Yep. Do push-ups on an incline. Get rings or a suspension trainer and do exercises from a more upright position. Rest feet on the floor when doing dips. Tons of ways to scale exercises down if you can’t do the normal version yet.
While you are all technically correct for one reading of that one sentence, it can also be read that buying dumbbells is the only option for using dumbbells right now.
Not really. What’s a body weight alternative to shoulder lift? When I travel and stay in hotels without gym, I use chairs and furniture. However, holding on to them can be really hard and certain exercises are just impossible.
That’s a good point, and I try that as well when no alternative, but I prefer a chair and a dumbbell before those things because they pull in a specific direction rather than down. But these are not just using a body.
Variations of Pike Press or Decline Push Up. If that 250lbs is mostly fat I wouldn't worry too much about my shoulder strength and focus on losing the extra weight. If it's muscle I agree that it's hard to maintain that without some iron.
Not the result. But I do do this, as well as pushups of different kinds, crunches, squats, etc. I just can’t agree that free weights can be completely replaced in a regular room.
You can build an entire upper body strength program around chins and handstand push ups. If you can't do a handstand push up; doing handstands and negatives until you can should provide plenty of upper body stimulation.
The only real downside to bodyweight training is lower back.
Yes, theoretically you can do "everything you need" (no, but in terms of main lifts I can accept the answer) only with bodyweight exercises. In the same way you theoretically only need Notepad to program in any language.
In practice it sucks.
Yeah ok, sure, you can make your push-up harder or easier if you incline one way or the other. But do you have a bench that can be set to the exact height you want? All padded surfaces? Do you have enough space? Not to mention your shoulder mobility/strength which might or might not be the best one for your push-up to work on all inclinations.
Do all people have enough dexterity and strength for all bodyweight exercises? I don't think so
You can't beat weights. If I had to go to prison and learn how to do body-weight exercises, I would, but a barbell with the ability to set the weight in increments of 5 lbs is exactly what you want to precisely overload your muscles at the exact rate your programming requires. Also, if body weight exercises were enough, why do elite athletes consistently use weights and machines?
Well, yes but I don't mean that. Even if you can do push ups or any other exercise with your body weight, there are some muscles that you can't exercise.
Legs are extremely complicated to work out without weight. They carry your whole weight around all day so in order to make it suffer a bit, you need to add something on top of that.
You can't do biceps or any other small muscle that needs to be isolated during the workout.
Casual gym-goers are likely more familiar with random dumbbell routines than a myriad of bodyweight exercises. If you've been out of the gym for months and are out of shape, you're likely going to go with something that's familiar to you with proven benefits regardless of whether there are superior alternatives out there.
> Which is false, as you could always just do bodyweight exercises instead.
lol, why dumbbells have been used for so long if they are useless ?
bodyweights exercises are quite limited, only three of them can are usefull for athletic people, dips (triceps) and pull ups( back + biceps) and handstand press (this one is very hard, shoulders). Push ups are very limited in term weight, about 50kg bench press equivalent (which is nothing). Raw squat is the same , doing 100 reps is not the same as doing 10 reps with 80kg on the back.
If you really want to exercise your legs, chest, biceps you have to use weights.
But of course if you are not into gym but only into fitness, you can do anything bodyweight
I wouldn't say its inferior by any means. I think the biggest difference is accessibility. When one uses weights, progression is very simple, just increase the weight. With body weight exercises one must switch exercises to increase / change the leverage and make the exercise harder to continue progression. A good example of this is going from a regular push up, to a diamond pushup, then moving toward pseudo planche pushups. The move from regular to diamond is not too bad as you only need to move your hands closer together, but to make progress towards PPPU, you have to learn how to do a planche lean forward a tiny bit more each time you attempt PPPU's eventually moving your hands from under your shoulders to practically under your hips for generating the push motion. So I guess the main point is body weight exercises require more study and coaching generally to see progression than exercises with weights and the progression you do see is less noticeable than simply adding more weight each time you workout, but they are both very good at gaining strength.
They didn't say they were useless, you're putting words in their mouth. They said it was false that "Even casual gym-goers might be able to justify the spend since weights at home are the only option when gyms aren’t open".
You can progressively raise your feet off the ground for something harder than a press-up but not as hard as a handstand press.
And one-legged variations are possible for legs which instantly doubles your equivalent weight; I believe they are also good for building up balance and stability from smaller muscles.
Because body weight exercises are much harder for most people it also is harder to progress from zero to hero with them but hero to super hero is pretty easy.
For chest you have push-ups and their multiple variations which most people still can’t perform correctly (even “lifters”) as well as body weight rows.
The moment you’ll be able to do even one parallel wide grip pull up which at that point is an unsupported chest row so it’s essentially a bench press in reverse just 100 times harder I’ll concede that you might be done with body weight.
For biceps just do chin-up curls, row curls or towel curls.
For legs there are a ton of them and if you think they don’t overload you well then I want to see you do even a single pistol squat.
It’s also much easier to add progressive overload by a) changing the mechanics of the exercise so you isolate muscles more effectively and b) by adding a backpack with a few water bottles filled with water or sand.
So the real issue isn’t that they aren’t effective, but that most people lack the strength, stability and range of motion to start doing them and it’s very demotivating when it might take you 4 months to do even one rep correctly. And that is without doing really hard stuff like planche which might take 2 years for an average person to do unassisted.
I disagree, the progress from hero to superhero is much more difficult. I can do many pull ups, I can do archer pull ups. In the gym I was just adding weights every time I felt it is too easy, 5kg at a time, nice little step up. During the lockdown I thought, okay, I can train for one arm pull up, I add half of my body weight in iron anyway. I still don't know how to do it gradually. I tried resistance bands and various progressions I found on youtube. They all feel like much bigger steps than adding 5kg every time. I ended up pulling my biceps when I moved from one resistance band to another.
Overall, I found it very irritating when people repeatedly told me: "oh, gyms are closed? try pushups at home!" Gym goers are already not "most people".
You know how many variations are there on pull ups? change your grip width and angle, can you do a parallel pull up? regular pulls up are so easy to overload even if you can't do the variations a backpack is all you need.
And honestly i want to see a one arm pull up with and a proper one (not when you hanging willy nilly sideways) with 150% body weight that puts you not only well above the average gym but well above the elite athlete territory here is Magnus Midtbø doing one arm pull ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zoN4DvEpKA and there is no way he can do it with 150% bodyweight, I don't know of a single climber that ever achieved that.
I do normal two arms pull ups with additional weight. If I could do weighted one arm pull up, I wouldn't have a problem to do them without weight at home.
I admit I was a big fun of bw workouts for 3-4 years. Until I realized that it is much easier to add another plate than dig youtube for more difficult progressions and suffer.
Pretty much the same way I can do a dozen of handstand pushups, but I have no idea how to move to one arm handstand pushup. I am not even sure I saw a video of one on youtube.
Moving through advanced progressions of bw exercises is much much more challenging than increasing number of plates on barbell. That was my whole point. I can see why people do it as sport, but it is a handicap for everyone who just wants to lift more.
For one arm standup push-up if you have push-up handles then you use one of them and the other arm on the floor and you alternate this basically puts more of the load on the arm that is on the floor while providing some support.
You can also use a palm on the floor and forearm on the floor if you don’t have the handles or just use a book/anything to elevate one arm to reduce its range of motion and to allow you to transfer more and more weight to the other.
But for hand stand push-ups you have other ways of progression such as curling your body to reduce the center of mass and to isolate your arms, chest and shoulder more from your back and core.
I generally avoid one hand anything because it’s too easy to get injured which is one of the main issues with body weight.
Most people won’t be able to lift enough weight to get injured and unless you are doing singles/doubles you are more or less safe.
With tings like one armed handstand pushups it’s way too easy to get to a point in your range of motion where you have absolutely no chance of holding that weight in fact it’s rather easy to do it with normal hand standing pushups. There are safer options for shoulder/delts dominated pushups than hand standing ones.
While there are things that are difficult to do with bodyweight exercises, there are plenty of ways of upping the difficulty.
E.g. I benched ~150kg when I was doing powerlifting regularly, yet I wouldn't have a chance in hell of doing a planche push-up, or quite a few simpler push-up variations.
> only three of them can are usefull for athletic people
This, however, is a very strange claim. "Athletic" means an awful lot of very different things to different people. Someone doing gymnastics for example will typically be able to do a whole lot of things that most weightlifters wouldn't be remotely close to, and they need to to be able to do the things they train for.
Like planches. Or flags. Or L-sits with rings.
I could at one point do L-sits, and the guys at my gym looked at me as if I was crazy - most of them couldn't get close to lifting their legs to 90 degrees.
I've mostly trained with barbells, but it gets pretty tiresome to see people dismiss bodyweight exercises to totally - I could lift weights most people doing bodyweight exercises can't get close to, but they can do lifts and motions where I'd be starting basically from scratch.
To call them "limited" is pretty weird to me. People who do bodyweight exercises to a high level seems to have a more versatile strength. It's just different goals.
Based on personal experience. I need to set my exercises not too easy and not too difficult. Too easy will get me bored. Too difficult i will totally give up. For that dumbbells is easier to manage.
It doesn't take very long to get to a point where you can benefit from adding weight to chin-ups/dips. Someone able to do just 1 chin-up at the start of lockdown could have made some very good progress now depending on how well they trained, their physical proportions, and athletic history. Also, some people simply benefit from exercise variety. I personally get sick of certain movements after months of doing them and need to switch them up purely for mental motivation.
Another issue with bodyweight training compared to free weights is training legs and hips effectively. Plenty people will be able to add resistance right away to something like a squat.
The debate is all about goals. The vast majority of athletic goals outside of bodybuilding and power lifting can be achieved with bodyweight and one kettlebell. The choice of that kb depends on your goals again. I have a 35lb and it's enough to get a hard workout.
> [home weight] sales usually start in the fall, hit their peak with January’s New Year’s resolutions, then taper off as it gets warmer and people are more likely to venture outside or go back to the gym.
> ...
> 95 percent of the world’s dumbbells are made in China, Logan said. To curb the virus spread, China instituted strict lockdowns from January to April;
> ...
> “It takes a month or so to get the products made and get them to the port,” Logan continued. “Then it goes from China to the United States” — landing, she says in Long Beach, California — “and then if they’re going to the East Coast, they have to go through the Panama Canal.”
> Once weights do get to America, ports, too, are subject to lockdowns and social distancing, adding even more delays.
It's not that it's "bad" to hold inventory, it's just expensive and risky. Tastes change, there's shrinkage, some things degrade over time, rents are high, and you have to finance buying/holding things you aren't selling. Obviously, just-in-time inventory isn't super resilient, but it has a ton of advantages most of the time. Perhaps it doesn't make sense for NOTHING to be stored near the point of sale, but it's not clear to me at least how that should be decided.
> I think most of these don't apply to dumbbells. At least not on a short term.
It does apply and is very pertinent, especially with ever decreasing operating capital in the small business sector; less predictable turnover/resupply rates and the likelihood that excess inventory turns into liabilities that can only be recovered via a liquidation process if they get it wrong is a risk that must be mitigated.
100% optimization in supply forecasting is an unobtainable panacea, but as has been seen with the asymmetric application to Gym Shutdowns, that varies by State, it reflects how uneven the reward could play out. Cost management is a huge part of Supply Chain and Logistics, so the constraints are obvious if you really take the time to analyze the situation.
I think all this underscores is the glaring single point of failure starring back at us with an entirely outsourced manufacturing infrastructure, and the inherit fallacy within it.
Gyms are open in my state, and I'm glad that they are because the buying all the machine and equipment that I use on a regular basis would require exceeding 10s of thousands of dollars, not to mention the pool and the still closed steam room/sauna I used prior to the shutdown.
> Now, the shortage seems to have kickstarted small shops dumbbell production lines (which are easier to put together than kettlebells)
Proving that the US can still manufacture despite the limited infrastructure and hollowing out of the means and resources to do so in the aftermath of Globalization.
I think what baffles me is how in my lifetime the notion of actual manufacturing-fabrication went from something that elevated so many in the US into the middle class came to be looked down upon and seen beneath an 'educated' person.
Especially because I actively participated in something where it was normal that undergrad to PhD mechanical and electrical engineers from Ivy Leagues Universities were working hand in hand with sometimes HS dropout mechanics and fabricators (on forums!) to develop better turbos and fuel mapping hardware/ECUs that were surpassing the gains of OEMs and even the well established aftermarket manufactures especially at time that it was being entirely under-served despite a significant demand that only increased with time. And then creating viable business models on those very same forums to serve as customer facing business with nothing more than a thread, a paypal account alongside a guy with tig welder a soldering gun.
Trump is an imbecile that predictably conned his way into office, and I hope he gets removed, despite the alternative not looking any better. But I really want the West to realize that the spotlight and rhetoric (mainly lip service) he put on China/CCP is warranted, and what occurred in Hong Kong is only a taste of what they're capable of and what they will do to their own kind (HK is Ethnically Han Chinese).
Reliance on such an oppressive regime is not sustainable and never ends well and the pitfalls and subsequent shortages of this centralized manufacturing infrastructure for even essential goods, like PPE, should be a much needed wake up call for manufacturing to return to at least their own continent(s).
> Or pick up 2 bricks. I did.
I resorted to filling 2 liter soda bottles and gallons with water for various lifts and isolation reps, it was a very dissatisfying experience from what I was used to but... it did help keep me somewhat fit, my upperbody PBs/Max lifts were only off by 15% by the time I went back to the gym when they reopened by mid Summer.
Sidenote: I just applied to a positions as Logistics Coordinator for a fitness equipment company, and they're currently on a 10-15 day delay on current orders. I kind of hope I can interview just to see the inner mechanics of what this all entails and where supply is being sourced from.
N00b here. I'm curious about JIT pipelines because the cost seems potentially so high when things go wrong, and JIT surely is fragile.
> Tastes change,
If you have a moderate inventory, surely they don't change that fast that you're stuck with much.
> there's shrinkage,
What's that?
> some things degrade over time,
But many don't
> rents are high,
are they (I really don't know)? How much to rent a warehouse out of town?
> and you have to finance buying/holding things you aren't selling.
But you are, they're not worthless inventory, just a buffer and you're still using them.
If you're JITting then those costs you claim will not go away, they're just passed on to your suppliers (who have to handle their pipeline/stocks) who will pass them back to you as higher prices. I don't get it.
> If you're JITting then those costs you claim will not go away, they're just passed on to your suppliers
Except your suppliers are JIT'ing, too, just as you are, for all the same reasons.
The savings may seem small to you, but if you are in a price competitive market (as is the case for most physical goods) your percentage markups are typically very small compared to what software developers are accustomed to. The grocery industry, for example, is famous for making about 2% profit margin. That means if you can shave 1% off your costs, you increase your profits by 50% in that industry. Very small optimizations can have phenomenal impacts on the risk and profitability of physical product and supply chains.
> What's [shrinkage]
Shrinkage is an industry term for items that get lost in physical supply chains. It's often hard to know what is theft and what is loss of products due to other processes like things getting misplaced, lost in shipping, accidentally shipped to the wrong customers, discarded by mistake, etc. If you run a large enough physical logistics system, you will inevitably have some amount of unexplained loss in the system. That unexplained loss is known as shrinkage, and it's a real and measurable cost in all physical industries (in the grocery industry shrinkage is about 1%, some fraction of which is theft and some fraction of which is other processes).
Ah, shrinkage. Once upon a time, in the army of a country that no longer exists, each soldier was supposed to have been provided with two waffle towels, each 96 cm long. Since such a towel can be easily made from a 1m long cut of fabric by tucking and sewing small margins on all four sides, the supply departments simply distributed [headcount] * metre-long rolls of fabric to the units.
Then one day an inspection arrives, grabs the nearest towel (used and washed many times) and measures its length. Naturally, it's shorter than 96cm since there has been shrinkage (heh), but try explaining that to the inspecting commission! Thankfully, since it's the waffle fabric, it could be done: take a fresh new towel, count its squares, then take the used towel, count its squares, and compare the numbers.
Yes, it's a pretty general pattern overall: being prepared for an emergency/catastrophe means that you have to spend resources on resilience instead of spending them on development/making more money. When the catastrophes are rare that means the "prepared" ones are outcompeted by the "lean" ones, and so when a black swan finally arrives, bang, everyone's caught naked in the middle of the night.
Looks like a rather typical scenario of a market failure, isn't it? That's why national governments typically have National Emergency Reserves or something like this, but naturally, even they only stockpile really basic and absolutely necessary stuff. Dumbbells ain't one of those things.
> That's why national governments typically have National Emergency Reserves or something like this, but naturally, even they only stockpile really basic and absolutely necessary stuff.
That is a very inaccurate statement when it came to PPE, and how it was handled at even the hospital and Union Rep level where first line workers (mainly nurses) had to resort to make their own from trash bags and such only to be reprimanded, told to STFU, fired in one case one died for their ad-hoc problem solving solutions where Governments failed to provide its medical workers with these 'basic' reserves.
That contributes, but end of the day the supply chain for a sleepy little niche market will never account for the sudden demand of an event like COVID with widespread gym closures. There is no scenario where it makes sense for the market ro stockpile 10 years of workout equipment demand.
The secondary market is insane. People are selling rusty dumbbells for the price of copper ($3/lb) in my area. One pictured on Nextdoor had a circa 1985 Sears label on it.
If anything, COVID should be a wake-up call for the idiocy of modern manufacturing. In my business I'm having weird supply chain issues for stupid parts (think stamped metal), and I'm finding that having low-volume, custom manufacturing work done on-shore isn't as outrageously expensive as I thought it would be (I expected 300% more, paid 20%). Middlemen and Chinese manufacturers are making lots of margin on products that could be made anywhere.
Dumbbells may be harder to find, but Rogue has consistently had kettlebells (made in America, in various sizes) for the last several months. Kettlebells are amazing tools for exercise, and can offer more movements than just bodyweight alone.
Shipping is not cheap, but you can outfit a perfectly good home gym with 3 or 4 kettlebell sizes and a jump rope.
Yet, Rogue has been out of all of their plates, barbells, dumbbells (both static and loadable), and most racks since lockdown, all of which are supposedly made in America.
Not true. They have a rotation of weekly stock in the last few months. You just have to be on top of it to beat everyone else as most items go OOS within 5 minutes. Barbells are consistently stocked weekly and plates as well. I've managed to build out my gym within the last 4 months with everything I need: rack, adjustable and flat benches, multiple barbells, over 700 lbs in bumper/iron plates, powerblocks and an echo bike. You can follow along (as well as tracking other companies stock) on the stock and shipping thread at r/homegym.
If you look around theres a few Rogue stock bots. Sign up for some notifications and you quickly realize they do in fact restock weekly (most items at various times on specific days) but they just sell out incredibly quick.
Between the bots and r/homegym I've been able to build out a complete home gym (squat rack, bar, milspec bumper plates, echo bike, bunch of accessories, few kettle bells).
The thing that was the hardest for me to snag was the spotter arm's, they kept restocking right during my weekly sprint planning and by the time I got done would be sold out.
We bought a home gym in March, just when the lockdown here was announced. We made the decision at 8am, picked up the stuff by 12am the same day and by 6pm all online shops were out of stock (within 24h after the lockdown was announced). Best impulsive purchase ever.
They definitely are. I’ve been training with them exclusively and they work and are perfect for a home gym. For someone who needs much higher resistance it might not be enough but you’d need to be pretty strong for that to be the case.
My experience is they are good, but it takes awhile to figure out the logistics. With bands like I mention below, you can get good resistance. Maybe not for serious hypertrophy training, but enough to keep you toned.
I trained with weights regularly for about 8 years before switching to bands when I became more nomadic.
Not sure about the availability, but I will attest to the quality of
https://bodylastics.com/
You may also want something like TRX. Last, conbody.com has good body-weight routines.
They are a nice complement to bodyweight training, allowing you to add some resistance to bodyweight basics like the push-up or the squat (or to add assistance in the case of the pull-up / chin-up )
They are not nearly as good as free weights for certain things though. The strength curve is very different to that of a weight and it's not as easy to progressively overload (ie, add weight to) the exercises over time. You can use thicker bands, change your grip to play with the band tension or perform harder exercises (such as one-arm variations of whatever you're doing), but nothing's nearly as easy as adding heavier plates to a barbell or picking up a heavier dumbbell.
They can be a great complement to other equipment, or if you're fully sold on calisthenics / bodyweight training, they might be everything you'll ever need. If however you're into traditional strength training or bodybuilding, they will fall short fairly quickly (personally, I can't wait to get back under the bar).
In other words, it's more difficult to be precise about the resistance increments. With weights, you know exactly how much you added and how you are manipulating them. With bands, you have infinite variation, but less control over it. You can combine them in steps, but they are very big steps. This makes a lot of sense
I tried them during the lockdown and found the whole experience very frustrating. The force follows Hooke's law and scales linearly. Let's say you take one marked as 14-34kg. Suppose you replace a dumbbell of 24kg. It means that in extremes of your range of motion it is either way too easy or way too hard. Sometimes it is not too bad, If you do shoulder press, you're at your weakest in the bottom. Sometimes it is the other way around and you start craving iron.
I've been using them for years; I took a job where I was on the road a lot, and they're way better than hotel gyms. I like them better for arms than weights. Middlin to very good for upper back and shoulders. Buy a chest expander. "The Hook" by Sierra exercise[0] or Samson Cable Set[1]. Then read "Fatman's guide to cable training."[2] Useless for lower body, and they build a fairly different kind of upper body strength; more useful for grappling than picking up barbells. The True Archer Pull is pretty amazing as an exercise and should be considered a standard feat of strength the same way as the deadlift, IMO. They make a great combination with sandbags and/or kettlebells and are now part of my staple exercises (unnatural garbage like bench press are long gone).
For anyone reading this, let me recommend an extremely easy alternative: sand packed into trash compactor bags and then duck taped into "bricks" of various weights. This plus a big canvas zippered duffle are plenty for some very excellent training. See https://www.goruck.com/equipment/sandbags/ for a commercial and readily available option.
These suckers can get up to 200# really easy, and are an excellent way to stay strong. Flipping one of these into a clean then front squatting it is PLENTY for 90% of people wanting to stay fit. Plus, overloaded progression is easy, just add more sand bags. Another classic is just to pick it up to one shoulder, then drop over your shoulder behind you, then repeat. Deadlifts are just picking it up to thigh height.
Add these homemade sandbags to a good rucking pack, and you're ready for an intense cardio session and strengthening routine. Just don't overdo it, rucking is really hard on tendons. Make sure to only ever increase weight or distance by no more than 10% a week.
I made a set of them for rucking, and it's amazing how fast a ruck pack gets mind alteringly heavy. At some point the brain just can't think any more. It's very enlightening.
you can also just do pushups and pullups, lunges, and other calisthenics. If you hit 100 push ups with a backpack full of something on your back then maybe you need dumbells. All kinds of way to make these things harder. Go slow, go down suuuper slow, use one arm.
I'll add in that Burpees are real gut busters and that the 'Deck of Pain' system is aptly named yet produces results quickly. I think it's the randomization element that gives you the extra 'umph'.
I'm a parcel courier and I know first hand that not many postal companies will accept or burden their staff to handle 20kg or over and the few specialist heavy package postal companies that exist both struggle and churn through employees by the day. The reason is quite clear all postal companies are using zero-hour staff on minimum pay, and if you're a job seeker you will be better off being an office cleaner for the same rate of pay than to be ordered to deliver 20kg+ packages for 11hours a day with no time off, work health care plan, and the employers right to replace you at will. It's simple economics of health and well being.
81 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadWhich is false, as you could always just do bodyweight exercises instead.
"You can overload the body with bodyweight, but at some point you are going to have to add more."
That may be true, but I would bet 99.9% of the people buying dumbbells aren't anywhere near that point.
The only real downside to bodyweight training is lower back.
I learned this the hard way when I got back in the gym.
In practice it sucks.
Yeah ok, sure, you can make your push-up harder or easier if you incline one way or the other. But do you have a bench that can be set to the exact height you want? All padded surfaces? Do you have enough space? Not to mention your shoulder mobility/strength which might or might not be the best one for your push-up to work on all inclinations.
Do all people have enough dexterity and strength for all bodyweight exercises? I don't think so
But yeah if you can't get what you want you'll just have to make do and work around it.
Like negative pull-ups for those who can't do a pullup yet, or knee pushups, or many others you can find on any good bodyweight routine?
Legs are extremely complicated to work out without weight. They carry your whole weight around all day so in order to make it suffer a bit, you need to add something on top of that.
You can't do biceps or any other small muscle that needs to be isolated during the workout.
lol, why dumbbells have been used for so long if they are useless ?
bodyweights exercises are quite limited, only three of them can are usefull for athletic people, dips (triceps) and pull ups( back + biceps) and handstand press (this one is very hard, shoulders). Push ups are very limited in term weight, about 50kg bench press equivalent (which is nothing). Raw squat is the same , doing 100 reps is not the same as doing 10 reps with 80kg on the back.
If you really want to exercise your legs, chest, biceps you have to use weights.
But of course if you are not into gym but only into fitness, you can do anything bodyweight
But I agree weights tend to be more efficient towards developing strength.
edit - punctuation
And one-legged variations are possible for legs which instantly doubles your equivalent weight; I believe they are also good for building up balance and stability from smaller muscles.
For chest you have push-ups and their multiple variations which most people still can’t perform correctly (even “lifters”) as well as body weight rows.
The moment you’ll be able to do even one parallel wide grip pull up which at that point is an unsupported chest row so it’s essentially a bench press in reverse just 100 times harder I’ll concede that you might be done with body weight.
For biceps just do chin-up curls, row curls or towel curls.
For legs there are a ton of them and if you think they don’t overload you well then I want to see you do even a single pistol squat.
It’s also much easier to add progressive overload by a) changing the mechanics of the exercise so you isolate muscles more effectively and b) by adding a backpack with a few water bottles filled with water or sand.
So the real issue isn’t that they aren’t effective, but that most people lack the strength, stability and range of motion to start doing them and it’s very demotivating when it might take you 4 months to do even one rep correctly. And that is without doing really hard stuff like planche which might take 2 years for an average person to do unassisted.
Overall, I found it very irritating when people repeatedly told me: "oh, gyms are closed? try pushups at home!" Gym goers are already not "most people".
And honestly i want to see a one arm pull up with and a proper one (not when you hanging willy nilly sideways) with 150% body weight that puts you not only well above the average gym but well above the elite athlete territory here is Magnus Midtbø doing one arm pull ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zoN4DvEpKA and there is no way he can do it with 150% bodyweight, I don't know of a single climber that ever achieved that.
I admit I was a big fun of bw workouts for 3-4 years. Until I realized that it is much easier to add another plate than dig youtube for more difficult progressions and suffer.
Pretty much the same way I can do a dozen of handstand pushups, but I have no idea how to move to one arm handstand pushup. I am not even sure I saw a video of one on youtube.
Moving through advanced progressions of bw exercises is much much more challenging than increasing number of plates on barbell. That was my whole point. I can see why people do it as sport, but it is a handicap for everyone who just wants to lift more.
You can also use a palm on the floor and forearm on the floor if you don’t have the handles or just use a book/anything to elevate one arm to reduce its range of motion and to allow you to transfer more and more weight to the other.
But for hand stand push-ups you have other ways of progression such as curling your body to reduce the center of mass and to isolate your arms, chest and shoulder more from your back and core.
I generally avoid one hand anything because it’s too easy to get injured which is one of the main issues with body weight.
Most people won’t be able to lift enough weight to get injured and unless you are doing singles/doubles you are more or less safe.
With tings like one armed handstand pushups it’s way too easy to get to a point in your range of motion where you have absolutely no chance of holding that weight in fact it’s rather easy to do it with normal hand standing pushups. There are safer options for shoulder/delts dominated pushups than hand standing ones.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/
E.g. I benched ~150kg when I was doing powerlifting regularly, yet I wouldn't have a chance in hell of doing a planche push-up, or quite a few simpler push-up variations.
> only three of them can are usefull for athletic people
This, however, is a very strange claim. "Athletic" means an awful lot of very different things to different people. Someone doing gymnastics for example will typically be able to do a whole lot of things that most weightlifters wouldn't be remotely close to, and they need to to be able to do the things they train for.
Like planches. Or flags. Or L-sits with rings.
I could at one point do L-sits, and the guys at my gym looked at me as if I was crazy - most of them couldn't get close to lifting their legs to 90 degrees.
I've mostly trained with barbells, but it gets pretty tiresome to see people dismiss bodyweight exercises to totally - I could lift weights most people doing bodyweight exercises can't get close to, but they can do lifts and motions where I'd be starting basically from scratch.
To call them "limited" is pretty weird to me. People who do bodyweight exercises to a high level seems to have a more versatile strength. It's just different goals.
Another issue with bodyweight training compared to free weights is training legs and hips effectively. Plenty people will be able to add resistance right away to something like a squat.
> [home weight] sales usually start in the fall, hit their peak with January’s New Year’s resolutions, then taper off as it gets warmer and people are more likely to venture outside or go back to the gym.
> ...
> 95 percent of the world’s dumbbells are made in China, Logan said. To curb the virus spread, China instituted strict lockdowns from January to April;
> ...
> “It takes a month or so to get the products made and get them to the port,” Logan continued. “Then it goes from China to the United States” — landing, she says in Long Beach, California — “and then if they’re going to the East Coast, they have to go through the Panama Canal.”
> Once weights do get to America, ports, too, are subject to lockdowns and social distancing, adding even more delays.
It's not that it's "bad" to hold inventory, it's just expensive and risky. Tastes change, there's shrinkage, some things degrade over time, rents are high, and you have to finance buying/holding things you aren't selling. Obviously, just-in-time inventory isn't super resilient, but it has a ton of advantages most of the time. Perhaps it doesn't make sense for NOTHING to be stored near the point of sale, but it's not clear to me at least how that should be decided.
I think most of these don't apply to dumbbells. At least not on a short term.
Now, the shortage seems to have kickstarted small shops dumbbell production lines (which are easier to put together than kettlebells)
It does apply and is very pertinent, especially with ever decreasing operating capital in the small business sector; less predictable turnover/resupply rates and the likelihood that excess inventory turns into liabilities that can only be recovered via a liquidation process if they get it wrong is a risk that must be mitigated.
100% optimization in supply forecasting is an unobtainable panacea, but as has been seen with the asymmetric application to Gym Shutdowns, that varies by State, it reflects how uneven the reward could play out. Cost management is a huge part of Supply Chain and Logistics, so the constraints are obvious if you really take the time to analyze the situation.
I think all this underscores is the glaring single point of failure starring back at us with an entirely outsourced manufacturing infrastructure, and the inherit fallacy within it.
Gyms are open in my state, and I'm glad that they are because the buying all the machine and equipment that I use on a regular basis would require exceeding 10s of thousands of dollars, not to mention the pool and the still closed steam room/sauna I used prior to the shutdown.
> Now, the shortage seems to have kickstarted small shops dumbbell production lines (which are easier to put together than kettlebells)
Proving that the US can still manufacture despite the limited infrastructure and hollowing out of the means and resources to do so in the aftermath of Globalization.
I think what baffles me is how in my lifetime the notion of actual manufacturing-fabrication went from something that elevated so many in the US into the middle class came to be looked down upon and seen beneath an 'educated' person.
Especially because I actively participated in something where it was normal that undergrad to PhD mechanical and electrical engineers from Ivy Leagues Universities were working hand in hand with sometimes HS dropout mechanics and fabricators (on forums!) to develop better turbos and fuel mapping hardware/ECUs that were surpassing the gains of OEMs and even the well established aftermarket manufactures especially at time that it was being entirely under-served despite a significant demand that only increased with time. And then creating viable business models on those very same forums to serve as customer facing business with nothing more than a thread, a paypal account alongside a guy with tig welder a soldering gun.
Trump is an imbecile that predictably conned his way into office, and I hope he gets removed, despite the alternative not looking any better. But I really want the West to realize that the spotlight and rhetoric (mainly lip service) he put on China/CCP is warranted, and what occurred in Hong Kong is only a taste of what they're capable of and what they will do to their own kind (HK is Ethnically Han Chinese).
Reliance on such an oppressive regime is not sustainable and never ends well and the pitfalls and subsequent shortages of this centralized manufacturing infrastructure for even essential goods, like PPE, should be a much needed wake up call for manufacturing to return to at least their own continent(s).
> Or pick up 2 bricks. I did.
I resorted to filling 2 liter soda bottles and gallons with water for various lifts and isolation reps, it was a very dissatisfying experience from what I was used to but... it did help keep me somewhat fit, my upperbody PBs/Max lifts were only off by 15% by the time I went back to the gym when they reopened by mid Summer.
Sidenote: I just applied to a positions as Logistics Coordinator for a fitness equipment company, and they're currently on a 10-15 day delay on current orders. I kind of hope I can interview just to see the inner mechanics of what this all entails and where supply is being sourced from.
> Tastes change,
If you have a moderate inventory, surely they don't change that fast that you're stuck with much.
> there's shrinkage,
What's that?
> some things degrade over time,
But many don't
> rents are high,
are they (I really don't know)? How much to rent a warehouse out of town?
> and you have to finance buying/holding things you aren't selling.
But you are, they're not worthless inventory, just a buffer and you're still using them.
If you're JITting then those costs you claim will not go away, they're just passed on to your suppliers (who have to handle their pipeline/stocks) who will pass them back to you as higher prices. I don't get it.
Except your suppliers are JIT'ing, too, just as you are, for all the same reasons.
The savings may seem small to you, but if you are in a price competitive market (as is the case for most physical goods) your percentage markups are typically very small compared to what software developers are accustomed to. The grocery industry, for example, is famous for making about 2% profit margin. That means if you can shave 1% off your costs, you increase your profits by 50% in that industry. Very small optimizations can have phenomenal impacts on the risk and profitability of physical product and supply chains.
> What's [shrinkage]
Shrinkage is an industry term for items that get lost in physical supply chains. It's often hard to know what is theft and what is loss of products due to other processes like things getting misplaced, lost in shipping, accidentally shipped to the wrong customers, discarded by mistake, etc. If you run a large enough physical logistics system, you will inevitably have some amount of unexplained loss in the system. That unexplained loss is known as shrinkage, and it's a real and measurable cost in all physical industries (in the grocery industry shrinkage is about 1%, some fraction of which is theft and some fraction of which is other processes).
Then one day an inspection arrives, grabs the nearest towel (used and washed many times) and measures its length. Naturally, it's shorter than 96cm since there has been shrinkage (heh), but try explaining that to the inspecting commission! Thankfully, since it's the waffle fabric, it could be done: take a fresh new towel, count its squares, then take the used towel, count its squares, and compare the numbers.
Looks like a rather typical scenario of a market failure, isn't it? That's why national governments typically have National Emergency Reserves or something like this, but naturally, even they only stockpile really basic and absolutely necessary stuff. Dumbbells ain't one of those things.
That is a very inaccurate statement when it came to PPE, and how it was handled at even the hospital and Union Rep level where first line workers (mainly nurses) had to resort to make their own from trash bags and such only to be reprimanded, told to STFU, fired in one case one died for their ad-hoc problem solving solutions where Governments failed to provide its medical workers with these 'basic' reserves.
1: https://nypost.com/2020/05/14/nurses-union-fires-potty-mouth...
2: https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/worker-at-nyc-hospital-where-n...
3: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2020/04/15/nur...
The secondary market is insane. People are selling rusty dumbbells for the price of copper ($3/lb) in my area. One pictured on Nextdoor had a circa 1985 Sears label on it.
If anything, COVID should be a wake-up call for the idiocy of modern manufacturing. In my business I'm having weird supply chain issues for stupid parts (think stamped metal), and I'm finding that having low-volume, custom manufacturing work done on-shore isn't as outrageously expensive as I thought it would be (I expected 300% more, paid 20%). Middlemen and Chinese manufacturers are making lots of margin on products that could be made anywhere.
Shipping is not cheap, but you can outfit a perfectly good home gym with 3 or 4 kettlebell sizes and a jump rope.
Between the bots and r/homegym I've been able to build out a complete home gym (squat rack, bar, milspec bumper plates, echo bike, bunch of accessories, few kettle bells).
The thing that was the hardest for me to snag was the spotter arm's, they kept restocking right during my weekly sprint planning and by the time I got done would be sold out.
lol really? i guess i stopped looking in march/april when they were sold out from Rogue.
I trained with weights regularly for about 8 years before switching to bands when I became more nomadic.
Not sure about the availability, but I will attest to the quality of https://bodylastics.com/ You may also want something like TRX. Last, conbody.com has good body-weight routines.
They are a nice complement to bodyweight training, allowing you to add some resistance to bodyweight basics like the push-up or the squat (or to add assistance in the case of the pull-up / chin-up )
They are not nearly as good as free weights for certain things though. The strength curve is very different to that of a weight and it's not as easy to progressively overload (ie, add weight to) the exercises over time. You can use thicker bands, change your grip to play with the band tension or perform harder exercises (such as one-arm variations of whatever you're doing), but nothing's nearly as easy as adding heavier plates to a barbell or picking up a heavier dumbbell.
They can be a great complement to other equipment, or if you're fully sold on calisthenics / bodyweight training, they might be everything you'll ever need. If however you're into traditional strength training or bodybuilding, they will fall short fairly quickly (personally, I can't wait to get back under the bar).
[0] https://www.sierraexercise.com/
[1] https://leviticus11.com/exercise-equipment/samson-cable-set/
[2] http://yoga-horizons.com/pdfs/Fatmans-Guide-to-Cable-Trainin...
These suckers can get up to 200# really easy, and are an excellent way to stay strong. Flipping one of these into a clean then front squatting it is PLENTY for 90% of people wanting to stay fit. Plus, overloaded progression is easy, just add more sand bags. Another classic is just to pick it up to one shoulder, then drop over your shoulder behind you, then repeat. Deadlifts are just picking it up to thigh height.
Add these homemade sandbags to a good rucking pack, and you're ready for an intense cardio session and strengthening routine. Just don't overdo it, rucking is really hard on tendons. Make sure to only ever increase weight or distance by no more than 10% a week.
I made a set of them for rucking, and it's amazing how fast a ruck pack gets mind alteringly heavy. At some point the brain just can't think any more. It's very enlightening.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/the-prisoner-workout...
I'll add in that Burpees are real gut busters and that the 'Deck of Pain' system is aptly named yet produces results quickly. I think it's the randomization element that gives you the extra 'umph'.
Now do office and children’s desks at IKEA...