Bodyweight exercises are a type of strength training where you use your own weight to provide resistance against gravity.
When you complete a bodyweight workout, you are essentially using your body alone without any other exercise equipment.
According to research, your own body weight—plus the motivation to push yourself to the limit—can burn more calories than any other exercise, including running.
Body Weight Exercises – Half an hour of body-weight exercises like pushups and pullups burn 167 calories if you weigh 73 Kg, and 200 calories if you weigh 91Kgs. Perform these at a more vigorous intensity and you can burn 298 calories at 73 Kg and 355 calories at 91 Kg.
Below are the 6 Ways to Burn More Calories Doing Bodyweight Exercises
1. Supersetting
- Put simply, a superset is performing a set of two different exercises back-to-back with minimal rest in between.
- Traditional resistance-training programming has you perform all assigned sets of the first exercise before moving on to the second exercise
- An example of a superset would be doing one set of 10 push-ups focusing on your chest and shoulder muscles. Then, immediately do a set of pull-ups focusing on your back and bicep muscles
2. Use Tabata Training Method
- Tabata training breaks a workout down into clearly defined intervals – typically, 20 seconds of a push-it-to-the-limit exercise followed by 10 seconds of rest.
- It will jump your heart rate up pretty quickly ensuring more calories burnt
- Eight consecutive work-and-relax cycles go into a 4-minute round in Tabata.
3. Do More Jumping
- The benefits of jumping include improved cardiovascular health, metabolism, bone density, strength, muscle tone, balance, and coordination.
- Regular exercise, good sleep, and a healthy diet are important pillars of a healthy body.
- Burpees is a good example of jumping exercise that makes you burn more calories4
4. Hit The Hills
- Most appropriately used by marathoners early in the training cycle, a longer run that takes you up and down a series of steady hills strengthens your aerobic system and improves your ability to avoid falling apart at the end of a long race.
- This extra effort ensures more calories burned per min
5. Interval Training-HIIT
- HIIT is a type of interval training exercise. It incorporates several rounds that alternate between several minutes of high-intensity movements to significantly increase the heart rate to at least 80% of one’s maximum heart rate, followed by short periods of lower-intensity movements.
- HIIT workouts can burn some serious calories in a short space of time. While this number will vary depending on factors like your weight, and what type of HIIT you are doing, you can expect to burn around 150-400 calories in 20 minutes of HIIT. And that’s without the extra calories burned throughout the day!
6. Do Whole Body Workout -Skip The Isolation Exercises
- An exercise that includes multiple joint movements would be considered a compound exercise, whilst an exercise with a single joint movement would be classed as an isolation exercise
- Isolation Exercise takes more time to complete and focusing on one muscle group at a time, tends to burn fewer calories.
- Isolation exercises do not release as many anabolic hormones during your workout, these are released when a workout is more taxing
