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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"Even casual gym-goers might be able to justify the spend since weights at home are the only option when gyms aren’t open"

Which is false, as you could always just do bodyweight exercises instead.

"You can overload the body with bodyweight, but at some point you are going to have to add more."

That may be true, but I would bet 99.9% of the people buying dumbbells aren't anywhere near that point.

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The benefit of dumbbells could be the opposite: that they weigh less than the body and thus make the exercises more manageable.

For that there are always alternative body weight exercises to make the effort easier.

Yep. Do push-ups on an incline. Get rings or a suspension trainer and do exercises from a more upright position. Rest feet on the floor when doing dips. Tons of ways to scale exercises down if you can’t do the normal version yet.

While you are all technically correct for one reading of that one sentence, it can also be read that buying dumbbells is the only option for using dumbbells right now.

Not really. What’s a body weight alternative to shoulder lift? When I travel and stay in hotels without gym, I use chairs and furniture. However, holding on to them can be really hard and certain exercises are just impossible.

You can do it with Resistance Bands which are super light.

That’s a good point, and I try that as well when no alternative, but I prefer a chair and a dumbbell before those things because they pull in a specific direction rather than down. But these are not just using a body.

Handstand pushups for example.

As someone who weights 250lb? ;)

Variations of Pike Press or Decline Push Up. If that 250lbs is mostly fat I wouldn't worry too much about my shoulder strength and focus on losing the extra weight. If it's muscle I agree that it's hard to maintain that without some iron.

Inverted shoulder press is super effective and not as hard as a handstand pushup.

Not the result. But I do do this, as well as pushups of different kinds, crunches, squats, etc. I just can’t agree that free weights can be completely replaced in a regular room.

You can build an entire upper body strength program around chins and handstand push ups. If you can't do a handstand push up; doing handstands and negatives until you can should provide plenty of upper body stimulation.

The only real downside to bodyweight training is lower back.

> The only real downside to bodyweight training is lower back.

I learned this the hard way when I got back in the gym.

Yes, theoretically you can do "everything you need" (no, but in terms of main lifts I can accept the answer) only with bodyweight exercises. In the same way you theoretically only need Notepad to program in any language.

In practice it sucks.

Yeah ok, sure, you can make your push-up harder or easier if you incline one way or the other. But do you have a bench that can be set to the exact height you want? All padded surfaces? Do you have enough space? Not to mention your shoulder mobility/strength which might or might not be the best one for your push-up to work on all inclinations.

Do all people have enough dexterity and strength for all bodyweight exercises? I don't think so

You can't beat weights. If I had to go to prison and learn how to do body-weight exercises, I would, but a barbell with the ability to set the weight in increments of 5 lbs is exactly what you want to precisely overload your muscles at the exact rate your programming requires. Also, if body weight exercises were enough, why do elite athletes consistently use weights and machines?

Bench-pressing 20 lbs dumbbells seems to be perceived as being cooler than but is also typically easier than doing pushups on your knees.

It doesn't take very long to get to a point where you can benefit from adding weight to chin-ups/dips. Someone able to do just 1 chin-up at the start of lockdown could have made some very good progress now depending on how well they trained, their physical proportions, and athletic history. Also, some people simply benefit from exercise variety. I personally get sick of certain movements after months of doing them and need to switch them up purely for mental motivation.

Another issue with bodyweight training compared to free weights is training legs and hips effectively. Plenty people will be able to add resistance right away to something like a squat.

Can you do a pistol squat?

> 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

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.

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

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

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".

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.

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.

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".

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 and there is no way he can do it with 150% bodyweight, I don't know of a single climber that ever achieved that.

I do normal two arms pull ups with additional weight. If I could do weighted one arm pull up, I wouldn't have a problem to do them without weight at home.

I admit I was a big fun of bw workouts for 3-4 years. Until I realized that it is much easier to add another plate than dig youtube for more difficult progressions and suffer.

Pretty much the same way I can do a dozen of handstand pushups, but I have no idea how to move to one arm handstand pushup. I am not even sure I saw a video of one on youtube.

Moving through advanced progressions of bw exercises is much much more challenging than increasing number of plates on barbell. That was my whole point. I can see why people do it as sport, but it is a handicap for everyone who just wants to lift more.

For one arm standup push-up if you have push-up handles then you use one of them and the other arm on the floor and you alternate this basically puts more of the load on the arm that is on the floor while providing some support.

You can also use a palm on the floor and forearm on the floor if you don’t have the handles or just use a book/anything to elevate one arm to reduce its range of motion and to allow you to transfer more and more weight to the other.

But for hand stand push-ups you have other ways of progression such as curling your body to reduce the center of mass and to isolate your arms, chest and shoulder more from your back and core.

I generally avoid one hand anything because it’s too easy to get injured which is one of the main issues with body weight.

Most people won’t be able to lift enough weight to get injured and unless you are doing singles/doubles you are more or less safe.

With tings like one armed handstand pushups it’s way too easy to get to a point in your range of motion where you have absolutely no chance of holding that weight in fact it’s rather easy to do it with normal hand standing pushups. There are safer options for shoulder/delts dominated pushups than hand standing ones.

Don't search on youtube. Ask on r/bodyweightfitness

https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/

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.

They could be concentrating on isolating muscles. Doing dumbbells to build up some strength before doing bodyweight is also another possibility.

But yeah if you can't get what you want you'll just have to make do and work around it.

Based on personal experience. I need to set my exercises not too easy and not too difficult. Too easy will get me bored. Too difficult i will totally give up. For that dumbbells is easier to manage.

Casual gym-goers are likely more familiar with random dumbbell routines than a myriad of bodyweight exercises. If you've been out of the gym for months and are out of shape, you're likely going to go with something that's familiar to you with proven benefits regardless of whether there are superior alternatives out there.

The problem is you can't do every exercise with your body weight, specially if you want to build muscle.

Aren't there simple variations that specifically target those who haven't got the muscle power to do the proper exercise?

Like negative pull-ups for those who can't do a pullup yet, or knee pushups, or many others you can find on any good bodyweight routine?

Well, yes but I don't mean that. Even if you can do push ups or any other exercise with your body weight, there are some muscles that you can't exercise.

Legs are extremely complicated to work out without weight. They carry your whole weight around all day so in order to make it suffer a bit, you need to add something on top of that.

You can't do biceps or any other small muscle that needs to be isolated during the workout.

The debate is all about goals. The vast majority of athletic goals outside of bodybuilding and power lifting can be achieved with bodyweight and one kettlebell. The choice of that kb depends on your goals again. I have a 35lb and it's enough to get a hard workout.

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