No-weight Circuit Training

As few as two to four circuit training sessions a week can transform your body by toning your muscles and burning calories. Weight machines and free weights are often used in circuit training sessions, but they do not need to be. Body weight exercises use the force of gravity pulling on the weight of your body as resistance. You can create entire circuits out of these no-weight exercises.

Method

Circuit training uses minimal rest periods and a medium- to fast-paced tempo during strength-training exercises. The quick speed and difficult exercises increase your heart rate for an aerobic benefit too. Circuit training uses exercise stations offset with rest times between them. For example, you might do squats for one minute and then rest for one minute before moving onto the next station in the circuit. The specifics of rest times and time spent doing exercises on the stations varies somewhat per goal, but typically a circuit is four to 12 stations along with a zero to 90-second rest between exercises.

Fitness Goals

Circuit training produces benefits such as increased general fitness and improved muscular endurance. Circuit training indirectly helps you lose weight because it is a high intensity exercise system. For general fitness, spend 30 to 90 seconds at each exercise station and take a 30- to 90-second rest between stations. Use a circuit that has eight to 12 stations. To improve short-term endurance, spend only 30 to 60 seconds on each exercise station and rest for 60 to 90 seconds. Use four to eight stations. A rest time of two to three minutes between circuits allows you to recover enough to do another circuit with maximum effort.

Exercises

Using no weight or body weight exercises does limit your exercise options, but it lets you work out any time because you don't need to wait until you can make it to the gym. Physical education classes use these exercises often because they're free and require little space. Many of these exercises you likely already know. Squats, crunches, chinups, pullups, situps and lunges can make up a circuit for the entire body.

Considerations

Although body-weight-only exercises feel challenging in the beginning, through consistent exercise the muscles get stronger and no longer benefit from the same exercises. Adding weight at this point is one way to keep the exercises difficult; for example, holding a dumbbell to your chest when you perform situps. Increasing the number of circuits you do and the repetitions you perform also adds intensity so the muscles receive a new challenge. Another option is to perform exercises on one side, such as single-leg squats and one-arm pushups.