The At Home Fitness brand and website changed ownership on 23rd May 2024. It is now owned by At Home Fitness North London, At Home Fitness Ealing, and At Home Fitness Lichfield
At-home workouts take away so much of the time and effort that can be involved with other forms of fitness. You eliminate travel time and you don’t need to deal with big clunky machines! If you want to keep it really simple, you can even get all your workouts done without using any equipment at all. But perhaps you’re wondering about how to make appropriate bodyweight exercise progressions? After all, when you do them consistently you’ll get stronger and fitter over time and will need some ideas to continue to challenge yourself and see improvements.
The good news is that there are plenty of bodyweight exercise progressions you can try without adding resistance, or any sort of equipment. You just need to understand a few simple principles and learn how to apply them. Here are some simple ideas for taking your bodyweight exercises to the next level.
Certain exercises simply require an adjustment in body position to make them much harder. By lengthening a “lever” (usually your arms or legs), you’ll be required to push or lift a heavier load. Let’s look at some examples:
When you add an element of instability, your core muscles and other stabilizing muscles are required to work harder to maintain your posture. This can help you become stronger for many activities of daily living that require strong and stable muscles. Here are a few ideas for making your exercises less stable:
Can you think of some ways to make simple exercises more complex? Adding in another dimension to your exercise will require a greater level of co-ordination between your brain and body. It will help you create more body awareness and you’ll probably find you’re working those stabilizing muscles harder yet again.
You can often add complexity by including an extra movement pattern into the mix. Note that you should only consider doing so when you’ve mastered excellent technique with one movement pattern! Here are some examples:
There are other bodyweight exercise progressions that perhaps require less explanation. Some of these are:
It’s also worth noting that you should only attempt one progression at a time. You may also find that you need to decrease your repetition range when you’re first building up to a new progression level. This is a good indication that you have in fact made it harder!
What bodyweight exercise progressions have you made lately? We’d love to hear about them so please leave a comment in the box below!
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