Issue 026
June 2007
By Alex Gold
Summer is almost upon us, so those of you who have been stuck training inside all winter will soon have no excuse not to get out into nature and enjoy the sun! At Hardcore Sports Training we’ve been out in the rain, wind and snow all winter, and here are some of our favourite bodyweight movements that you can replicate with no equipment.
The exercises:
Burpees: The first exercise I will cover is the simple burpee. This exercise is a basic move that uses most of the muscles in the body in one way or another. It looks easy, but is not for the faint hearted! To perform a burpee, start from a standing position. From here place the hands on the floor by the sides of the feet (ensure not to drop uncontrolled into this) then kick the legs back into a push-up position as fast as possible, then return them to the start position. Lastly, stand up or explosively jump up to return to the starting position.
To make the exercise harder, there are two things you can add to the sequence. Firstly, when you kick the legs back into the push-up position, before returning the feet to the start position, add in a push-up! The next variation is to perform the exercise under a tree or chin-up bar, and at the end of the exercise jump up straight into a chin-up. Either of these options will vastly increase the difficulty level, try throwing in both if you’re feeling really brave!
Push-ups: The second exercise is the push-up (or press-up). This is an easy exercise for most people, but all sorts of variations can be used to increase difficulty. Some things to be aware of when doing push-ups to ensure good form are as follows; whatever style of push-up you are doing, your elbows should be tucked in to some degree. Of course, with tricep dominant push-ups, your elbows are against the ribcage, but even with wide hand placement there should be a maximum angle from body to arm of around seventy degrees. This will ensure your arm is in a good position, both from a strength viewpoint and reducing the chances of injury to the shoulder. You should also ‘lock’ the shoulders to the hips. Too many people perform push-ups by lifting the shoulders first and then the hips. This is a sign either of weakness in the torso causing the hips to sag involuntarily or fatigue in the arms and shoulders causing the person to keep the hips low voluntarily in order to reduce the load. In the former case, the torso should be trained to stabilise statically with bridge style exercises, and in the latter the set should either by terminated or the person should perform push-ups with knees on the ground in order to reduce load, as the arching of the back as described previously can put a lot of stress on the lumbar spine.
Jumps: Another great exercise for explosiveness and speed that can be done is a bench or tuck jump. I recently covered these plyometric style exercises in more detail so will just briefly go over the technique. If you are near a bench or something similar, you can do bench jumps, simply jump onto the bench and either step down or jump back down. If there is nothing suitable nearby, the other option is to jump in exactly the same manner, trying to get as high as possible and tucking the knees into the chest. Like any of these exercises, it can be done for time or repetitions, although I would prefer to cap the repetitions around 10 due to risk of performing them when fatigued.
Chin-ups: The last exercise is the great chin-up, or its relative the pull-up. “What’s the difference?” I hear you ask. I’m glad, as there seems to be a fair bit of confusion about these two terms. A chin-up is performed with the hands facing you, and a pull-up is performed with the hands facing away. The other basic classification we use is narrow grip, which is shoulder width or narrower, and wide grip, which is anything outside shoulder width. Other variations you can use are to either go to full hang at the bottom, where the shoulders are touching the ears, or the active shoulder position where you hold the shoulders down and back throughout. Whichever of these you choose, make sure you compare like with like when doing them next time. Of course in the context of this article, the chin or pull-up would be performed using a bar or a suitably strong branch of a tree.
Putting it all together
Here are some sample ideas for exercise routines built around just these 4 exercises:
Legs-Pull-Legs-Push:
Burpee x 30-50
Pull-up x 8-12
Bench Jump x 10
Push-up x 10-15
Repeat
(No rest between exercises, 60 sec after each round)
Tabata Burpees:
Burpee x as many as possible
Repeat
(Work period = 20 seconds, rest period = 10 seconds, repeat for 4 minutes. Surprisingly hard!)
Sprint/Bodyweight Intervals:
Sprint 50 metres
Push-up x 10
Tuck Jumps x 5
Repeat
(Rest 2-3 minutes, repeat 10 times)
EDT upper body:
Chin-up x 5-8
Press-up x 10-15
Repeat
(Rest as necessary, do as many sets as possible in 15 minutes)
Alex Gold is a strength and conditioning coach and sports therapist specialising in working with sportsmen to increase performance. He can be contacted on 07931 561 807 or via his website, www.hardcoresportstraining.co.uk where you can also sign up for a free newsletter with training tips and more!
