I’ve been trying to get in better shape without buying weights or going to the gym. I run outside, do situps and pushups, but it seems like I might be ignoring muscles that could use some work. Are there any exercises I can do using just my body to get in shape (beyond the afore mentioned situps and pushups)?
Chinups/pullups.
Put two sturdy chairs back to back and do bar dips in between them.
Sit in a sturdy, armless chair. Grip the sides of the seat. Stick your legs out straight and scoot your butt off the seat. Use your arms to press yourself up and down (tricep press).
Lunges and squats.
Get a good excercise book and you’ll see some illustrations of how to do these properly and they probably have lots of other good ideas as well.
What muscles do you feel are being left out?
Scissor kicks, legs lifts on your side, situps alternating elbows/knees (think “Rocky”), “mountain climbers”, “Hello Dollies”…
In mountain climbers, get into the “up” pushup position, bring one knee to your chest, and then kick and alternate knees to the chest. Four count exercise. (1, 2, 3, 1… 1, 2, 3, 2… 1, 2, 3, 3…)
“Hello Dollies” are like leg lifts, but at the top of the lift, spread your legs out, then return them to center, then down. Four count exercise.
I have a simple weight-less routine I do 3 times a week at home:
∙I do some swing kicks to warm up, then some side kicks. You can insert any mildly heart-rate inducing activity here. Just enough to get the blood flowing and lessen the likelyhood of injury.
∙One-legged squats. I stand on one leg to simulate standing on two legs with a barbell and squat down. Requires a bit of balance but not too much.
∙Push-ups. I do these on my fingertips, but you might want to do them normally.
∙Decline push-ups. I put my feet up on the armrest of the couch. This is pretty much the only way to get the deltoids without weights.
∙Sit-ups. Self-explanitory. I have my knees bent and make sure to do them slowly with proper form.
∙Side angle sit-ups. These are a little weird. I turn my body so that I’m resting on one hip, then do a strait sit-up. This is sorta like doing pull-ups with one arm, it works one side real hard, harder than you can without an incline sit-up bench.
∙Pull-ups. I do these on the awning over my back porch. I do one set with my palms turned away, and another set with them facing towards me, in order to more even work my arms.
∙Calf raises. Again I stand on one leg to simulate having a barbell, then rise up and down on my toes. I stand on the edge of a step so that I have a larger range of motion. It’s important to do these at the end of the workout, or at least after you do the squats, since fatigued calf muscles with make your legs shake when you are trying to squat.
I used to own a home-gym, but I moved alot and found it a pain in the arse to keep dragging around with me. So I developed this weightless system to allow me to keep myself somewhat in shape without the hassles of weights. The whole thing takes me 30 minutes.
You can pick up books from the library on yoga and Pilates and do them at home–or in a hotel or whatever while traveling, for that matter. You do not need special equipment, though I’d recommend a mat.
Pilates would probably be the easiest, and there are LOADS of books, videos and DVDs you could get.
Be warned, the emphasis is on gentle, slow, controlled movement, not doing everything at top speed or for hundreds of repititions. It never feels like you’re doing much at the time, but it will HURT the next day, believe me, and it works.
I’ll second most of the advice here, there are lots and lots of bodyweight exercises. As long as you do them with strict controlled form; and ensure that you perform them with intensity (this may mean that you need to start adding weights such as bags of sugar or phone directories etc.) then you should acheive results.
Finally I can also vouch for Ashtanga yoga. A bit more intensive IMHO than most other forms since you flow into different positions without any static rests. Easy to do anywhere, get a DVD!!
But, of course, it’s more effective if you pick up LOTS of books. And try bigger books, like dictionaries and encylopedias.
Heh. 
So for those of you who are suggesting yoga; I always imagined yoga to be mainly a flexibility kind of thing (not that that’s bad). Is yoga in and of itself a good workout?
UncleBill, I guess I don’t really know that any are being left out, but it just seems that the relatively limited range of motion in push-ups and sit-ups must be leaving some things out (I am doing the opposite elbow/knee sit-ups). I mean, when I do push-ups, changing even slightly the angle between my arms and the floor or the distance between my hands seems to give me very different workouts.
If you do much looking around on bodyweight exercises, you’re going to hear about Matt Furey pretty quickly. He’s pretty well-respected as the guru of bodyweight training. Perhaps you could search on that name.
I could have sworn that you’ve chastised me for recommending bodyweight calisthenics, ultra.
I’ve gone through a couple of Furey’s books (Combat Conditioning and Combat Abs) and think they’re great. Just know that the sort of stuff that he’s training you for is wrestling (“functional strength” and endurance mostly by using exercises that work multiple muscle groups at once) and not necessarily body-building type exercises. For much more explosive strength, Pavel’s got a new book out that basically says, “do your pushups fast.” Which is the “prison variation:” do one [pushup, squat, etc.] regular-speed and then the next the fastest you can.
Furey’s books are pretty expensive, but if you go digging through back issues of Grappling Magazine (I think they’re online), where he has a column, they ran a “Top 10” (I think it was actually 7 + 3 more for good measure). He’s also got an email list that occasionally throws out some exercises (lately, he’s been pushing hill sprints). www.mattfurey.com.
To be sure though, CC really didn’t have anything that you’d never have heard of if you had a high school course on wrestling (except the royal-court which used to be online everywhere until I suspect Furey asked the site operators to take the descriptions down). The suggestions in this thread are all good and most are included in his book. I really like these exercises and got tremendous benefit from them.
Here’s a quick link to get you started: Grappling Magazine and how to do the Hindu Pushups. I’ll try to find the article at home and let you know the month, if nothing else:
http://www.cfwenterprises.com/article.asp?s=cfw&content_id=1382
This is one of my favorite exercises. Just be sure to avoid walking down stairs for the hour or two after you finish these.
Yes, yoga can even make you work up a sweat, especially if you can hold a certain position for more than a minute. Don’t push yourself beyond the limits of your endurance, though. It will make you stronger the more you do it.
As irishgirl noted, Pilates can cause pain in places where you never even knew you had muscles, but the pain will diminish as you continue. It will strengthen your core (abdomen and back).
Just as a side note: JetBlue is now putting Pilates cards in its airplane seats; and there is a book called Airplane Yoga. Doing these exercises while in a plane can reduce the possibility of blood clots in the legs. Their advantage is that they can be done anywhere.
I’ve learned more since then. I’m still not convinced that the bodyweight program is the best ever, or that it really even makes sense for me, but it’s probably very good for some people. And if someone’s bound at determined to do bodyweight exercises, they should know what information is out there.
I hated bodyweight exercises, especially push-ups, and then I joined the military. Then I really hated them, especially push-ups. However, one exercise made all the difference: diamond (aka triangle) push-ups.
Kneel in the leaning rest position, then place your hands together with your thumbs extended and touching each other, and your index fingers also touching. A triangular or diamond-shaped gap will appear in the space between your hands. Straighten your legs and bring your sternum down until it almost touches the diamond (I did these with a rolled pair of socks nested in the diamond). Do a set to exhaustion, then do two more equal sets with one minute’s rest between.
Done daily (or every other day) it does wonders for ramping up your ability to do “real” pushups in numbers higher than 20 at a time. I was unable to pass the military’s PT Test because of the requirement to do 30 push-ups. At the end of camp, I could do sixty diamonds and then switch out to regular push-ups and do another thirty.
Bodyweight is really frustrating for me until I get my reps up, and diamonds helped me get my reps WAY up. YMMV.
Jurph it sounds like you had relatively weak triceps compared to your pectorals, and the imbalance is what was holding you back. You can put your hands together when doing pushups to focus more intensely on your triceps. Conversely, if your pecs are weaker, you can spread your hands wider than your body to focus them more, but you can’t get as good a range of motion.
You can do the same thing with pull-ups. Put your arms closer together to more intensely work your biceps, and spread them farther out to work the lats more without working the arms quite as much.
I also do yoga, but I use it as a cool-down later on at night, the kind I practice is more focused on flexibility, I couldn’t imagine breaking a sweat doing it.