BODYWEIGHT BLUEPRINT

Build functional strength and conditioning any time, anywhere, with the best no-equipment bodyweight exercises

No kit? No problem. As Olympic gymnasts, your local park’s calisthenics crew and huge numbers of prisoners have known for years, you can train any muscle with just your own body, a towel-sized space on the floor and some ingenuity. In fact, it’s a good idea to build a base of strength using bodyweight moves before you pick up a set of weights. As well as helping to prevent injury, it’ll improve coordination and proprioception (your sense of where your body parts are in relation to each other), increasing your control over your own movements.

Here, you’ll learn enough essential bodyweight moves to be able to put together a workout anywhere, whether your goal is fat loss, muscle gain or performance. Aim to hit a respectable amount of reps in the key moves – press-ups, squats and lunges – and you’ll do better at almost anything.

BODYWEIGHT BENEFITS 

Think functional, full-body strength. Take the press-up: if you do it correctly, you’ll engage everything from your chest and triceps to your core and glutes, teaching the body to work as a unit. Bodyweight moves also lend themselves to circuit-style workouts: because they take minimal setting up, you can shift from one movement to another with zero fuss, making them ideal for high-intensity fat-loss efforts. Finally, high-volume sessions can and will build muscle – especially if you use a combination of slow and fast reps to hit all your muscle fibres.

LEVEL UP

If bodyweight movements start to feel too easy, you need to get creative. While you might be surprised by just how long it takes to rack up serious reps for, say, a correctly performed press-up, even then you can always move to tougher variations - including the diamond or even clapping press-up.