about seeing a 310 pound guy do 20 one arm chin ups?
For my money, body weight exercises are a very much yes/no deal. You need to find exercises that push your weight limit (ie what your muscles can shift) and work those. Irritating if the exercises that come to mind are to easy, a no-starter if the exercises are too hard to hit single reps. I like the idea of bodyweight because the fitness I want is the ability to move my body well into handstands and a core that can hold any pose, but it does offer difficult progression outside of obvious windows (to which the answer is "learn more" of course gymnasts do damn well with it)
Anybody doing 20 one-arm chin-ups is going to be impressive. But if there's a 65kg guy doing them compared to an 85kg, the heavier guy will always be the more impressive, much like the lighter guy will always be more impressive lifting heavy free weights. For example, if you see a burly powerlifter deadlifting 725 pounds at a body weight of 300 pounds, it turns out to be about 2.41x bodyweight, which though a big pull isn't as impressive as Bob Peoples who pulled 725 pounds at a body weight of 181 pounds for a 4x bodyweight pull. More impressive, isn't it? With body weight exercises, it's the reverse. For that same 130 pound guy to lift as much as Jesse Marunde did in his pull-ups, he would have to do 21 pull-ups with an added 180 pounds. A good way to look at it is the Tactical Strength Challenge hosted by Dragon Door. Two of the events are actually deadlifts and pull-ups, and ties go to the lighter of the contestants for deadlifts and the heavier of the contestants for the pull-ups.
Yes, it is impressive, but it's relative strength. It's the amount of weight that can be moved and lifted versus the weight of a person (which, to some degree, has a big say in how much strength they will possess). A big guy weighing 310 lbs better be strong as heck, because all that muscle needs to be able to do SOMETHING. That's a huge amount of weight to carry around and it should be fully functional. I understand that someone in Jesse's position is technically lifting more weight, but I think that if Bob maintained his body weight/strength relationship, if he weighed 310 lbs he would be able to pull more than Jesse. I'm not articulating this very clearly, I know, but I hope you get some sort of idea of what I'm TRYING to explain, Dangit! I am not arguing that a big guy pulling a lot is not impressive, but I don't find it particularly impressive considering that he has so much more muscle to use than a smaller guy, although a smaller guy who can do the same thing and maybe more most likely has denser muscle. I think it depends on the exercise and level of leverage involved. I have long legs, so when I hold an L-sit it's definitely more impressive than if a person with short legs and arms holds one. The leverage is less in my situation than in his. As Kuma already said, seeing anybody do 20 one arm chin ups is impressive. The question is not whether it is impressive, but whether a smaller person doing a more advanced progression of the same exercise for the same reps would be more impressive.
Hi, Atre. Are you familiar with Coach Sommer? He's a gymnastics coach (I think for the junior team of the U.S., not sure, though), and he's got a great book and a great forum if you're interested in strength and condition primarily via body weight. He even posts a workout of the day (WOD) 4 days a week! http://www.gymnasticbodies.com/
