bodyweight exercises?

[monkeyboxing]

Does anyone know any good bodyweight exercises/routines that build strength ( as opposed to endurance gained from exercises such as pushups)? Thanks.

[Chief Fox]

You could probably do a search on this site and find a bunch.

1 leg squats or pistols.

1 arm pushups

Pullups

Handstand pushups

[Vash]

www.Trainforstrength.com

[Din Gao]

The site Vash posted is great. I base alot of my home workouts on his exercises and throw in a couple of things by Furey.

[gwa sow]

also, www.crossfit.com

[Toby]

What the others said + Janda situps.

[spiraler]

horse stance stance training see tao thread

[IronFist]

Does anyone know any good bodyweight exercises/routines that build strength ( as opposed to endurance gained from exercises such as pushups)? Thanks.

"Strength" or "endurance" will come from how hard your muscles have to work. The reason people say things like pushups build endurance is because, once you can do more than about 10-15 of them, you're just gaining endurance by increasing the amount you do. In other words, if you can do 15 pushups now, and you work up to 30, you won't be able to bench or lift more weight, but you've increased the amount of times you could do a bodyweight pushup.

Remember that your body doesn't care if you're doing a bodyweight exercise or a weighted exercise. Resistance is resistance to a muscle. All it can do is contract or relax. So the same principle applies with weights. If you can bench press x pounds for 15 reps, and you increase it to 30 reps, you won't be any stronger, meaning the maximum weight you can lift for one rep won't have increased, but you'll have increased the amount of reps you could do with that weight.

So, any bodyweight (or weighted) exercise you can do for a lot of reps will only be building endurance and not strength. So if you want to build strength with bw stuff, you'll have to find a way to increase the load placed on your muscles.

Some suggestions:

Can you do a lot of Hindu squats (bodyweight squats)? Try one legged squats (pistols).

Can you do a lot of pushups? Try one armed pushups.

Can you do a lot of pullups? Try weighted pullups or one armed pullups.

[Mo Lung]

Can you do a lot of pushups? Try one armed pushups.

Don't forget hand stand pushups! A very underrated exercise.

[IronFist]

Yes, but not much of a chest developer. I just wouldn't do them exclusively.

[Mo Lung]

No, of course not, but still a great bodyweight exercise to build into your routine once you get past strength development with the basics.

[monkeyboxing]

Thanks for all the advice so far. I'm definitely going to use some of these tips. What's a good way to work up to handstand pushups? I can't even do a handstand... and when I try it against a wall I have a very difficult time doing even one pushup. Also, I can only do one one-armed pushup so I can't really get a good workout doing that. Should I just do one repetition and conclude my workout? Also, is it possible to increase the amount of one armed pushups and the amount of regular pushups (strength and endurance) concurrently? It seems that after working on one type of these pushups, my arms would be too tired to work on the other type. Thanks.

[monkeyboxing]

One more thing, scrapper seems more designed for endurance than strength. Also, spiraler, your link doesn't work.

[Toby]

I've got access to weights and I find them more effective for strength than BWE but here's my advice:

(i) handstands: I did yoga years ago and we'd do it against the wall. That way you'd have no concerns about falling over on your head. Put your hands a few inches from the wall and walk your feet up a bit, then kick up. Get a friend to help catch your feet the first few times so you learn how much to kick up - too much and you'll "bounce" off the wall and find it hard to stay up. Once up, try to stay tight and straight - don't do the super-arched back handstands that you see some people do.

(ii) one-armed pushups: do negatives. Do your one pushup, then do several negatives. If you're purely after strength, that means < 6 reps per set and several sets. Long rests (>3min) between sets.

(iii) endurance and strength: yeah, it's a tradeoff. You'll have to decide which you prefer. You can certainly train both simultaneously, but in general endurance training will detract from your strength training. A lot of us do HIIT (also discussed on trainforstrength) for our endurance. That minimises the detrimental impact on strength which giving a very decent cardio capacity. But I definitely wouldn't try to do e.g. a strength benchpress workout and follow up with 50 reps at 50kg.

[monkeyboxing]

Sorry for my ignorance, but how do I do a negative repetition? Also, how many reps/sets do you recommend? Thanks.