Why Bodyweight Strength Training?

Following my last blog, ‘Why Strength Training for Women?’ and the recent launch of 'Pure BodyWeight', I’d like to share with you why I believe the best and most successful way to improve women’s strength is with bodyweight training.  
 
It’s time efficient
No need for you to travel to a gym, or travel anywhere, as bodyweight training can be done at home. This also means you can jump straight in your own shower afterwards. There is no time needed for setting up equipment, changing weights on bars and dumbbells or waiting your turn for a machine, as you’re just using your own body weight to train.
 
Cost effective
No big costly equipment is needed or ongoing gym memberships.
 
It’s suitable and safe for everyone
Bodyweight exercises are very functional, and modifications to exercises are easy to make. This means every exercise is suited to your body, which makes it very effective and safe and especially so when learning a new exercise. It’s very difficult to do a bodyweight exercise incorrectly and hurt yourself and most exercises are very easy to learn.
 
Cardio as well as strength
A lot of bodyweight exercises have cardiovascular as well as strength benefits, as they will raise your heart rate, especially if placed into a circuit.
 
Flexibility and range of movement
Flexibility and joint range of movement is important for all ages, but especially so as we age. Range of movement decreases as we age, but bodyweight exercises help to improve our range of movement, which makes bodyweight training fantastic for muscle flexibility and joint health.
 
Balance improvement
Using your bodyweight to exercise means you’ll build a higher awareness of your body in controlling its movement. A lot of bodyweight exercises involve single arm and leg work, which really helps to improve your balance. Balance is something that we lose as we age, but with bodyweight training this doesn’t have to be the case.
 
Can be done anywhere
Whilst bodyweight training, you’ll need no equipment (just a few light pieces such as resistance bands), which means you can train wherever you want, such as the park, your office, your hotel room, at home etc. There are no limitations, you can train anywhere.
 
It builds strong core muscles and muscle balance
Most bodyweight exercises involve using the body as a whole. This means if you’re training your chest muscles, you may also be also training your back, abdominal muscles, glutes, hips, shoulders and so on. This is because all bodyweight exercises are what’s called closed chain movements, and these movements recruit more muscles and muscle fibres. This means that bodyweight training has the potential for greater strength gains than any other type of resistance training.  
Bodyweight training uses a lot of single sided exercises, which helps muscle balance and recruit deeper muscles. This means that you’ll train one side of the body to be equal in strength and flexibility as the other. This will help us to avoid a lot of aches and pains and injuries that can develop from the way we use our body in life, work, training and so on.
The stronger our core and body’s muscle balance the stronger we become overall.
 
A lot of compound exercises
Bodyweight training involves a lot of compound exercises, which means we are working more than one muscle group in an exercise. Compound exercises recruit more muscles and develop more strength.
 
Get strong but NOT bulky
I believe this has a lot to do with the type of exercises, amount of intensity and repetition involved. Some bodyweight exercises involve higher repetition and lower intensity, which helps to build muscular endurance, stability and coordination, whereas other body weight exercises involve a higher amount of intensity and lower repetitions, which focuses more on pure strength building.
 
With bodyweight training and lower repetition, we may also focus on control and squeezing the muscles at the pinnacle of every repetition.
However, a lot of bodyweight exercises are isometric which means there is no visible movement in the angle of the joint (holding a position still) for example, the plank or side plank exercises.
With isometric exercises the body is CONSTANTLY working under tension, and the longer we hold the exercise the greater the tension. I believe it’s the time under tension that builds the muscle not the weight.
One of the reasons I have a great preference for bodyweight training for women is that it is strength training to build strength and not bulk.