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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

How do body-weight exercises compare? Things like push-ups and sit-ups and such.

Body-weight exercises are very good for population health. They can produce muscle growth sufficient to look muscular, much less the sort of maintain-mobility goal that should exist for almost everyone. Losing muscle mass is one of the largest factors in the reduced mobility we experience as we age.

Body weight exercising is much more than just pushups, crunches, and pull-ups. In addition to a large number of unique exercises, there are techniques to decrease the challenge or increase the challenge of most body weight exercises that should be taken advantage of. Over the entire fitness community the knowledge of how to make a body-weight exercise routine work is spread thin.

I honestly think we need more of the aging (55+) community taking good calisthenics classes. My elderly father (70s) visits the outdoor calisthenics park often when he is staying at my house.

They also do well. The mechanics of this process can be described as the body, given calories defecit, will start optimizing energe consumption and will start 'turning off' big consumers (muscles). In general you just need to use your body muscles in two directions - endurance and strength. Two because we have two (simplified statement) types of fibers, strength and endurance.

Good example of body weight excercises could be calisthenics.

edit: improved example

If you're able to increase your strength using body-weight exercises, then they're excellent. And they can go a long way - most people probably can't do a pull up, and very few will ever be able to do a pistol squat or a handstand pushup. However, for basics like pushups and squats, body weight offers only a beginner's level of resistance, and going to the gym not only offers the ability to continue making improvements, it makes incremental progress accessible for all kinds of movements, not just those two. Specifically, most people doing pushups and body weight squats are probably doing no pulling movements, or overhead movements.

> Specifically, most people doing pushups and body weight squats are probably doing no pulling movements, or overhead movements.

yeah - I'm definitely not. Need to fix that - gotta find a place to do pull-ups, and get some actual weights.

One issue is that I know I'll never go to the gym; besides the comparative time required (driving/biking to the gym, vs. just going downstairs to the basement), it's just a weird psychological quirk of mine.

Thinking about this more, I'd say the convention wisdom on body-weight exercises is completely backwards. They're terrible for beginners, but can be valuable for people already strong enough to do them. Why are they terrible for beginners? Two reasons, either their potential for improvement is too low, like the pushup or squat, where the average person can get to 5-10 reps pretty quickly- the point at which a given resistance is no longer able to elicit strength gains. Or, the first step is so large that it's effectively unreachable. Pull-ups are great, but if you are a beginner, doing your first pull-up by doing only pull-ups is a great challenge, compared to going to the gym and doing pull-downs or assisted pull-ups starting at an appropriate weight, and making incremental progress. In short, body weight exercises can certainly be challenging, think of a gymnast, but they offer very little in the way of incremental improvement from any starting point, which is what beginners need most.

Better than nothing but you want to go reasonably heavy to get the improvements in bone density. Also hard to get hypertrophy in the posterior chain, which is a major area for atrophy with age.

I think calisthenics/gymnastics can give a heavier load but there is a substantial skill component there, much harder to learn than, say, squats and deadlifts.

Depends on the fitness of the person doing them, really. For many populations, they might be too advanced. For others, too easy. As long as the person has to exert themselves, it's a good exercise. Make sure to use all the muscles you'd like to keep (which I hope is all of them).

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