anyone here do extensive bodyweight exercises?

[Stewart Kwong]

i just wanted to know if anyone here does extensive bodyweight exercises in place or along w/ weights. i was just curios as to whether or not it really improves ur muscular endurance that much. i use weights and usually lift 8-10 reps of 3 sets but noticed the other night while grappling for a long period of time that my muscles were extremely fatigued. i have lloyd irvin's body weight exercise book for combat sports but haven't used i yet. just wanted to know what you all think. thx.

 

[hughes]

Endurance is probably what bodyweight exercises are 'best at' if that makes sense.

So yeah. But it's more a conditioning question than strength and power.

 

[Butcher101**]

i just wanted to know if anyone here does extensive bodyweight exercises in place or along w/ weights. i was just curios as to whether or not it really improves ur muscular endurance that much. i use weights and usually lift 8-10 reps of 3 sets but noticed the other night while grappling for a long period of time that my muscles were extremely fatigued. i have lloyd irvin's body weight exercise book for combat sports but haven't used i yet. just wanted to know what you all think. thx.

give it a try for a month or two. See which one you like doing better, i would say do both, so you ll get the benefits of both kind.

 

[JoeU1741]

I included bodyweight work after I found the same thing as you. Strength is there, but during grappling my arms and upper body would just feel totally fatigued so I could barely hang on to my opponent. I started doing 8 min of continuous pushups and chinups, just do as many on one then move to the other backwards and forwards. Doing it this way became a good strength endurance exercise as I would get pretty winded too. I found it helped a lot, and now I find I have a lot more strength endurance and I tend to recover after bouts quicker than some of the other guys.

 

[surferdude]

Bpdyweight excersis are the best in the world

 

[Urban]

Bpdyweight excersis are the best in the world

Dork. they're only part of the puzzle. Personally I think they should be used for conditioning more than muscular endurance. before I get started I should say these two terms are not mutually exclusive.

Let me clarify how I beleive on difers from the other. Muscular endurance is being able to do 200 pushups. That's quite a few and nobody here will doubt that that's pretty good endurance. Conditioning I would say places more emphasis on cardiovascular work. So doing tabata intervals, 3 minute rounds or circuits, or something like that is for conditioning. what really separates the two is time. The guy doing 200 pushups can sort of rest in the up position, but make him do those pushups in three minutes and he's gonna be breathing HARD at the end. This is how I beleive bodyweight exercises should be used: with temporal goals or limitations.

In fact, if you go to my website, you will find my little program randomly generates bodyweight GPP drills that work much like that. this is the kind of muscular endurance you want in sport, you want to be able to push as hard as you can for an interval, rest a bit and repeat.

To be honest, for most athletes I'm not sure what the advantage of posessing just straight muscular endurance would be.

 

[nudge119]

If your getting tired while grappling for long periods of time - then practice grappling for longer periods of time - seriously.

 

[SpAzNeT]

Endurance is probably what bodyweight exercises are 'best at' if that makes sense.

So yeah. But it's more a conditioning question than strength and power.

Agreed

 

[Chad Hamilton]

I like the bodyweight stuff.

 

[Dash_Riprock]

Here's an interesting one to chew on...

I used to (and still do to some extent) do a TON of BW squats. Did them for long reps like Matt Furey style, and in the last few years have really concentrated on doing them in an interval fashion like what Urban is talking about. Now, here's the interesting thing. When I started concentrating on increasing my strength in the barbell squat, guess what happened. My BW squats became easy as hell. I could not only do more of them, but I could also do them faster with less accompanying fatigue.

It sort of ties back to something I read in a Louie Simmons article. I'm paraphrasing here, but the gist of his point is that increased max strength can actually contribute to greater levels of strength endurance as it applies to high repetition work (whether with light weights or BW). The theory is that if you have one guy who can barely squat his own bodyweight with the barbell, and another guy who can squat double his weight...then the stronger guy has a greater capacity to work with his own BW since it is a lower % of his 1RM in the squat relative to the other guy.

Simmon's idea rang true with me on an intuitive level, but now I can say from experience that his contention has a lot of merit. I say do both BW and lift. However, if I HAD to make a choice I would choose the barbell.

 

[muerteverde]

If your getting tired while grappling for long periods of time - then practice grappling for longer periods of time - seriously.

Or if cannot practice grappling for longer periods of time, suplament with BW excersizes. When I get back from judo practice, that is when I do my pushups and situps. The pullups I do before hand so I can take advantage of the daylihgt, but I do the other stuff after. I cannot grapple any more than the rest of my team mates, obviously, so this is a way to build more endurance for me and get a bit ahead. I have noticed that it seems to help.

 

[Stewart Kwong]

If your getting tired while grappling for long periods of time - then practice grappling for longer periods of time - seriously.

i intend to, i just wanted to know what else to supplement my conditioning with. i'm doing my first fight in a couple months so i wanted to know if changing my workout from less weights to more bw would be that helpful or if i should just keep doing what i do.

 

[cosism]

I agree with many of the other here. Just like changing up your rep schemes, I believe it is beneficial to CHANGE IT UP, as often as possible. If you continuously do ONLY BW workouts, you will not be able to reap the benifits of 3X3s, 5X5s, tabatas, etc. I say, go ahead and train BW excercises hard, but after a short time, change it up, so yuor body will not plateau. That just my opinion though, as I still have alot to learn.

 

[bck]

I like the bodyweight stuff as well. People will say that bw exercises aren't conducive to building mass, but I actually gained most of my mass while I was in basic training. I had always lifted weights in high school and college, too. I still say for max strength you can't go wrong with weights, though.

 

[joe broadway]

need to grapple more, use more technique and less muscle

 

[bck]

As Urban said, BW exercises are only a piece of the puzzle. Long gone should be the days that athletes think that just weight lifting or just bodweight exercises are the answers. When I'm in "off-season" mode (not fighting for 5 months or more) I usually mix in bw exercises and weights equally. I lift hard 3 days (deadlift/squat/bp) and then on other days, after MMA training, I do one set until failure on push-ups, sit-ups, diamonds, squats, jump squats, pull-ups, and chins. Nothing that is going to kill me or anything.

When I'm two months away from a fight, I usually cut down lifting to 1 day (2 sets of high rep cleans, squats, cg bp, and speed deadlifts) so I don't lose too much strength. I just don't have enough time to dedicate to weights when I'm in the gym 3 hours a day afterwork working on MMA. To increase my strength endurance, I do tabatas and sprints and other bw exercises..

 

[Brand Nizzle]

Dork. they're only part of the puzzle. Personally I think they should be used for conditioning more than muscular endurance. before I get started I should say these two terms are not mutually exclusive.

Let me clarify how I beleive on difers from the other. Muscular endurance is being able to do 200 pushups. That's quite a few and nobody here will doubt that that's pretty good endurance. Conditioning I would say places more emphasis on cardiovascular work. So doing tabata intervals, 3 minute rounds or circuits, or something like that is for conditioning. what really separates the two is time. The guy doing 200 pushups can sort of rest in the up position, but make him do those pushups in three minutes and he's gonna be breathing HARD at the end. This is how I beleive bodyweight exercises should be used: with temporal goals or limitations.

In fact, if you go to my website, you will find my little program randomly generates bodyweight GPP drills that work much like that. this is the kind of muscular endurance you want in sport, you want to be able to push as hard as you can for an interval, rest a bit and repeat.

To be honest, for most athletes I'm not sure what the advantage of posessing just straight muscular endurance would be.

URL to your website?

 

[OpethDrums]

i am heavy on weights and i do pull ups on back day.. up downs and barbell work in my jump roping routine too

i really love bw stuff. they make me feel more coordinated

 

[Gavin LeFever]

you need to be able to do the bodyweight exercise with your own bodyweight added for full sets and reps, IMO.

pushups with someone in your weight class on your back. pullups with him on your back. etc etc. otherwise you can only do so much with your own weight. it can keep you in-shape but if you're here, you'll looking for more.

if you can man-handle your own weight, which is what you'd be facing in a fight, then you're good to go.

 

[HitmanNO.1]

i used to just to bW, u get stronger and more ripped until you get better at them, they are great for endurance and for the Normal Human who just wants to be fit. I do bw after i finish lifting. Also, i jump rope a lot and spar.