Why Natural Bodyweight Training is the Best Way to Get in Shape

I've long believed that bodyweight training, meaning exercising with nothing but your own bodyweight, is by far the best way to train. Exercising in this fashion simply works the body out in a way that I haven't experienced from any other workout. What's more, it gives you Functional Strength, meaning that it gives your Real strength and stamina to do things, as opposed to just more strength to lift more weights. Put another way, a person who performs pull-ups can easily use a lat pull down machine. A person who is the king of the machine will not be able to do pull-ups easily - if at all.

One authority who agrees with me on this is Karl Gotch. Karl Goth was a professional wrestler when the term meant real athlete (ie, they could really wrestle) as opposed to showman. Back in those days when wrestling was a real sport a match might go on for an hour or more. In order to wrestle like this you had to be in amazing shape, and Karl was. How did he train? You guessed it, bodyweight training. These are his thoughts on the matter:

"I don't like weight lifting for wrestling", says Karl. "I believe you should do gymnastic type exercises that use your own bodyweight. Take a gymnast, for example. he is the only athlete, that, without weight training, when given his own body weight and asked to press it overhead, will go BANG and press it without any problem. You've got to look at the animals in the wild. That's what I did. I watched how they moved around and figured out how to do similar movements. When I was growing up in Belgium, a doctor friend of mine took me to the zoo to observe the animals. He said that they were the ones who knew how to train. He was right. So I started to put together a way of training ... but I don't want to take credit for it. How can you take credit for exercises and ideas that are at least 3000 years old?"

Karl is bang on about the strength and power that gymnasts posses, as well as everything else he said. What's more, Karl was speaking from experience. Karl was a fanatic about finding out about new and different ways to train. He really wanted to know if there was anything to weight lifting that might help him. The only way to find out, he reasoned, was to try it himself. He completely abandoned his workouts of bodyweight exercises and dedicated himself to weight lifting. What were the results? Although he could lift more (he could apparently squat 700 lbs and bench press 400) he lost the functional strength that he needed. After only 10 minutes of real wrestling, he was done. In Karl's point of view, weight lifting gives you counterfeit muscle. You may look like a million bucks, but none of it is worth a damn. What's the point of looking like you're in shape when you're really not?

Below are some other reasons why a regimen of bodyweight training exercises works so well:

1. When you do Hindu squats and Hindu pushups, or variations of them, you are working major muscle groups. Most people who train with weights do isolation exercises. The person who works major muscle groups beats the isolation exercise dodo 16 ways from Sunday.

2. Because bodyweight training involves 'natural' movement, they require deeper self-concentration, neurological connections are stronger than they are when your focus is on something other than yourself, i.e. 'weights.'

3. Bodyweight exercises allow you to train your body from virtually any angle or position. The same cannot be said of weights, especially all those ridiculous machines.

4. Bodyweight training exercises simultaneously increase strength, endurance and flexibility. Hindu pushups and squats are a textbook perfect example of this.

5. Bodyweight exercises attack the muscle at a deeper level than weights, thereby
giving you greater 'functional strength.' The person who does a set of pullups, for example, works the muscles of the back and arms far more than the person doing a lat pulldown on a machine.

At the end of the day I can write about why I think bodyweight training is the best way to train till the cows come home. The only way you'll know for sure is to take a page from Karl Gotch's book and try it. I'm convinced that when you experience the amazing benefits that can accrue from performing natural bodyweight exercises you'll never look back.