Age-Old Wisdom Meets Modern Ingenuity Beautiful bodies are not exclusive to the era of pec decks and treadmills.
As early as the 5th century BC, the physical culture surrounding the wrestling traditions of the Indian Peninsula were based largely around body weight exercise.
As with the Pahlavani training methods, these ancient body weight exercises were traditionally performed using very high repetitions without added resistance.
As my coach and mentor Scott Sonnon, founder of the Circular Strength Training system, is fond of saying, “Yoga was never meant to be a thumb and a blanket, but rather a hurricane and an earthquake.” If you dig past the softer side of yoga and apply a little imagination, you’ll discover that old school yoga can be an incredible source of inspiration for body weight only exercise options Today’s Icons Of Body Weight Training Today, we need look no further than the physique of the male gymnast to recognize the power of resisting the pull of gravity on our own bodies.
According to renowned gymnastics coach, Christopher Sommer, the overwhelming majority of a gymnast’s training is done using only the resistance of his or her own body weight.
Sommer attributes much of the impressive gymnast’s physique to straight arm manipulation of the body, the plyometric nature of many of the exercises, and a lot of jumping and single leg exercise for the lower body.
It’s all relative Complete mastery over how your body moves in space is almost magical.
How well you handle your own body weight is known as your relative strength.
It’s dependent upon how strong you are, how heavy you are, and how skilled you are at moving your body.
Being able to manipulate the way your body moves in space also has the potential to reduce your risk of injury and to increase your performance in life and sport.
When you slip on a patch of ice, your body must react instantly in order to keep you upright.
This righting reflex is automatic, but the way your body responds, and which movement patterns are recruited to do the job, can be trained by moving your body through all of its potential degrees of freedom.
What do I mean by “Movement patterns”? This refers to the way our bodies are put together and how they generate force.
Activities like sitting at a desk all day, or performing only two-dimensional strength training and conditioning, can cause our bodies to forget how to move naturally, a phenomenon referred to as Sensory Motor Amnesia.
Using bodyweight exercises to take your body through its full movement potential allows you to solicit all those little muscles that should be part of a given Anatomy Train, but which may have become disconnected through disuse.
One of the most frequent comments I hear from new clients who already have an extensive training history is, “Wow, I discovered some new muscles after our training session.” My clients are often strong, fit people, but by taking their bodies through more complete and complex patterns of movement using only their body weight, I’m able to connect the dots and get all their muscles firing in concert along the various chains of tension.
Moving Through 6 Degrees of Freedom In talking about relative strength and your ability to respond in a functional way to situations both in day-to-day life and in athletic pursuits, I mentioned the importance of moving the body through all its potential degrees of freedom.
Although you can take the body through the 6 Degrees of Freedom using many different tools, the most versatile and natural tool for this is the weight of the trainee’s own body.
Most of my own vocabulary of body weight exercise either comes from or is inspired by CST. Incremental Sophistication One of the hallmarks of CST is a concept called Incremental Sophistication.
With each version of an exercise, the brute effort required may not be more demanding, but the finesse of execution becomes more sophisticated and the resultant training effect is increased.
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