Strength Training With No Equipment

There are lots of scenarios where you’d like to be able to do strength training with no equipment; you’re traveling and won’t have access to a gym, you want to work out at home and don’t have any exercise equipment, you can’t afford a gym membership or home gym equipment for strength training, etc. The good news is that you can still get a very effective strength training workout in by just doing body weight exercises!

Basic Bodyweight Exercises

When designing a simple bodyweight exercise program, make sure you target all of the major muscle groups and cover the basics: legs, trunk, pushing, pulling, and rotation. You can get this all accomplished with just a few functional total body exercises, or you can do a few isolated movements as well. If you want to include cardio, you can do these as a high intensity interval circuit and get an effective workout done in a short amount of time! Lets’s look at a few examples:

Legs

There are a variety of squat and lunge variations: double leg squats, single leg squats, and lunges in multiple planes. If you’d like to include plyometric activities, add some type of jump or hopping exercise.

Trunk

I rarely isolate trunk exercises, but crunches, planks, bird dog, cobra all target the trunk.

Push

Do some type of push-up: a full push-up, modified, wall, or with rotation to kill two birds with one stone 😉

Pull

Do pull-ups, chin-ups, or body rows at whatever amount of incline is necessary to do the movement without compensation.

Rotation

I already mentioned adding rotation to your push-ups, or you can do supine lower body rotations, windshield wipers, oblique crunches, or lunges in the transverse plane.

Shoot me a message if you’d like help getting started with a customized body weight training program yourself. You have the option of in-home training in the southwest Minneapolis area, a private gym in Eden Prairie, or online coaching options anywhere in the United States.