Bodyweight exercises use your body's weight to provide resistance against your muscles. These include exercises such as push-ups and pull-ups. Weight training uses barbells, dumbbells or weight machines to provide resistance, and allows you to perform heavier lifting and more exercises. You can work a wide variety of muscles using either method.
Biceps
To work your biceps with bodyweight exercises, use push-ups and pull-ups. Experiment with the placement of your hands during push-ups for more or less resistance, depending on your level of strength. When performing pull-ups, lower yourself using your muscles, not gravity, for maximum benefit. To work the biceps using weights, perform biceps curls using a barbell or dumbbells. Dumbbells allow you to perform several variations of curls, including across your chest and holding one hand steady to create an isometric muscle contraction while performing curls with the other.
Chest
Push-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups and dips help you to work your pectoral muscles. Pulls-ups are more effective than chin-ups for this, while pectoral emphasis increases on dips when the hands are placed wider apart. Free-weight exercises for improving chest size include the bench press and flyes, while a pec deck machine, as its name implies, is designed specifically to work the pectorals.
Triceps
Chin-ups and dips are the two main bodyweight exercises for working the triceps, which are on the back of your upper arm. The triceps are weaker muscles than the biceps, which is why most people have more difficulty performing chin-ups, which have your palms facing away from you, than pull-ups, which have your palms facing you. The term chin-up comes from the fact that most people can only raise their body high enough to get their chin up to the bar. With dumbbells, you can work the triceps with triceps extensions or kickbacks.
Back
The main bodyweight exercise to work the latissimus dorsi is the chin-up, with pull-ups and dips providing some stress. Dumbbell and machine rows work the lats, as do machine pulldowns, done from a standing, sitting or kneeling position. Pulldowns are most effective when the bar is pulled down in front of you using a wider-than-shoulder-width grip, according to Sports Injury Bulletin.
Legs
You can work your legs using squats, lunges and calf raises which can be done as bodyweight exercises or with barbells or dumbbells. You can use weight machines to do leg presses, and free weights to do deadlifts.
Member Comments
Klingkong February 28
For a great resource on bodyweight exercises, check out the first exclusively bodyweight fitness app from Apple. The app is called Your Gym, and it is based on the bestselling fitness book You Are Your Own Gym; The Bible of Bodyweight Exercises. It contains 125 exercises with over 300 variations, timers, social media integration, and it has a long road map of upcoming updates that will include videos of all the exercises and personalized programs that give users step-by-step guidance during each workout.
You can find out more at www.marklauren.com.
Cheers!