Basic Bodyweight Exercise Programming

Mar 29

Takeaway Points:

Confused about how to get started with bodyweight exercise? This is intended to be a good entry point.
How can you modify bodyweight exercises to make them easier or more challenging? Exploring regressions, progressions, levers, and base of support.
Exercise selection, exercise tempo, workout frequency, and long-term progression when working with bodyweight exercises.
Covering home equipment that may help you supplement your bodyweight workouts.

In the process of writing last week’s post about bodyweight fitness and where to get good info, it became clear that a lot of people would be interested in understanding bodyweight fitness a bit better - and would like a good basic guide for getting into it. If you want to know a lot more about bodyweight fitness, I’d recommend looking into one of the books mentioned in that post. But if you’re just looking for a good overview of the concepts and principles behind bodyweight training, this post is for you.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no expert on bodyweight fitness, but I certainly have a lot of experience with it from working with clients over the years, especially clients who had to work with minimal equipment. However, here’s a good primer on some basic concepts.

Progressions/Regressions

A progression is a harder version of an exercise which adds more challenge. A regression is an easier version of an exercise which removes some of the challenge.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere in my posts on basic lifting concepts, the body adapts to the stressors placed on it. Too much stress and you overdo your body’s ability to recover, creating injury or delaying progress. Too little stress, and your body won’t adapt to meet the challenge, creating a stagnation in training or a reversion to lower levels of skill/strength/musculature/metabolism. Exercise is always about finding the right challenge - that sweet spot where it’s not too hard or too easy - so that you can continue to progress in the long term. The biggest problem many beginners have, is simply that they don’t know how to progress their workouts effectively. They do it either do it too quickly or too slowly, hurting their results.

When it comes to traditional workouts with weights, we think of work in terms of volume - sets times reps times weight used. This means that we can increase the difficulty by increasing the number of sets completed, the number of reps completed per set, or the weight used. Conversely, if you’re struggling with a workout that’s too hard, you can decrease any of these variables. The most popular method, especially in the beginning, is to change the weight.

Unfortunately, with bodyweight exercises, we don’t have the ability to easily add or take away weight, since the weight used is our body. You can add weight to some exercises by holding weights or by adding a weighted vest to your body, but this is not typically a piece of equipment everyone has.

Most beginners also don’t have the conceptual theory and experience to attempt more complicated set and rep progression schemes - so the end result is that they end up simply adding reps or time - and they run into the same problems that beginner weight lifters run into - they add too many reps too quickly and hit a wall where the workouts are too hard, or they don’t add reps in a consistent way and end up with delayed or diminished results.

In bodyweight exercise, we have another possibility for increasing and decreasing the difficulty of our exercises - progressions and regressions that actually change the way the exercise is performed.

For example, a standard pushup or pullup may be too challenging for the beginner, depending on their current bodyweight and previous experience. Beginners with heavier bodies will be naturally starting at a bit of a disadvantage relative to their lighter peers, and will need to rely more heavily on regressions for the pushup or pullup to ease into the full versions of these exercises. For example, a pushup may need to be regressed into a pushup from the knees, an elevated pushup from a countertop, or a pushup against a wall.

This brings us to the next topic: leverages and base of support.

Leverages and Support

When moving any weight from point A to point B, your bones and muscles often act like levers which function to help move the weight. If you remember anything about levers from high school physics, you know that you can alter the difficulty of moving a weight by altering the length of the lever used.

When you shorten or lengthen the levers in your body, this results in more or less force being placed on your joints and muscles. A classic example is the pushup from the knees versus the pushup from the toes - the shorter lever arm created by reducing distance from shoulders to point of contact makes it easier to complete the lift. The same thing occurs in many core exercises, where you can choose to either keep your legs folded to reduce the difficulty, or extend your legs all the way to increase the difficulty.

A second important variable you can manipulate to change the difficulty is your level of support. By altering the foot positioning, hand positioning, and relative height of various parts of your body, you can increase or decrease the level of support - and less support generally means more difficulty, as does the concentration of bodyweight towards the muscles being used.

Let’s take the pushup again. We can start off with the simplest version - a standing pushup against a wall. Because we are essentially standing and gravity pushes downwards, all of our bodyweight is in our feet, and very little of the weight is placed on the shoulder joint - the exercise is quite easy. We can increase the challenge by moving our feet back a little bit and taking a more diagonal approach to the wall - in this way, more of the weight is moved towards our shoulder joint by moving our base of support.

We can take this further and further. If we do a pushup on a countertop, leaning forward closer to a 45 degree angle, even more of the weight is placed on the shoulder. The further we continue to lower the base of support for our hands, the harder the lift gets. Eventually, we can move from the countertop to the table - from the table to a box - from there to a lower box - eventually to the floor.

Once we get to the floor, this pattern can still continue! Now, we can begin to elevate our feet instead of lowering our hands. As we elevate our feet - up onto a box - now up onto a table or other high surface - eventually up onto a wall - we progressively place more of the weight onto the hands and away from the feet. Eventually, we will arrive at the handstand pushup - a very challenging exercise which puts all of our weight onto our hands.

Another method for increasing the difficulty is manipulating the size of our base of support. A pushup with the hands at shoulder width will provide much more stability than a pushup in which the hands are placed very close together with a smaller base, or a pushup in which one arm is not able to provide much support. Eventually, one can progress to single-arm pushups or single-leg squats - eliminating some of the base of support entirely. These progressions are for more advanced bodyweight exercisers, but they provide a natural progression when you get tired of doing endless reps of easier exercises.

These principles can be applied to basically all kinds of bodyweight exercises. I could talk a lot more about progressions, but suffice to say, something like Steven Low’s free progression chart from Overcoming Gravity, or the progression charts from Convict Conditioning, are a much more thorough resource if you want to understand the best progressions for all the exercises you want to master. When you can do a given exercise with ease, you may be ready to move up in those charts to a harder variation of the same exercise - conversely, if you’re having trouble with a given exercise, you may need to continue practicing easier regressions in order to develop the strength and stability required to move up to the next level.

If you don’t know a good regression for a certain exercise, it may be easy enough to simply google for it, or search YouTube. Often, there are plenty of possible regressions we can do, but beginners simply aren’t aware of their existence, or how to find them.

Exercise Selection

In lifting weights, we talk about the need to focus on a handful of major movement patterns when lifting. We use the squat, the bench press, the deadlift, the overhead press, the row, and the pulldown/pullup because in combination, these 6 exercises can basically target all the major muscles in the body - stimulating growth and strength, and optimizing movement. We add cardiovascular exercise to this, as we need to protect our heart health in the process.

In bodyweight exercise, it’s much the same. We replace the bench press with the pushup. The squat stays the same, but the lack of added weight means we have to be more creative with progressions to keep it challenging. The deadlift cannot be effectively trained, but we can do extra core and low back exercises (nordic ham curls, glute bridges, hip thrusts, bridges) to make up for it. The overhead press is replaced by the handstand and handstand pushups, though these require a decent level of training before you’re able to do them well. The row may be replaced by ring rows (or something similar, depending on what equipment you have), and the pullup remains - however, because these movements are harder to do at home, you may require some equipment to train them effectively.

Bodyweight exercises do require a greater deal of stability and mobility than many barbell, machine, or dumbbell exercises, where you can easily train a muscle through a given range of motion with the aid of supportive equipment. Because you have to play around with angles, body positions, and so on to get gravity to work on your bodyweight in the intended way to provide the level of resistance to the right muscles, it may be harder to do this effectively without a very strong core and plenty of stability.

For example, training the shoulders with weights is quite simple - you sit down, you pick up some weights, and you perform an overhead press, lateral raise, jerk, or snatch of some kind. In contrast, when training your shoulders with bodyweight, you have to first be upside down in order to be able to place bodyweight on those muscles, and this requires that you be able to perform a handstand and be used getting into that position and stabilizing your core in order to maintain that position, in order to complete the lift. As a result, a much greater deal of focus needs to be placed on exercises like planks, leg raises, v-sits, front levers, back levers, and so on in order to be able to exercise effectively. This violates my normal principle that most people don’t need a lot of core training - when it comes to bodyweight training, you’ll need a lot!

Pick one or two exercises for each of the seven categories above - pushup, squat, glute bridge, pullup, row, handstand/handstand pushup, and core - and practice them regularly in about even proportions. As mentioned above, Steven Low’s progression chart is a fantastic starting resource, or you may find something like the progression chart from Convict Conditioning to be a useful resource if you’re more of a beginner.

Exercise Tempo

It is a well known fact in exercise science that speed, also known as tempo, is a variable we can use to enhance the effectiveness of an exercise. When we perform an exercise at the same weight at either greater or lesser speed, the version done with greater speed will recruit more muscle mass simultaneously, leading to better strength and muscle built in the process.

However, I think that you should be more careful when attempting to apply this method to bodyweight exercises. As explored above, stability is often far less of a challenge in lifting weights than it is in bodyweight exercises simply because we can make strategic use of benches, machines, and other kinds of support in order to minimize the amount of time spent in unstable positions. Thus, it is easier to accelerate the lifts in these exercises because we don’t have to worry as much about losing stability and losing control in the exercise.

In bodyweight exercises, where stability is far more challenging, it is likely a bit of an advantage to move a bit slower. In this way, you spend more time in stability-challenging positions, build more stability over time, and have less risk of losing control by trying to go too fast. For this reason, I recommend slightly slower reps, and many reps should be paused (taking a short break at the bottom of a rep) in order to increase your control. You may be able to up the tempo on exercises that are comparatively easy for you, but only do so cautiously.

Training Frequency

In Pavel Tsatsouline’s The Naked Warrior, Pavel recommends training bodyweight exercises every single day.

While this is not necessary, it is likely a bit more possible and practical than training with heavy weight training exercises daily. When you are training very heavy, there is typically a great deal of fatigue involved, and you risk injury by attempting heavy weights again before your body is fully recovered.

In contrast, training with your bodyweight is typically a little bit more manageable, injury-wise, because you’re manipulating stability, leverages, and repetitions more than manipulating weight. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to hurt yourself doing bodyweight training, but it is a little bit less likely that you’ll do something terrible. If you aren’t fully recovered, it’s less likely to be a huge problem.

This is good because in general, training more frequently allows you to get in more work without it feeling too exhausting. Let’s say that you perform 10-20 challenging sets for a given exercise in a week. You can split it up any way you want, but if you did 20 sets in a single workout, it would be intensely exhausting and the quality of your work would suffer - especially if that exercise is heavily reliant on stability. But if you split that same amount of work up into daily workouts, 7 days a week, then you can perform an easy 3 sets per workout and still get in 21 sets - more work, but it feels like less effort.

Again, you don’t have to work out 7 days per week. It does get easier when you’re working with bodyweight exercises, because you can often do them from home, and that means that there’s less of a barrier to entry in terms of dedicating time to practice it. I would recommend that for most people, a minimum of 3-4 days is a good approach, and you can aim for more days per week if you’re able to manage it and want to improve your results.

Long Term Progression

What is the best way to make your workouts harder each week? The simplest method, and the one most likely to hit a wall too soon, is to simply add reps repeatedly. If you can do 20 pushups in total this workout, then you aim for 21 reps in total next workout, 22 in total the workout after that, and so on.

As I’ve explored in my writing on linear periodization, this approach rarely works, because bodies don’t adapt and progress linearly. Instead, your progress will slow down over time as you get more adapted to the exercise, and further adaptation requires greater and greater stimulus. This means that, sooner or later, on such a plan you’ll hit a point where your body is progressing slower than you’re adding reps, no matter how slow of an approach you take.

It’s generally better to apply a standard progression system based on number of challenging sets. This is a method that is shockingly intuitive, and works really well - it’s the basis of many of my training programs.

Here’s a rough structure of that style of program:

Week 1 - 2-4 challenging sets per exercise per workout
Week 2 - 3-5 challenging sets per exercise per workout
Week 3 - 4-6 challenging sets per exercise per workout
Week 4 - 1 challenging set per workout - max test or endurance test

This structure enables 3 weeks of increasing difficulty, and then in the 4th week, you’re dropping volume and having an easier workout, but testing your progress in some way. You might do this with something like a single set to failure.

Let’s take pushups as an example. I can do about 20 reps before failing, so let’s say that I decide to do something like 15 reps per set as this is challenging but allows me to leave a little bit in the tank. So, week 1 consists of 2-4 sets of 15, each time I train pushups. If I’m having a good day and feel well rested, I’ll push for 4 sets. If I’m having a hard day, haven’t slept well, or have limited time, I might aim for the minimum of 2 sets. Week 2 is the same, but with 1 additional set added to the minimum and maximum, still aiming for 15 reps per set. Week 3 is again the same but with another added set.

Then in week 4 I’m doing 1 set to failure, as many reps as I can do. I find that I can do 25 reps this time, meaning that I’ve improved significantly from my previous max of 20. In the following month, if the previous month’s max test went well, then I’ll increase the number of pushups per set (perhaps to 16 or 17) and repeat.

Typically I’d recommend splitting upper and lower body focused days. In this way, a weekly schedule might look something like this:

Monday - Pushup, Pullup, Handstand, Core
Tuesday - Squat, Glute Bridge, Row, Core
Wednesday - Rest, or maybe some cardio
Thursday - Pushup, Pullup, Handstand, Core
Friday - Squat, Glute Bridge, Row, Core
Sat and Sun - Rest, or maybe some cardio

If doing more days than this, you can get creative - adding extra upper or lower days, doing combined upper/lower days, doing technique days where you focus on practicing harder progressions you haven’t mastered yet, and so on.

This is far from the only way to progress your workouts, but it represents a simple and effective method for doing so. If it gets boring over time, you may want to switch up your progressions a bit to increase the difficulty in other ways.

Home Equipment

At the end of the day, bodyweight exercises can take you very far, but you can still benefit from some minimal weights and equipment to use in the home.

A simple resistance band is typically very cheap, and enables you to add difficulty to pushups and squats, while also enabling you to do exercises (band pullaparts, bicep curls) which you couldn’t easily do with your bodyweight.

A set of light home dumbbells won’t be able to handle as much weight as a barbell or machine, but may help you perform some lighter accessory exercises for the arms and shoulders, while adding a bit of challenge to your squats, glute bridges, and so on.

A TRX or pair of gymnastics rings can often be anchored above your doors at home and used to provide an additional point of stability for many exercises, enabling you to do a great deal of exercises that would be difficult to do by bodyweight alone.

If you struggle to have a way to get in rows or pullups in your home, it may help to get a pullup bar for your door.

Parallettes are movable handles which can be used for various bodyweight exercises. You can use them to perform dips, add difficulty to pushups, and perform some kinds of rows from. They take up some space, but since they’re movable, they’re generally easy to store and use.

Check out my home gym guide for more info about setting up an ideal home gym for your needs and budget. This equipment is generally somewhat affordable and can help introduce a lot of variety and ease into your workouts.

Wrapping It All Up

The intent of this guide is to give you a solid introduction to bodyweight fitness, and the ways in which you can make it work for you. Unlike powerlifting, bodyweight fitness is unfortunately a bit more complicated - it’s not as simple as “learn to squat, bench, and deadlift, and then do those a lot”.

Instead, bodyweight fitness is a bit more of a “choose your own adventure” where you get to pick and choose what exercises you want to focus on, learn, and eventually master. You will need to learn the basics of pushups, squats, pullups, and planks, but after this, you’ll find that you’re left much more on your own in terms of pursuing goals and reaching them - this may be exciting and fun for some, or intimidating and challenging for others. Unfortunately, we’re all stuck with bodyweight exercises for a bit, so you might as well make the best of it and try to focus on the things you find the most fun and interesting.

I’ll certainly admit that there are also plenty of bodyweight exercises that don’t fall into this typical format. Stepaerobics, mountain climbers, burpees, jumps, high knees, plyometrics - these are all bodyweight exercises as well, even if they don’t neatly fit into the typical strength training paradigm. They will not be as effective in terms of building muscle, movement quality, stability, or strength - but they may be a fun supplement to your other staples when you just want to get a good sweat on and focus on getting in consistent movement instead of stressing over making it perfect. This basic guide is not intended to be a comprehensive view of the only way to do things, and there’s plenty of stuff that is outside its scope.

If you want further reading on bodyweight exercises, I’d recommend checking out the reviews I recently did of the most popular bodyweight exercise books. If you’re struggling to manage harder bodyweight exercises to begin with, it may help to start off with “no load” exercises and easier regressions until you’re able to handle the main exercises.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.

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