I have another interview with a performance professional that focuses on body weight exercises.

It is part of an interview that I did a while back.  If you would like to listen to the full body weight exercise interview, CLICK HERE.

Why should fitness professionals do bodyweight exercise with their clients?

Rick Kaselj: Why should fitness professionals do bodyweight exercise with their clients?

Adam: Just like a carpenter or mechanic has a tool for every job, a fitness professional should have a toolbox full of different tools for different jobs. Different tools just like a bench press, or a squat, or a dead lift is a great exercise to build up that limit strength. I think bodyweight exercises are the perfect tool in certain situation for fitness pros. I don’t think fitness pros should limit themselves to bodyweight exercises but, for example, just for its portability, it’s a very powerful tool.

A lot of our clients nowadays are very mobile. They’re traveling for work. They’re commuting. They don’t have time to go to the gym and want good workouts at home; at their office, just close the door; a lot of them train at lunch. That’s just one aspect is that it can be done anytime and anywhere. I think more profoundly, it’s a really good tool to address the whole idea of relative strength, or the ability to manipulate your own bodyweight in space.

Obviously in life, in our occupations and in sports, there are going to be situations where we have to manipulate heavy objects, odd objects, things like that. Most of the time, we’re actually dealing with our own bodyweight in space and learning how to move and use it.

A lot of the injuries are just stupid little things like slipping on a patch of ice, or getting out of a chair wrong, and whoa, there goes something. So, learning to use your bodyweight correctly through bodyweight training I think translates really well into life and sports and occupation.

The other thing that we can target really nicely with bodyweight exercise is movement sophistication. There are only so many ways you can modify a bench press, or a squat, or dead lift. The limitations on what you can do with bodyweight exercise are almost nonexistent.

There’s so many ways you can modify bodyweight movements to develop more and more sophisticated patterns of movements with your client. I think I could probably go on for awhile, but those are my main ones for why bodyweight exercise is such a powerful tool.

What are some Common Mistakes Fitness Professionals Make When it Comes to Body Weight Exercises?

Rick Kaselj: What would be some common mistakes that you see? It could be fitness professionals or your clients when it relates to bodyweight exercises.

Adam Steer: I think what I’ll do is I’ll just address this more from the aspect of fitness pros.
I think one of the biggest mistakes that I see fitness pros making is that if they do incorporate bodyweight exercises, they’re not going beyond the two dimensional staples we see day in and day out.
They’re doing push ups, sit up, fronts, backwards and bodyweight lunges. There are really two dimensional exercises you can do just as well with traditional strength training equipment. Like I said, there’s just so many ways of modifying bodyweight exercises to make them more sophisticated and more interesting, that it’s just a shame to stick with those two dimensional options. I’ll come back and do a few examples of that in a bit.

I think the other mistake that I see with bodyweight exercises is not exploring, or exploiting the full versatility of the exercise choices that we have. Depending on how you set your exercises up and the protocols you use and whatnot, you can do almost anything with bodyweight exercise.

You can build strength. You can build timing and coordination. You can work on metabolic conditioning. You can even replace a long slow cardio with a certain bodyweight exercises, we call them slow routines. The options are almost endless for what you can do with bodyweight exercises if you have a little bit of imagination and a little bit of creativity with how you put them together.

Finally I would say that the last mistake that I see a lot is people just abandoning bodyweight exercise if their clients are having difficulty with it, and going back to very simple, isolated strength training machines, instead of looking at ways you can modify bodyweight exercise to allow your clients to tap into its powers, instead of just giving up on it. So those are some of the mistakes that I see fitness pros making.
Thank you so much.

I hope you enjoyed the interview.

If you would like more information on Adam Steer or more info on his amazing bodyweight workouts, CLICK HERE.

Feel free to email me and let me know what topic you would like to cover in upcoming interviews or fitness professionals you would like me to interview.

Rick Kaselj, MS

.