Body Weight lifting a more beneficial way of working out than lifting with free weights

In today’s age people are pushing their muscles to the limits and beyond by lifting as heavy as they can because that’s what people think looks good. What most of these people do not understand is that they are putting so much stress on their bodies due to bad form and lifting too much weight to often. Now if you want to look like a big juiced up man or women then go and lift as much as you want but I am here today to show people that you can live a healthier life from body weight lifting. 

Body weight exercises can be done by people all shapes and sizes

Body weight lifting is a safer and cheaper way to exercise because you do not need to spend money buying a new bow flex machine or spending 50 dollars a month to go to a gym, when the only thing that you need is yourself and the right mind set.

Body weight lifting has been shown to have some very positive effects on the body. Because body weight is only using your body, everyone can do it, they can be modified for any type of person, you can challenge your fitness level by any way, say you can’t do a regular push up because you are to out of shape, you can modify it so you can do knee pushups and pump up the repetitions that you are doing so that one day you are strong enough to do a regular push up. 

I interviewed Alex Bazink, who is the head trainer for the University of Maryland baseball team and here is what he had to say about the effects of body weight lifting.

Even world champions know the truth as to why body weight lifting is so important

One of the biggest and most brawn men of all time Arnold Schwarzenegger who was a world champion body builder in his prime spoke about the importance of body weight lifting. He said it best by saying just 1% of your day. 1% meaning just 15 minutes of your day to doing body weight exercises can make all the difference and have a major impact on your life.  This may be hard to believe coming from a man of Arnold’s stature because this is a man who would lift 12 hours of the day and go to the gym six days a week during his body building career.

Picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger
schwarenegger.com 

Hitting the gym for 12 hours a day is not for most people and can scare people away from the gym, but like Arnold said, you only need that 1%.  The reason why that bodybuilding is such a danger is because of the effects it can have on your body physically. Because of the physical activities you are doing you are putting so much stress on your brain and other parts of your body. People who partake in bodybuilding are actually shortening their life expectancy tremendously. This comes down to one simple question, do you want to look like the hulk for a short period of your life, or do you want to be able to live your full expectancy.  

Many body builders and trainers know this truth about body weight exercising, and why it is so important. The reason being is that because of the shortness of the exercises and not exerting force on an outside object, you are not putting stress on major parts of your body.

Coming from one of the biggest workout guys of all time, it is hard to wonder why people can take 15 minutes out of their lives to do this.

Your body is all the weight you need to see the results you are looking for

Body Weight Lifting is defined as lifting with just your body weight and not using any outside weights, but there is more than what people actually realize about body weight lifting. Most people have the impression that you need free weights to get big and strong but you don’t, you only need your body and patience. In this article, written by Jason Ferruggia he explains that using body weights is just as effective as using free weights.

This photo shows a man doing one the simplest form of a body weight exercise.
Photo from www.simplysweat.com

The more resistance that your body produces the better your results

In this he explains that just doing the basic forms of push-ups and pull ups will not show you the same results but if you enhance the way that you do these exercises like doing drop push-ups and holding yourself up at the top of your pull up will show you better results. 

The muscle fiber is a basic component that allows a human to produce force when working out or doing any activity. When lifting with free weights, the way you add more resistance is simply done by putting more weight on the bar so it is harder, with body weight lifting people usually do not know how to add more resistance so they usually do not see the results as fast as someone who would be lifting with weights so they usually go over to weights and end up putting more stress on their body this way. I asked Alex Bazink, what are some negative effects of training with weights and how having bad form can put more harm on the body than just doing body weight lifts.

 Body weight lifting safer exercise on brain than using free weights

Body weight lifting and free weight lifting both have good results on your health in the long term, but because of the way you exercise during these activities lifting free weights can put stress on your brain. Lifting with weights is considered to be an anaerobic activity because when lifting free weights, you need short bursts of energy that do not require as much oxygen and because of this short bursts of not breathing these people using free weights are putting too much stress on their brain which can cause problems in the long run.

Body weight lifting because there is no outside acting on the body and it just yourself working out, you are able to breath much more effectively which can get the brain the oxygen it needs so it can pump blood throughout the body and help the growth of the muscles that you are working out.

In this video, Alex Bazink tells some the long-term effects of body weight lifting.

Psychological aspects of resistance training

Sport psychology has had a great deal for athletes involved in resistance training. The goal of everything athlete is to perform in an ideal state of mind. The goal can be achieved by psychological and physiological efficiency, which would be ideally achieved by using the bare minimum amount of energy. The right state of mind that I am referring to is a state of no fear, laser like focus, a positive mind, self-efficacy, and using the right dynamic movements. 

The athlete needs to be able to learn and excel at several psychological skills and in different environments. The biggest skill that needs to be there for an athlete is goal setting. Goal setting is so vital for athletes because athletes have a different way of thinking than most people because they know how to work through adversity and not stop until they achieve the goal that have set for themselves. 

With the help of body weight training, these goals can be achieved easier than using free weights, because if you are trying to put up big weight with free weights, and you don't achieve it is a major let down and can harm your state of mind, but by using body weight, you can accomplish your goal that day every time. 

Body weight athletics are increasing on the biggest stages of their field 

If you are an athlete and you have grown to the peak of your ability and you are trying to challenge yourself, you can go into the Cross Fit games. The Cross Fit games are as series of events that are a combination of free weight lifting and body weight exercises. The way the Cross Fit games work is that you first have to go to the trials, then regionals, and finally the Cross Fit games.

These games include, push-ups, burpees, pull-up, muscle-ups, the box jump, and running, for the body weight exercises, which are all physical activities that normal people can do. The free weight exercises include the snatch, the clean and jerk, deadlift, and overhead squat, which not taught correctly, can turn into life long injuries.

The Cross Fit games have seen the number of body weight exercises increase as the years have gone on. In this bar graph below, I have shown the trials, the regionals, and the games from the years 2011-2012 to show how much body weight exercise actually have increased.  

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Vedran Lekic, assistant professor at The University of Maryland receives award for global seismic velocity model

Nearly 2 million data lines fill the screen of Vedran Lekic’s computer every day, each representing seismic waves that are detected from of the more than 1,700 seismic stations around the U.S. From this data, Lekic is creating a map that will not only cover all 48 contiguous states, Alaska and Puerto Rico, but also dive deep into the Earth’s crust and core.

 As a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkley, Lekic formulated higher-resolution images of the Earth’s mantle structure, stemming from his creation of a global seismic velocity model. Not only is the model able to give geologists a better understanding of plate tectonics, but it also helps explain the movement of continental plates and their evolution, Lekic said.

How the data is used

Lekic’s research is based on ground vibration recordings, which he and his students use to detect the scattering of seismic waves across the North American tectonic plate. In conjunction with the National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Facility network, the data is collected from the 49 states and Puerto Rico and makes up about 3.8 million square miles, Lekic said. EarthScope is kind of like our Apollo mission, but not as costly,” Lekic said

In recognition of his efforts to integrate computer science and geological studies, Lekic joined the ranks of 17 other early career U.S. scientists and engineers who were awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering last week. Lekic is now one of five alumni faculty members who have received the award while at this university, and he will be given access to unrestricted funds of $875,000 over a five-year period to support his extensive research on Earth’s inner structure. Now that a large fund has been granted to his work, he hopes to spend more time plotting the seismic information in graphs and models so that he may better understand the Earth, Lekic said.

 Benefits of the award 

“The great thing about this fellowship is its flexibility to go chase a really good idea to wherever it leads,” said Orr, a Stanford University professor. “It is an incredibly valuable fund and gives the researchers an opportunity to take off with a good idea instead of waiting a year or more for federal money.”

Lekic has already used the seismic information to investigate why and how the crust moves over the Earth’s mantle. As of now, the deepest any machine has been able to dig was about 12 kilometers into the Earth’s crust, a minuscle fracture of the roughly 6,730 kilometers it takes to get to the Earth’s core. Using the seismic information helps geologists see the shapes and sizes of the Earth’s layers.

“We are both interested in the energy that moves the tectonic plates and creates the magnetic shield around the planet,” geology professor William McDonough said.

Lekic and McDonough are attempting to harness that energy to create another way to build a model of the Earth. “What we do is comparable to how an ultrasound let’s us see through our bodies,” Lekic said. “But this lets us see through the Earth.”

 Lekic leading the way

Other than his seismology research contributions, Lekic is also a forerunner in the new geological field of neutrino geoscience. Neutrinos are a type of electrically neutral subatomic particle that are created during radioactive decay or some kinds of nuclear reactions. The particle, which was only discovered geologically in 2005 and physically detected for the first time last year, moves through every kind of object, McDonough said. “It sounds magical; it’s like a particle that exists but you can’t really see,” Lekic said of neutrinos.

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