Always Train for ENDURANCE

A crucial Fitness Tip for Bodyweight Exercisers

Weight lifting (in the traditional progressive-resistance method) builds strength, but not endurance. This is because bodybuilders do a limited number of sets with a limited number of repetitions, and “progress” by adding heavier weight over time. For example, George the weight lifter performs 3 sets of 8 reps in the bench press. In the beginning he can press only 155 lbs. Sticking to the same set/rep ratio, but adding more weight over time, he is eventually able to bench almost 300 lbs. Impressive? Certainly. Have his muscles grown bigger? You bet. But unless he supplements with a vigorous exercise, like wrestling, that forces him to USE those muscles for an EXTENDED period of time, his muscles are really showier rather than functional (useful). That is, those muscles will tire easily.

And because he trains isolated muscles to fatigue, what happens when he has to use his entire body simultaneously for an extended period of time (like when his boat goes down in the ocean 12 miles from shore and he has to swim all the way back to land)? That’s right, because he is not used to training his entire body simultaneously, he will fatigue very quickly.

Now let’s look at bodyweight exercises. If you were like me when you started, somewhat overweight, believe me, you are in the perfect place to start. Your heavy weight will give you extra resistance and help make you really strong, compared to if you were already thin when you began.

If you are really overweight to the point that bodyweight exercises are impossible to do in good form, never, never despair, my obese friend. Just focus on the exercises that get your heart rate going and your lungs breathing hard, and always give every exercise EVERYTHING you’ve got. I don’t care if you’re just doing a self-resistance bicep curl, or a challenging series of squat-thrusts, work it HARD. You will become very strong and lose those unsightly pounds faster than you probably can imagine at this point.

If you are a skinny buck, my recommendation is to focus on exercises that promote a high level of flexibility, because this will naturally be your strongest point. You then can gradually add poundage using a weight vest (the same training method as is recommended for those who, once overweight, have progressed to a high level of endurance with bodyweight exercises).

For those of you who are slightly overweight (most of us fall into this category), and for all beginners of natural bodyweight exercising, hear me out. When I first started these exercises, it was tough just to do 10 or 15 straight reps, so I adopted the weight lifting mindset of 3 sets/10 reps. This worked well at the beginning, but after doing this for a while I started to notice, as you will, that I wasn’t getting winded anymore.

Since I couldn’t add pounds of resistance, I had reached a plateau in receiving progressive benefit from the exercises (with the set/reps mentality, that is). If I were weight lifting, this plateau would signal to me that it was time to add more weight. I didn’t realize what the correct mindset was for bodyweight training until about two years ago, when I fell in love again with the favorite activity of my youth: mountain biking. Mountain biking is an extremely fun sport, like swimming, that requires, above strength and above flexibility, ENDURANCE. These guys train for endurance, and their respective muscles they use which are specific to their sport become very strong. Once I adopted this training theory into my bodyweight calisthenics routine, I realized I had discovered the key to excellent fitness.

Have you ever seen the calves on a professional mountain biker? Talk about shapely, defined, functional and massive legs! Look at the shoulders of swimmers. Are they not large, powerful, and shapely? Yet swimmers, because the rest of their bodies are less trained than their shoulders, tend to have thin, lean bodies dwarfed by their massive shoulders. Likewise, mountain bikers have disproportionately small upper bodies with wicked muscular legs. That’s when it hit me: train my whole body for endurance proportionately, and my body will be very strong all-around!

My strength took off when I started doing bodyweight exercises with ENDURANCE as my PRIMARY goal! Instead of doing 3 or 4 sets of 10 reps of dive-bomber pushups, I would imagine I was in a pushup marathon, find my rhythm, and just constantly push, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes I counted, sometimes I just lost myself in the rhythm. When I finally got exhausted I allowed myself a moment to rest then I would go into a bodyweight exercise that trained a different muscle group, such as the bodyweight squat. I would do a circuit of just 3 or 4 whole-body exercises trained to fatigue, which would take me about 15 minutes. If I had energy left, I would go through the circuit again, and in just 30 minutes I’d be completely exhausted and rolling on a natural high.

THIS is how you lose a lot of weight fast, build incredible strength, and achieve marathon-like endurance! This is how you literally can make yourself very fit after just several months on just 30 minutes of exercise a day! If you have the time though, the best recommendation for beginners is to train to fatigue (about 30 minutes if you really train hard) every 12 hours. So, you could train at 6 am, shower, then go to work, then at night train at 6 pm before you eat dinner. If your lifestyle is such that you are able to train more often, great! Just try to keep each session equally spaced apart (every 24 hours, every 12 hours, or every 8 hours). Training more often than every 8 hours is not recommended, because that would mean you are not getting your full night’s sleep of at least 8 hours.

Also keep in mind that you want to train your entire body evenly all around. So if you train every 12 hours, your training in the morning might be dive-bomber pushups, squats, and situps, then at night it might be handstand pushups, lunges, and bridging. The more compound movements you can do, and the more you vary it up, the stronger, leaner, and more flexible your body will be.

Here is a point of contention between endurance exercisers and weight lifters: the latter claim that endurance exercises don’t build muscles that are as massive and shapely as those developed solely by weight lifting. I agree with that on just ONE point: endurance-exercised muscles won’t get as massive, huge, and gargantuan as weight-lifted muscles* due to the progressive-resistance nature of weight training, BUT endurance-trained muscles WILL become shapely and STRONG. Have you ever seen a “big” guy who lifted weights, yet looked more like a bloated tire? He was strong, but he sure didn’t last long, did he? Now, look at Bruce Lee’s small, lean physique and tell me which one could throw a punch that would knock your head off. Unless the bloated tire just mentioned happens to be a Tyson, Sapp, or Shamrock-type MMA contender, we all can agree Bruce Lee would win out in a power-punch competition ANY day.

Why is this? Lee, possibly the most well-known martial artist, is not known for being massive, so he should not be that strong right? Well, it’s because his muscles were DENSE and THICK (they were also very defined and shapely). Poke the body of someone who sits at his computer for a living; I bet you will find him pretty flabby. His muscles “give” easily under light pressure. Then poke the arms of a serious wrestler or the legs of a biker. You will find that it is much more solid. This muscle TONE is like packing a thicker material under the muscles. They don’t become massive, but they really don’t need to, in order to become very strong.

Finally, for those who have mastered the ENDURANCE aspect of bodyweight exercises, there IS another progressive step forward: Weight vests. Vests ranging from 25 to 150 pounds can be used, and will make your muscles all over your body EVEN bigger and stronger, but ALWAYS put ENDURANCE first on your list of training goals. Training for ENDURANCE makes you physically and mentally TOUGH. As a BONUS, you become STRONG and FLEXIBLE. Let’s look at a very common natural exercise, pushups. This is not generally considered an endurance exercise. People tend to do them in sets of 10, 20, even 50. But to change your mindset of the pushup into an ENDURANCE exercise is to reap a large gain in mental toughness as well as great physical strength.

Marines get used to doing 60 or 70 pushups in a row. The cadets at boot camp get punished with pushup after pushup. Their chests are not massive like the posers on current bodybuilding magazines, but they’re very strong and shapely.

Take any ONE single exercise, even weight-training moves, and perform it with the mindset that you are training for an endurance marathon, and watch your mind and body get tougher and stronger.

*Let’s get real, folks; bodybuilders who are monolithic and massive either use steroids or at least supplement with creatine and other manmade crap. Even progressive-resistance weight lifters who don’t supplement will not get that massive. Organic-fitness.com is committed to the NATURAL lifestyle, which means all supplements that are potentially harmful are shunned! Even protein powder shakes are not considered useful, because they are not natural. You want protein, grill a filet of tuna! Some endurance exercisers, because of the nature of their training, have been known to take a dose of caffeine or some other “energy-producing” formula prior to training. If this helps you train longer, more power to you, BUT (and this is a BIG but) you can easily overdo it and give yourself an early heart attack. Natural is always, always better.

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