Different exercises have different effects on the human body. Running works best as a method for building cardiovascular health and for losing weight. Lifting free weights builds strength, but does little to shed fat. Body-weight exercises fall somewhere in between, giving rise in some to the fear that they will actually reduce your level of muscle mass.
Resistance Exercises
Resistance exercises build muscle by adding resistance to the range of motion for a muscle or group of muscles. This added strain causes microscopic tears in the muscle fibers, which heal back thicker and stronger --- much like a scar from a cut is thicker and stronger than the skin around it. In terms of weight loss, resistance exercises tend to burn fewer calories than cardio training, and are better for strengthening and toning muscles than for losing weight.
Body-Weight Exercises
Body-weight exercises are one form of resistance exercise. Where weightlifting uses pieces of metal to provide the resistance to a range of motion, body-weight exercises use some or all of a person's own body to provide the resistance. Some examples of body-weight exercises include pushups, pullups and yoga postures. Because the maximum resistance of body-weight exercises is the weight of the whole body, these routines are typically better for toning and endurance training, rather than the bulk-building you can get from training with massive weights.
Caloric Deficit
Losing weight is a matter of burning more calories than you eat. Body weight exercises do burn calories, albeit not as quickly as spending the same amount of time running or cycling. If you do enough body-weight exercises to lose weight, and you have already burned most of your fat away, your body may start burning muscle to make up for the caloric imbalance. This is one way in which body-weight exercises might cause you to lose muscle.
Muscle Changes
In general, body-weight exercises will increase your muscle, not reduce it. However, the high-repetition, moderate-weight nature of body-weight routines might change how your muscles look. Maintaining big muscles requires you to keep training with very heavy weights. If you shift to body-weight exercises, you may find that your muscles become denser and more compact. In fact, you're not likely to grow much weaker --- but your muscles might be smaller.
References
- "Brawn;" Stuart McRobert; 1999
- Extreme Bodyweight Workouts
- "The Art of Expressing the Human Body"; Bruce Lee; 1998
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