Don’t despair if your income, work schedule or other commitments just don’t allow you time to get to a gym or buy expensive home training equipment.

It’s perfectly possible to attain extraordinary levels of muscular strength, endurance and flexibility using bodyweight training exercises alone.

Pavel Tsatsouline is a name rapidly becoming very well known in hardcore, strength, fitness and training circles.  He’s perhaps best known as one of the pioneers of the Russian kettlebell movement that is now sweeping the country and he’s eminently well qualified for this status, having been a Soviet kettlebell champion, and trainer of that country’s Special Forces, a role which he has also performed in the US.

But Pavel is not just about kettlebells; he’s also the author of the incredibly popular Naked Warrior, which as the title suggests is a comprehensive guide to bodyweight only training.  The point is not to suggest, however, that bodyweight training is better than going to the gym, or vice versa, but to demonstrate how it can be used to developmaximum strength and conditioning when getting to the gym is not an option.  Be assured, this is a kind of training which goes way beyond the traditional push ups and other “free” exercises, with which we’re all familiar (and deeply bored).

Click Here to see the exact steps that “ordinary guy” Alex Miller used to lose 36 pounds of body fat and FINALLY get six-pack abs.
Check out Alex’s inspirational pictures and also the Q&A we put together on how he achieved these results (very informative and inspirational!)

One of the great attractions of this type of training is that it does not require (and in fact works better without) any set workout.  But do a few high intensity exercises
at random times of the day (as you pass by your pull up bar for example) and you’ll find your body responding to this shock treatment by rapidly increasing in strength.

It’s the intensity that’s crucial, and this means high resistance.  Now obviously, since we ‘re not able to increase the resistance by adding weight to a bar or choosing a heavier kettlebell, the only way to increase the resistance is by using the positioning of the body.  And this is the great strength of Pavel’s book, he goes into great detail as to how to use your body to remove leverage from the movement – ie making the targeted muscles do all the work without assistance or momentum from the rest of the body.

Sets of five reps of an exercise done in this way are recommended for the best results, progress being achieved not by adding artificial weight but by moving on to harder variations of the exercises.  In fact Tsatsouline only recommends two core bodyweight training exercises – the one-legged squat, or “pistol”, and the one-armed push up.    But there are numerous variations on these two core “powerlifts”, which will stimulate the development of tremendous tensile strength.

At the bottom of the one-legged squat, for example, a back and forward rocking motion before driving up to the vertical will greatly intensify the action.  Or you might bend the free leg behind you and drop that knee to the floor, making a kind of lunge.  Similar variations, up to and including vertical handstand push ups, are possible with the one–armed push ups which Tsatsouline recommends, and the purpose and effect of all these variations is to avoid staleness and stimulate the body to rapid growth.

To reiterate, it’s not being argued here that bodyweight training is intrinsically superior to training with kettlebells or other weights, but that it can be highly valuable both in its own right and as a complement to more conventional gym.

If you want to get a lean, toned and shapely stomach in the shortest time then click here for access to these great free downloads
Mike Geary’s – Insider Secrets For A Lean Body (e-book)
Tom Venuto’s – Six Pack Abs Revealed (e-book)
David Grisaffi’s – Posture & Core Conditioning (e-book)
Mike Geary and Jeff “Muscle Nerd” Anderson (90 minute MP3 audio)

© 2011 Effective Ab Workouts