Tuesday 19 July 2011

The power of pure bodyweight training.

In the last months, due to work-related reasons, I have to spend 4 days a week in another city. It's not far from home but spending half a week there means rearrange my workouts too.
I've always been a big fan of bodyweight training, but I've always put some sandbag-lifting and tire-flipping between the sets of pushups.
I have always preferred to have few pieces of equipment, and basically homemade things. Being in another town, with no equipment at all forced me to concentrate only on cardio and bodyweight training. The best thing about bodyweight training is obviously that you can perform a full training everywhere, so it's perfect for me at the moment.
First thing to solve, was to find a pull-up bar or something similar, to compensate the good amount of pushups I'm doing. Finding a suburban playground works great, as there are many bars that can be used for pullups, with lots of variations. People from ex URSS have a long tradition of palyground bodyweight training, look at this video:

No ultramodern machines, no fancy gyms, just motivation, sweat and hard work.
Ok, back to me :-). I'm used to circuit-training, like boxeurs, so I wanted to transpose the circuit training in my new momentary location. Reaching a playground to make pullups means about 1,5km uphill, and I walk up there fast pace, just to warm up a bit, then I do a first set of pullups, then from the playground there is a path which leads to a park with a few benches, good to make pushups elevating the feet. After the pushups, the park is perfect for some quadrupedal running, then back with the feet under the benches for crunches. Then some minutes of jogging downhill to cool down a bit, and I'm back to the playground, to start another set of pullups. Looping the circuit for 4-5 times is an excellent workout, and it's totally free.
Good workouts can be done everywhere. I still have to understand why people join gyms.

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