Body Weight Workouts

Who needs all those fancy and expensive weights that you see at the gyms? Well if you're on a budget I know that thought has crossed your mind before, and rightly so. The fact is you don't absolutely need big expensive machines to be able to lift weights and gain muscle. You can do this simply using yourself as the resistance factor. Yep, that's right, all you need is your own body weight. Sure the workouts you can do at gyms with all the equipment have benefits, but if you're just starting out or only looking to gain a bit of muscle rather than turn yourself into the next hulk then working out from home with no equipment can still net you some very good results. Everybody has to start of somewhere. Even if you can afford the gym fee's I still recommend people that are new to training and trying to build muscle to start off from home anyway so they can build up a bit of strength before tackling the heavier stuff.

So how do you workout by only using your own body weight and no special equipment? Well lets start off with the chest area. The most effective body weight exercise to hit this area is easily the hugely popular good old pushup! Pushups are great for hitting all over your chest area, plus also targeting your triceps as secondary muscles. Another very important muscle group to train are your legs. A couple of good exercises to work this area are body weight squats, lunges, and to really test yourself perform jumping squats and jumping lunges to give your muscles a real explosive workout.

Next lets move onto your arms, more specifically biceps. Now for this part of your arm unfortunately you will need something to hold onto to add some sort of resistance. A good idea is just using a old milk bottle filled with water and doing bicep curls with it. Make sure you do each arm one after the other. For triceps you can do close in pushups which involves putting your hands closer together, almost touching and performing pushups. You will probably find this quite a bit harder than your regular pushups as your chest can only help out a little, most of the load is put right onto your tricep muscles. For your shoulders there's really only one solid exercise you can do which is slightly advanced and can be dangerous without proper precautions. The hand stand press ups. Try putting a cushion down below your head in case you should slip. This is where you fling yourself up against a wall so you're looking down at the ground and your feet are stabilizing you by resting against the wall. You don't have to be super coordinated like you would to do proper handstands since you have the wall there, but some people don't feel comfortable doing this and that's ok, until you can get yourself some equipment like some dumbbells to add resistance for this area you can focus on the other muscle groups.

Last but not least are your abdominals. Now you can do a ton of different body weight abs exercises, it's definitely the easiest muscle group to accommodate when you only have your body weight to help train. We will stick to the most basic and popular exercises since this is more of a beginner to intermediate article. First off of course you have your standard crunches. You can do these with your feet flat on the floor or you can have your legs in the air to hit a slightly different area of the abs. Next to focus on the obliques or the small side muscles you see just beside your main abs area we can do ankle touches. These are when you're flat on your back with your knees bent and feet on the ground you tilt yourself up engaging your abs and then just wiggle side to side using your straight arms and hands to touch your ankles side to side. Next are toe touches, great for your upper abs. Once again lay on your back, this time raise your legs up so they're point straight up to the sky, doesn't matter if your knees are bent a little, that's usually more comfortable for people. Then you're going to try and reach up and touch your toes alternating side to side with each hand touching the opposite foots toes. Another great one are scissor kicks, there's lots of variations of these. I always like to finish off with planks. For these you get yourself into a pushup position but lower your elbows down so your weight is resting on them, keep your abs tight and stay like that for a couple of minutes and feel your abs burning trying to stabilize yourself. Those exercises alone will give you a great abs workout.

Best of all you can do all these exercises from home with absolutely no equipment. If you're after a solid workout visit this site for a good six step workout that will work your whole body without weights and has pictures to show you what it's all about:  Body Weight Workout Routine