Best Body Weight Workouts For Men & Women To Get Into Shape Without Breaking The Bank

When it comes to working out and training you may be reluctant to get started in a routine because you aren’t a member at the gym or you don’t want to spend the money to be a member at the gym. My goal for this article is for you to realize that you do not need a gym membership to get into amazing shape. There are some awesome body weight workouts available that will seriously kick your butt and get you into great shape, so here are a few I enjoy.

It’s kinda’ funny how even a hardcore workout sounds nicer when done at the beach. I wonder if she’s thinking about the nice warm breeze or the sound of the crashing waves — kinda’ doubt it. I think the only thing on her mind is “I’m doing pushups on the sand.”

There really are many, many different body weight workouts that you can, and really should be doing. What’s great, the best body weight workouts for men and women can be done just about anywhere … even at the beach.

My Favorite Body Weight Workouts For Men & Women

After reading through a few of my posts, you’ll come to know that I really do like body weight workouts and you can get surprisingly good results from them.

My favorite body weight workout comes from Turbulence Training and it can be done in a little less than 20 minutes — after you’ve gotten in good enough shape that is. I’ve actually done this workout along with Eat Stop Eat and have lost more fat than by doing traditional cardio workouts for an hour at a time.

Since I list that workout quite a few times, I’ll just mention that it’s the “crazy 8 workout” and you can watch a video here to see it in action.

Ultimate Body Weight Workout Challenge

Craig Balantyne has quite a few awesome workouts though. Here is an incredible one. It’s called the Belly Off Body Weight 500 Workout … video here.

Here’s the body weight workout written out if you’d like to print it out. Even though it’s a bit old (2007) it is still a true test of your fitness.

• 50 prisoner squats
• 50 push-ups
• 25 jumps
• 25 leg curls
• 50 stability ball jackknifes
• 50 step- ups (25 per leg)
• 25 pull-ups
• 50 lunges (25 per leg)
• 50 close grip push-ups
• 50 body weight rows
• 50 squats
• 25 chin-ups

Here’s a disclaimer from Ballantyne:

The entire body weight workout is just a challenge and is by no means something you should do everyday … you should do this body weight challenge on the weekends or on the day of your final workout of the week instead of doing your workout.

As he mentioned and as you can see, this body weight workout is more of a challenge and less of an actual routine that you’d include into your weekly schedule.

For more body weight workouts and exercises checkout Turbulence Training by Craig Ballantyne. He’s actually got a lot of different workouts available. They aren’t free but I think most of them are only like $20 (some less, some more) so they are well worth it.

Are Body Weight Workouts As Effective as Weight Lifting?

This is actually a pretty tough question to answer and I’m not sure that there can really be one definitive answer … not really.

Most likely you’re going to get a lot of opinions and those opinions are going to differ greatly.

I personally feel that they are as effective overall but there are always going to be pros and cons to both body weight exercises and traditional weight lifting exercises. For me, I prefer to do both and I don’t recommend neglecting one type of training completely.

If your main goal is to bulk up it certainly is possible to do so with body weight training, although it is generally easier to do so by lifting weights. For an effective way to build upper body mass doing a body weight workout, checkout this pushup workout routine which is based on using escalating density training.

If your main goal is to get in shape and to be healthy with a decent amount of muscle and definition then, yes, these types of exercise routines will work.

When it comes to getting ripped or even really defined though, you can do so with body weight exercises as long as your diet is designed to do so. Here’s an article discussing the diet I follow to get ripped.