A Seldom Discussed Benefit of Bodyweight Training

A Not-Thought-Of, Often Not-Used Benefit of Bodyweight Workouts and/or Home Training

     There are some real benefits to bodyweight training.  You don’t need a gym membership.  You can train no matter where you are or at any time, day or night, since you take your “gym” with you at all times.  You can train more often—a real plus in my book—since you don’t have to make that trip to the gym that might prevent you from otherwise training.  You can train more as in more days per week or more workouts per day.  Doing double-split, or even triple-split, daily workouts are viable for the same reason.  It’s just hard for most people with any kind of “normal” life—family, spouse, kids, job—to make it to the gym more than once per day.  You also don’t have to wait in line for equipment or put up with any of the other annoyances I always found when training in a commercial gym.

     Most of the benefits of bodyweight training are also the benefits of having your own home gym, with the exception, of course, that you can’t pack up your home gym and take it with you on a trip to the beach or a weekend excursion to the mountains.  I mean, you can’t do that if you have my home gym, replete with squat rack, lifting platform, Forza bench, around 1,500 pounds of weights, not to mention a sled, a sandbag, and other lifting implements.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t haul off some dumbbells, a few bands, or a couple pairs of kettlebells with you on your trip.  I do just that myself when I head off for a mountain getaway or take a trip to visit my family’s ranch in Texas.

     Having written the above, there is one problem with home training, bodyweight or otherwise, and that is simple lack of motivation.  There are a lot of lifters, and especially casual gym-goers, who need to go to a gym to stay motivated.  Whether it’s the atmosphere of the gym—the music, the smell of the iron, the buzz of all the people—or their fellow training partners, the gym ensures they stay at it.  And, as much as I love training in my garage, I’ll admit that there are days when it’s sub-freezing in the winter or over a hunerd (as we say in the Deep South) degrees in the middle of August and I would rather stay inside and be comforted by either my fireplace or my A/C and ceiling fan.  That’s when I go the bodyweight route myself.

     But I think, overall, you can’t deny all those benefits I listed for bodyweight and/or home training.  However, there’s another real benefit to bodyweight training that seems seldom discussed and little used.  And what is that?  The benefit of long, and sometimes really long, rest periods between sets.  When training for strength and performance, there is some genuine benefit to taking as long as 15 to 20 minutes (or longer) between heavy sets.

     The “king of the squat” Paul Anderson, for instance, would rest around 30 minutes between heavy sets, sometimes more.  But he didn’t do that while training down at the local gym.  It wouldn’t exactly be a fruitful management of your time if you were to rest 30+ minutes between sets at the gym, but if you do that at your home, there’s nothing to it.

     If you think this idea is “crazy” or even original in some way, you’re wrong—I’m not the 1st strength coach to suggest such a thing.  It is, to give you an example, one of the main benefits of bodyweight training suggested by Pavel Tsatsouline, who thinks that 10 minutes is the minimum that you should rest between sets when strength is your goal, even if it’s for strength endurance.  He suggests that athletes are resting optimally between sets, bodyweight or otherwise, when their bodies have “forgotten” the prior set.

     One of the optimal ways to use this technique when training pushups, chins, or bodyweight squats, of whatever variety, is to just do a set periodically throughout the day rather than doing a “workout” with “rest times” between sets.  This manner of “grease-the-groove” training will quickly develop your strength if performed correctly.

     This is not to say that you can’t use prescribed rest times.  In fact, Pavel recommends exactly that in his book “Beyond Bodybuilding.”  To show you how you might go about doing this, here’s a push up program from that very book.  I’ll outline it first, then explain the details afterwards:

Monday: 100% - 30% - 60 minute rest between sets

Tuesday: 50% - 60 minute rest between sets

Wednesday: 60% - 45 min rest between sets

Thursday: 25% - 60 min rest between sets

Friday: 45% - 30 min rest between sets

Saturday: 40% - 60 min rest between sets

Sunday: 20% - 90 min rest between sets

Monday: 100% - 35% - 45 min between sets

Tuesday: 55% - 20 min between sets

Wednesday: 30% - 15 min between sets

Thursday: 65% - 60 min between sets

Friday: 35% - 45 min between sets

Saturday: 45% - 60 min between sets

Sunday: 25% - 120 min between sets

Monday: Test

     Pavel says that the workout is self-explanatory, but when I gave this to a work acquaintance of mine over a decade ago who was interested in bodyweight training after listening to me prattle on one day about “grease the groove” stuff, let’s just say that he didn’t understand it at all. (Rest in peace, Big Ted!)  So, if you’re a Ted, it works something like this:

     On the first Monday, test your pushup max.  Let’s say you manage 40 reps for one all-out, pec-pumping, triceps-blasting, shoulder-fatiguing set, then 40 is your 100%.  For the remainder of that day, you would do 12 reps (30% of 40) approximately every 60 minutes.  Don’t worry if you miss a set here or there.  If you notice that 80 minutes have gone by on that Monday because your boss keeps showing up at your desk, then just drop and give me 12 when he looks the other way.

     On Tuesday, you would do 20 every hour.  On Wednesday, you would do 24 reps every 40 minutes.  And so on and so forth for the remainder of the program.  Stick with the program until you achieve your desired number of pushups that you are aiming for, though I wouldn’t do it for more than a month straight.  At that point, your body will be ready for something different.

     You start the pushups from the time you get up in the morning until an hour or so before your head hits the pillow at night.  If that’s too much for you—this might be a bodyweight program but it ain’t one for downright beginners, let’s admit—then do your “workout” during a pre-set time of the day, say, from noon until 8PM, or from 8AM until 5PM.  The latter suggestion works well if you have an office job that allows you to do the training at ease while “at work.”  Not so much if you’re a construction worker.  (If you’re a manual laborer, this isn’t the workout for you, though, if you’re young, you might prove me wrong.)

     By the way, you can do more than just push ups.  You could use the same program for, say, push ups and chins, or chins and bodyweight squats.  You could also do it for push ups, but then do a low-rep powerlifting program for your lower body and back at the same time, just to give the rest of your body a completely different stimulus.

     You could also utilize it to get strong on different styles of push ups (or other upper body movements) by rotating to a new exercise every 2 weeks.  Something like this would work well:

2 weeks: regular push ups

2 weeks: Hindu push ups

2 weeks: parallel bar dips

2 weeks: knuckle push ups

     If you get great results from it, and want to keep doing it after 8 weeks, then, by all means, go ahead and do so.  Either select some different exercises or start back over with regular push ups and see how much stronger you are than when you started it.  By the way, if you don’t have any parallel bars to do dips on, then just do them in between some chairs.  You can also select to do your push ups, feet elevated in a chair, for more upper chest development.

     Training in this manner has another benefit, one which might not be obvious at first glance.  Let’s say you follow Pavel’s program above to a T, either while you’re at work, and then after work, or when you have an off day on the weekends and you’re cleaning the house or doing whatever weekend chores need to be done.  You’re not resting completely between sets.  And that’s a good thing.  In fact, you don’t want to just plop down and do nothing.  You want to stay relatively active.

     If you’re a martial artist, for instance, you can do martial arts between your push up sets.  It might even be good to do a set of push ups and then follow it up around 10 minutes later with some punches, blocks, or anything that involves the upper body.  Same goes if you use the workout for bodyweight squats, Hindu squats, or one-legged squats.  Follow up those sets with some kicks.

     It deserves an article all its own, but it’s worth mentioning here, even just briefly.  If you want to excel at a sport, and this is especially true for any fighting arts—boxing, MMA, etc—then your resistance sessions will be more effective if you do them at the same session as your chosen discipline.  When a karateka, for example, combines a squat session with a kicking session, his body will better “combine” the two together as one.  When you follow up a set of squats with a session of kicking the heavy bag, the body seems to respond by kicking harder and faster.  Combining the two in one workout allows the body to “weave” together the strength and power developed in the squats into a “better,” more powerful kick.  It’s as if your body then “knows” that the squats are meant to aid the kicks.  Doing them separate, for whatever reason, doesn’t seem to work as well.  It is still beneficial, don’t get me wrong, but not to the same augmented degree.

     Everything discussed in this essay is not to say that you can’t do bodyweight or home training sessions that are short, compact, and contain shorter rest between sets.   Perhaps the best approach would be to combine both methodologies.  Spend a few weeks using grease-the-groove training that utilizes very long rest times and a few weeks with more “conventional” training consisting of little rest between sets and actual “workouts.”  Doing both will make you a much more well-rounded strength athlete and lead to a better developed physique.