Bodyweight Exercises: Okay To Do Everyday?

Cavemate K · Bodyweight Exercises: Okay To Do Everyday?

Does anyone have any advice whether or not one can perform pushups-squats, etc. everyday or should one do them with days off in between? If the prevailing wisdom of weight training is that one needs to give their muscles a rest in order to recuperate, wouldn't one need to do the same for bodyweight exercises since it's also putting resistance pressure on the muscles? Thanks.

K

cygnus

I think it depends how hard you are working out. Maybe you should split them up and have a day of active of high intensity cardio in between.

The problem I have with bodyweight excercises is load. You have to find ways to progress. Pistol squats are good if you are holding a kettlebell and you can advance to one arm pushups,but then you must add resistance to continue to make gains..

You can also cut down on the rests between sets..

If you can, I would chin and dip and split squat as much as I can as my core.

Scout Finch

I do abdominal stuff like different kinds of crunches every day and some "core" Pilates type stuff, like "swimming" and "side bends" and the hundred, but it is mostly to keep my trunk and abdomen in shape for running. I alternate doing upper and lower body strength training several days a week. Mostly, I just get bored doing strength training, so I have to do it in small short segments throughout the week. I also try to stretch every day because of my running, and I'm still working on doing a side splits, but I'm a very tight girl. Yup

Max Thunder

When you're doing an exercise in the endurance range, such as bodyweight squats and push-ups, you can do it everyday with no problem, unless you really do say hundreds of reps. The CNS (central nervous system) is not fatigued much by that type of training and it doesn't affect the muscles much, one easy way to see it is that you usually don't get sore muscles from push-ups. Soreness is not a real measure of "muscle damage" but it gives a good idea. In fact, the exact cause of what is called delayed onset muscle soreness or simply DOMS is not known.

The closer you train to your limits, the more the CNS is fatigued.

Beginners can do this a lot more often, as they don't tapper into anything close to their real limits.

As cygnus said, pistol squats are great although they're pretty hard to be do if you don't have a weight to hold in your hands, to balance yourself. Weightless pistol squats are quit a feat and I still can't do more than 3 with my right leg, and 1 with the left one...

Chins and its variation is pretty much the ultimate back exercise in my opinion!

About abs, doing work every day is unnecessary and it seems to come from the old mythic wisdom that say that a) more is better and b) you'll burn abdominal fat with crunches. My favorite exercise, which was also Bruce Lee's favorite and which is one of Pavel Tsatsouline's favorites is the dragon flag, where your shoulder stays still on a bench and the rest of the body is doing the movement. Much more intense and doesn't make you do a gazillon of reps! I train them once or twice a week, like other muscles.

Here is an article that give an idea about how to increase chin reps; it can give an idea about how you can manage your number of reps in order to train very often:
Synaptic Facilitation
http://www.cbass.com/Synaptic.htm

Cavemate K

Thanks Max! Happy

As a beginner, I do a lot of struggling and often I wind up sore the next day, so I equated that with the type of resistance placed on the muscles when lifting freeweights. Maybe at the beginning I should only do BW exercises every few days? I've read quite a bit that says that it's okay to workout even when sore, just to do less reps. I'd like to adopt that approach, I just want to make sure that it's a valid one.

K

ReddyMcMeaty

You're sore now... but once you've been doing them long enough it will be just part of your daily life and you won't even think about needing rest. If you're feeling run down, or LOSING strength then you need to rest, but if you're not then don't worry about it. And yes.. agreeing with what everyone else says, it depends on how hard the exercises are TO YOU. It is good to do some movement every day so the approach you mentioned seems to be ok. Sore legs? Ok just do a few of squats rather than 100, keep your body doing the movement but not exhausing it.

There are people who commute an hour each way on their bikes to work and they do not need to rest as it's just what they do, the body truly adapts. Yet to another person an hour's ride would make them so sore they'd need a week to recover.

Cavemate K

Thanks for the replies everyone!

BTW, in case anyone's interested I really reccommend a product called fitdeck which can be ordered at amazon.com . If you go to fitdeck.com you can check it out. It's basically a deck of cards with exercises described on them: draw a card, do the exercise. Nice and handy and all bodyweight!

K