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> 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 ex

by polote 6y ago

> 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

nextos 6y ago
You can add rings and then you have a lot more bodyweight options. But I agree weights tend to be more efficient towards developing strength.
Joker_vD 6y ago
Or you could spend literally hours on bodyweight exercises, the athletes of yore used to do this... but it is indeed an inferior option.
- Mindstormy 6y ago
  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. edit - punctuation
j4yav 6y ago
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".
Robin_Message 6y ago
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.
dogma1138 6y ago
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.
- shmel 6y ago
  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".
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    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 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.
vidarh 6y ago
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.

by polote 6y ago

nextos 6y ago

You can add rings and then you have a lot more bodyweight options. But I agree weights tend to be more efficient towards developing strength.

Joker_vD 6y ago

Or you could spend literally hours on bodyweight exercises, the athletes of yore used to do this... but it is indeed an inferior option.

Mindstormy 6y ago
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. edit - punctuation

j4yav 6y ago

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".

Robin_Message 6y ago

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.

dogma1138 6y ago

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.

shmel 6y ago
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".
- dogma1138 6y ago
  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 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.

vidarh 6y ago

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.