Bodyweight exercises

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These are the catalogue's 29 exercises that use your own body weight as the load, sorted by muscle group: upper body, legs, glutes and core. Some need a pull-up bar, parallel bars, a step or an ab wheel; none needs plates or machines. Weighted variants have been left out of this list because they are no longer bodyweight.

The exercises, by muscle group

Abs

• Ab Wheel (kneeling)
• Bicycle crunch
• Reverse crunch
• Dead bug
• Hanging leg raise
• Hollow hold
• Lateral plank walk
• Plank
• Side plank
• Ab wheel rollout
• V-sit

Quads

• Box jump
• Static lunge

Back

• Pull-ups
• Inverted row

Glutes

• Frog pump

Shoulders

• Pike push-up

Hamstrings

• Nordic curl

Lower back

• Bird dog
• Back extensions
• Superman hold

Calves

• Isometric calf raise on step
• Single-leg step calf raise
• Jump rope

Chest

• Push-ups
• Ring push-ups
• Parallel bar dips

Triceps

• Bench dips
• Diamond push-up

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Does bodyweight training build strength? Progressive push-ups versus the bench press

Bodyweight exercises carry a reasonable doubt: if the load is always your own body, does a point come where they stop building strength? Kotarsky, Christensen, Miller and Hackney tested it in 2018 in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research with 23 moderately trained men, split between a group doing progressively harder push-ups and another doing the bench press, three times a week for four weeks.

Both groups significantly improved their bench press 1RM and their push-up performance, and the progressive push-up group improved more in push-up progression. The honest detail is the last one: neither group meaningfully changed muscle thickness, which is to be expected in just four weeks, so this study speaks to strength, not hypertrophy.

The word doing all the work in that study is progressive. A bodyweight exercise that never gets harder stalls just like a bench press that always uses the same weight. The levers are the usual ones, adapted: more reps close to failure, lowering more slowly, a pause at the hardest point and moving to a more demanding variation — from incline push-ups to regular ones, then to decline push-ups or a single supporting hand.

Exercises by muscle group

• Abs
• Biceps
• Quads
• Back
• Glutes
• Shoulders
• Hamstrings
• Lower back
• Calves
• Chest
• Traps
• Triceps

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