One aspect of fitness that is not often sought after is explosive ability. Being explosive is one characteristic that is essential for athletes, but I’m here to explain how creating explosive strength will have huge gains in your other lifts along with creating a new physique unmatched by the old.
The answer is body-weight training. I’m not talking about doing some pull ups and push ups a couple times a week, I’m talking about advanced techniques using only your body weight that will generate a new power that most will never contest.
I will give you a couple of different examples of these explosive body-weight exercises in this article, but first we need to understand how to incorporate them into your workout.
If you are going to a gym, which most of us are, body weight training is essential to building a balanced physique. You must first understand that if you are too much of an isolationist you run the chances of creating “muscular imbalances” that can lead to injury and a odd looking body.
The reason why body weight training is great for creating not only functional, and explosive strength but also maintaining balance of your muscles. For example, the barbell bench press is a great exercise for your chest, but I invite you to do “push up claps” and see how many more muscles are incorporated into pushing your body off the ground enough to clap and catch yourself. I know you’ve seen the Rocky movies. The same thing goes for the barbell row. Yes, it’s a great exercise, but if you do “pull up claps” I promise you get more of a workout than your rows.
Once you’ve started doing some of these explosive body weight techniques you will notice how much stronger you are when you go back to the bench, because you’ve built some of the supporting muscles around the target area creating a more function strength and stronger lift.
Some of the moves you can do include:
– push up claps
– pull up claps
– box jumps
– high jumps in place
– throwing and catching a heavy medicine ball
One thing that I’ve done with my workout routine that is still in its “experimental phase” is a week of my body-weight workouts and a week of lifting in the gym.
I’ve been doing this for about 2 months and have noticed great gains with all of my lifts, and it keeps everything interesting. I’m sure a lot of you have found yourself bored with the same workouts week in and week out, these body-weight workouts will give you a whole new outlook into training along with generating that excitement you had during your first weeks of lifting.
