What muscle does that exercise work? I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked that question. Given the rather “out-of-the-box” nature of our programs and bodyweight exercises, they draw attention. But people don’t quite know what to make of them.

So of course they fall back on their most familiar frame of reference—the bodybuilding paradigm. So, they ask “what muscle does that work?” If I’m in a flippant mood, I’ve been known to answer “all of them.”

But usually I’ll take a bit more time to explain the method behind the madness. I explain that although we’re building a fine physique with our bodyweight exercise, we’re doing it by concentrating on movement, not muscle. So by taking the body through its paces using bodyweight exercises that are based in efficient movement, we’re not only changing our physiques to look better, we’re making them more functional and injury-proof.

We’re also laying the foundation for increasingly rapid learning of OTHER skills. Because we focus on correct movement through varied degrees of freedom, we actually rewire the nervous system, the muscles and the facia to move well. And those new movement patterns can be called on when we need them.

So whether you’re trying to learn a new sport or just keep yourself upright when you slip on the ice, training for movement, not muscle, is your best option. And bodyweight exercise is one of the most efficient ways of getting there.

Here’s a great bodyweight exercise from Scott Sonnon’s original Body-Flow program. I taught this to one of my buddies a couple years ago, and to this day it’s his favorite! He told me recently that he does it every night as part of his evening routine just for the way it resets his system and connects him with his movement.

It’s called the Leg Thread. Give it a try and let us know in the comments how it goes. It may be tricky at first. Make sure you think from the core outwards rather than the limbs in. It’ll make all the difference in the world.

Here’s to a new you, one bodyweight exercise at a time…

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1. Bodyweight Training And Muscle Mass – Building The Functional Physique
2. Release The Inner Animal With Bodyweight Exercise
3. Bodyweight Exercise for Martial Arts Part 1 – Upper Body Force Transfer

Can you believe another decade is about to expire? It seems like only yesterday we were ushering in the new millennium. But as I reflect on how my philosophy of health and fitness has evolved since then, ten years becomes an eternity.

In that time, I discovered Circular Strength Training® and embraced a whole new paradigm of what it means to be fit. In truth, CST isn’t new. It’s a journey “back to the future.”

There are generations of fitness wisdom locked in diverse physical cultures across the planet and through the ages. CST excavates those universal truths and digests them using the very best modern sport science has to offer. The result is a truly functional system of health and fitness.

In essence, it’s a ward against trends and fitness fashions. Everything is boiled down to it’s essence. And that essence can be applied to any specific methods, tools or goals. CST is the proverbial grain of salt that can be thrown on the myriad of over exuberant tangents the fitness industry enjoys.

And with that in mind, I thought it would be fun to reminisce on some of those trends. As I started my own reflection, I realized that each decade was defined by some distinctive fitness fashion.

In the 80s, I was immersed in the Muscle & Fitness magazine culture (insert embarrassed smile). The 90s conjured up memories of my wife doing Step Reebok workouts in our living room. Of course, the past decade is imbued with the “functional fitness” refrain.

But I realized: that’s just ME. I bet you have a totally different and equally amusing perspective. And I hope you’ll tell us about it.

What did you’re fitness journey look like across the decades? What jumps out at you as you let your thoughts wonder across the past? Please share your stories in the comments below.

We’re looking forward to a great walk down memory lane!

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If you’re not sure what to ask for this Christmas, or if you’re still not done shopping for your favorite bodyweight exercise enthusiast, you’re in luck. We’ve put together a list of our Christmas gift top picks.

Gymboss*

There’s nothing more annoying than having one eye on the clock when you’re trying to pour your effort into your training. The Gymboss is by far the most versatile training timer we’ve run across.

You can program both work and rest times, so it’s perfect for any kind of interval training. It’s also super portable — the size of a pager.

Gym Rings*

This is a bigger purchase, but by far one of our favorite pieces of equipment. Training with rings allows you to add pulling movements into your bodyweight program. It also allows an element of instability to be injected into your training.

You could get by with just a pull-up bar, but these things are more versatile and so much more FUN!

Tiger Mats

Bodyweight exercise involves a lot of rolling around on the ground. That means some good floor mats are a must. You can get by if you cobble together a bunch of small puzzle mats from Walmart, but these mats from Tiger are the Rolls Royce.

These are the exact mats that I have in my training area and I love them.

Paralettes*

These little known training devices open up a whole new world of bodyweight pressing exercises. Essentially, they provide stable “handles” that allow you to do much more sophisticated exercises. They also take some of the strain off the wrists for people who have trouble with pressing movements straight from the ground.

Jump Stretch Bands

If you’re looking to add a little resistance to a bodyweight exercise, nothing beats the versatility of stretch bands. You can arrange them in virtually any combination and from any angle. You can also use them to REDUCE resistance for doing things like pull ups or Handstand Push Ups.

Bodyweight Exercise Revolution

OK, time for us to toot our own horns… Bodyweight Exercise Revolution contains several different 28-day programs geared to different goals: fat loss, general athleticism, strength, longevity, and functional muscle growth. They are all follow-along programs with charts, photos and videos of all exercises. All of the programs in BER use the 4×7 format of periodization.

Bodyweight Blueprint For Fat Loss

The Bodyweight Blueprint package focuses on fat loss. It’s a 3-month program (broken into 3 28-day phases), and is entirely follow-along, with videos, program charts, and printable daily program guides. It’s a much larger package of material than BER, but all focused on one goal. Phase 1 and 3 both use 4×7, while Phase 2 in the middle uses a more traditional periodization plan. Though the Blueprint ebook is focused on fat loss, it shares the same health-first approach as all CST stuff, so it’s also ideal to your goals.

So there you go. A whole sleigh full of ideas to keep you or your favorite bodyweight athlete happy!

Merry Christmas from the Bodyweight Coaches…

_______

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The G.I. Joe movie — like any good action flick — contains some admirable scenes of impressive acrobatics. They recall the cool bodyweight exercise moves from CST. That’s the kind of thing that really gets my juices flowing. I love watching good movement, especially enhanced to superhuman proportions through the latest Hollywood gadgetry.

In a recent post — G.I. Joe Fitness — I promised a video of one of my favorite CST Body-Flow movements. It’s a bodyweight exercise that looks cool but that’s really quite simple, and easy to teach. And if you squint your eyes really hard it almost looks like a cool move from G.I. Joe!

The bodyweight exercise is called a Long Arm Roll. I love teaching it to people who have doubts about getting into “weird” looking bodyweight exercises. Using Coach Scott Sonnon’s Body-Flow principles, I help those people surprise themselves every time!

Take a look at the video and you’ll see what I mean.

There’s lots more where that came from. Give it a try and let us know what you think of this cool bodyweight exercise in the comments. If there’s enough interest we’ll keep ‘em comin’.

Related posts:

1. Release The Inner Animal With Bodyweight Exercise

When guys like Ryan and I meet a titanically muscular bloke carting around a cooler full of protein shakes, we mentally file him under “meathead”, “musclehead” or “gym rat”.

That was our kneejerk first impression of coach Vince Delmonte, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Within moments we were struck by Vince’s thoughtful, genuine nature. And when he spoke, we were immediately aware that this is a guy who knows his stuff.

We’ve become good friends with Vince since that first meeting, and we’ve come to respect his muscle building knowledge. We’ve even used his ideas to build bodyweight-based programs for putting on mass. Wouldn’t you sit up and listen to a guy who went from the high school nickname “Skinny Vinny” to modern man of muscle?

Vince is a walking encyclopedia of innovative muscle building techniques, and we felt it was  about time that you experienced his stuff first-hand. Many of you have written to ask us how to pack on more lean mass. And even if you don’t want bulk, those of you who are simply interested in getting or staying trim need to keep an eye on muscle, because it supports fat loss.

Unfortunately, Vince just sold out of all 500 copies of the DVDs that he had printed for his birthday sale last week. BUT, he kept a few for friends, and we were lucky enough to wring one of them out of his hands for you guys! Vince has agreed to give away a muscle building package to one of our readers — and it’s a massive package fit for those with massive aspirations.

If you think you could stand to have a little more meat on your frame, you MUST enter this contest.

The rules are easy:

In 200 words or less, tell us your fitness goal for 2010, which bodyweight exercise will be most helpful to you in achieving that goal, and why you need Vince’s muscle building DVDs.

Post your answer to the comments below. The best one wins Vince’s 9 DVD set.

This is a one day only contest. At the stroke of midnight on Sunday December 6th, we’ll close the comments on this post and pick a winner.

We’re looking forward to reading your entry!

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1. Bodyweight Training And Muscle Mass – Building The Functional Physique

Today we feature a guest review from bodyweight exercise blogger Parth Shah:

My name is Parth Shah, and I’ve been blogging about working out at home since February 2007. I started my site, ShahTraining.com, as a way to share my views of at home training—especially bodyweight exercise. Over the years it has become a source of practical home fitness information and has developed a loyal following.

I’m an average guy who likes to work out and write about working out. I’m not selling anything, and I’m certainly not a world-class trainer like Coaches Sonnon, Steer, and Murdock. And after years of training in my home gym—which is outfitted with a 16kg kettlebell, 300lb barbell set, 15lbs medicine ball, makeshift bench, makeshift pullup bar, jump rope, sledgehammer, and push up handles—I thought I’d seen and done it all.

About a year ago I began promoting and reviewing products on my website as a way to continue blogging and potentially to support myself. After purchasing many bodyweight training eBooks, I literally rolled my eyes when I came across Coach Steer and Murdock’s “Bodyweight Exercise Revolution.”

“Not Another Bodyweight Program!”

I rolled my eyes because I’d seen my fair share of bodyweight exercise programs. “This must be just another bodyweight eBook,” I thought, “talking about the same old exercises, and providing the same old routines.”

Before purchasing Bodyweight Exercise Revolution (BER), I had never heard of Coach Steer or Murdock. I had heard of Circular Strength Training® and Coach Sonnon, of course. In fact, I used to read the original version of the RMAX/CST website. It was there that I was first introduced to density training, which I began to implement into my training to improve my numbers in certain exercises.

After downloading BER, I started skimming through it. The first thing that stood out was the exercises—I had never seen anything like them before. I performed the first workout later that week, and I honestly found it quite easy. I probably needed to use a more advanced level of sophistication on some of the bodyweight exercises, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Certain movements, such as the basic leg swoop, were surprisingly challenging. I still haven’t tried every single movement in the Bodyweight Eexercise Revolution manual, but I did realize I had stumbled upon something truly unique. After actually reading the full eBook, I also learned a lot of brand new exercise concepts.

One of the biggest lessons I learned was how to better organize my overall training program. Before BER, all my workouts were performed at a high intensity level. I must say I went through some severe training cycles, but I thought it was just a part of training.

During the summer, I used to train with my buddies in my backyard and garage. We’d go 5-6 days a week. We were training at a super high intensity level using metabolic conditioning workouts comparable to Crossfit and GymJones. By the end of the summer all of us were banged up, tired, and suffering from overuse injuries—especially in the shoulders, wrists, and knees.

The injuries sucked, but we were also a lot leaner, stronger, and bigger than we were at the beginning of the season. The problem was, it didn’t last. We all went into hibernation and dramatically decreased our training when the weather turned cold. We went from a period of extreme high intensity training to being near-sedentary, over and over again, every year.

I’ve noticed a very similar pattern with athletes who go through periods of on-season and off-season training. Many bodybuilders also go through extreme cycles of bulking and cutting. After reading Bodyweight Exercise Revolution and learning how the 4×7 system works, I realized how dangerous these extreme periods of training are.

The Drawback to Extreme Training

There are many drawbacks to extreme training, and I’ve experienced most of them. I’ve also seen them in my friends and in other individuals I trained with. A propensity to injury is the most obvious one. Without paying attention to proper recovery, you’re putting your body at risk of a sidelining injury.

I’m a young guy, so I bounced back from these injuries pretty quickly. But I still experienced a nasty cycle: I went from being fat to lean to fat to lean to fat to lean. Why? Because I would overtrain, burn myself out, and then “rest” for a few months before realizing I had to start working out again.

CST’s 4×7 method of periodization was an eye opener for me. This simple protocol allows you to program both high intensity and recovery sessions within the context of your program.

I learned the hard way that simply warming up with dynamic stretches before each training session isn’t enough. You really do need to devote a full session to your recovery, and it needs to be specifically scheduled within your overall training program. Don’t let your body get to the point of breaking before you start focusing on recovery.

In conclusion, Bodyweight Exercise Revolution and Bodyweight Blueprint For Fat Loss have a lot of great new exercises, techniques, and a training methodology you won’t see in any other bodyweight training manual. But one of the biggest lessons you will learn is this: health and fitness should have a long-term focus.

Don’t just work out for the sake of vanity and to achieve short-term goals. Make it a lifestyle.

About Parth Shah:

Parth Shah is an average joe who loves training in the comfort of his own home. He blogs about bodyweight training and other forms of home fitness on ShahTraining.com. You can read more of his reviews at shahtraining.com

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The importance of developing a functional core is universal. Even if you’re only concerned with your six pack. You still need to make sure it works right. Every movement you make flows from it.

Trying to move well without a strong core is like shooting a cannon from a canoe! The problem is, most people think the only way to train their core is through movements like crunches. That misses half the equation. One of the important funcitons of the core is to stabilize.

Check out this clip from our fellow coach Chris Lopez. He’s demonstrating a cool bodyweight exercise combo that you may never have guessed is a great core exercise. Try it and let us know what you think in the comments.

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1. How To Build A One-Arm Push Up — Bodyweight Exercise For Serious Strength

(This article is part seven of a seven part series. Be sure to grab each of the installments to assemble your complete 6-Degree CST Bodyweight Glide program... If you missed it, click to read part 6 of this bodyweight core program series.)

CST Bodyweight Glide Part Seven

If you’ve been following the bodyweightcoach.com blogs, you now have all 6 CST Bodyweight Glide movements, one for each of the 6-Degrees of Freedom:

• Heaving: Knee-in
• Pitching: V-up
• Yawing: Side knee-in
• Surging: Mountain climber
• Rolling: Side plank knee-in
• Swaying: Tadpole

Great!

Now what do you do with them?

Shredding Your Core in 12-Minutes Per Day

There are a number of ways we could approach it, and it really depends on your goals. Think of the individual movements as being tools on the tactical level — they’re the manouevers we use to carry out our plan, but the plan itself — in this case our training protocol — is decided at the strategic level.

Many of you posted your ideas about possible training protocols in the comments of Part Six, and each of your solutions made sense given the strategic questions you were trying to solve. If you really want to understand these Bodyweight Glide movements and how they can be applied with totally different results in terms of your conditioning, I would encourage you to make an experiment of it. Take each of those suggested protocols and run them through a 28-day training cycle. Keep careful notes, and let us know what you discover. I could just spell out some of the differences here of course, but that would rob you of the experience of figuring it out for yourself.

For the purposes of this series, I’m going to suggest one protocol for readers who would like to put this program to immediate use. Our hypothetical client in this case is someone who travels frequently for business, who has no access to equipment, little free time, and whose primary goal is to develop core strength through all degrees of freedom while increasing their cardiovascular capacity and losing excess weight.

Perform each exercise for 30-seconds. When those 30 seconds are up, switch seamlessly into the next exercise and perform it for 30 seconds (don’t take breaks in between — that’s too easy!). Continue until you’ve done all 6 movements.

That’s one circuit. The full program consists of 3 circuits, with 1 minute rest between each circuit.

At first you’ll feel like you want to coast through the movements, to spread out your reps. Don’t do it. Your strategy should be to keep the fastest pace that you can manage while maintaining good technique. You want this to be intense. What’s the point of coasting along when you can squeeze every ounce from the time you’re spending?

Hints for Further Progress

If you work the program as planned, you’re going to progress and it will get easier. When that happens, you can do one of two things:

1. decrease the rest time between sets
2. OR increase the duration of the exercises.

Start by decreasing the one minute rest between sets. Ease that down to 30 seconds of rest, then to 15 seconds of rest. Your body will adapt by training itself to recover in less and less time.

Next, increase the duration that you perform each movement to 40 seconds (from our baseline of 30).

Finally, if you’re up for it you can remove the rest periods entirely so that you’re performing 3 back-to-back circuits nonstop. This has the added benefit of bringing your total workout time down to 9 minutes—allowing you to knock off early, or to add a fourth set.

You can do this CST Bodyweight Glide program 3 to 4 times per week, or on the Moderate day of a 4×7 cycle.

So that’s it. How to shred your core in 12-minutes per day, in a balanced, health-first fashion. We’re glad you chose to come along for the ride.

Be sure to take before and after photos! And share them with us on the forum at bodyweightcoach.com

Good luck!

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I finally got to watch G.I. Joe last night. I loved it. It was just the right mix of action, comedy, caricature and reality. The effects were stelar. And any tacky moments were just transparent enough to make them cool instead of distracting.

But my favorite parts of the movie were the stunts and fight scenes. There was some truly beautiful movement on display at times — and just the right mix of cinematic effects to highlight the grace and poise of the action.

In the movie, the characters have fancy suits to help them with some of their more impressive feats of strength and speed. But in reality, the stuntmen and actors had no such help.

And that’s where the lesson about exercise comes in. True fitness is about being ready for the demands of your life, sport, job and whatever else you do. You are FIT FOR something.

And you don’t get fit FOR anything with biceps curls and leg extensions. Those things can certainly sneak in to round out a judiciously planned program. But the platform of any program has to be based on full body movement.

Notice I said movement, not exercises. That’s because the best fitness approach focuses on MOVEMENT, not on muscle. If you move, and move well, the muscle will follow.

Basing your program around movement will actually give you a more natural looking physique as well. It builds what I’ve coined before as the Functional Physique — a body that takes shape according to the demands of real-life action.

And besides, playing with fun and challenging movements is just a lot more interesting than doing biceps curls! Do you remember what it was like to spend hours practicing a new skill or perfecting a new technique?

Those days don’t have to be relegated to high school hockey, football or cheerleading practice. Just because you’re a “grown-up” now doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with movement.

Take a look at the video clip at the top right of this page. You’ll see Scott Sonnon playing with movements from Prasara Body-Flow. Granted, you might not be able to run out today and start doing what he’s doing in the clip. But there are tons of lead up exercises that’ll get you there long before you’d expect.

Would you like to move like that? Let me know in the comments. If we get enough interest, I’ll film one of my favorite Body-Flow exercises. I like it so much because it looks seriously cool, but I can get even the most “out of shape” clients doing it very quickly. This impresses the heck out of them and makes me look good… 

In the meantime, you can get started with some more gentle movements from Prasara Yoga. Try out this follow along yoga routine. Enjoy the movement. The physique will follow.

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(This article is part six of a seven part series. Be sure to grab each of the installments to assemble your complete 6-Degree CST Bodyweight Glide program... If you missed it, click to read part 5 of this equipment-free ab exercise series.)

CST Bodyweight Glide Part Six

This program is designed to shred your core in as little as 12-minutes per day using only bodyweight exercise.

The movements were designed to be done with those little plastic glide discs you’ve seen on TV. But the good news is you don’t need the discs. Socks, RMAX ultimate grappling shoes, and squares of felt all work on hardwood floors. Disposable paper plates work great on carpet. If you’re on a business trip and staying in hotels, tear a page out of one of the free glossy magazines in the desk drawer, or put the plastic laundry bag from the closet on your feet. Anything that will allow your feet to slide on the floor will work.

Movement six is the Swaying component: the tadpole.

Remember, keep your shoulders packed, rotate your elbow pits forward, maintain good crown to coccyx spinal alignment, and activate your core with a hard exhale on every rep. These movements should be core driven.

Now go try it out for yourself!

In the final installment I’ll tell you how to put it all together into a training program. But remember, you’ve gotta comment if you want to see the training protocols!

Good luck!

(Click to read part seven=> bodyweight core blowtorch)

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