How to Get Your Training Clients STRONG With Body Weight – Only Workouts
by Forest Vance, author, Body Weight Strong 2.0
I want to talk to you today about how you can use body weight only training in your client’s workouts to help them get stronger.
This is great if you are training clients at home, or if you are in a boot camp situation where you can’t have 15 clients doing barbell training all at once, or you just don’t have the equipment necessary to work on strength development in a more traditional way.
You know you NEED to be doing strength training. You don’t want to be doing just burpees and jumping jacks and other high rep calisthenics all the time. Your clients need the strength work, it’s super important to lay the foundation for everything else.
So if you’re going to use body weight training to get your clients stronger, there’s a couple of important points that you need to keep in mind:
Number one, you want to make sure you’re working in a lower rep range. So while doing reps of 50 body weight squats in a row is cool and it’ll smoke your client, get their metabolism elevated, and burn calories- but it’s not going to help them get stronger.
Using squats as an example, you want to progress your clients up into a harder exercise, like a split squat. Now essentially you’ve doubled the weight on your front leg versus doing the two leg squat. Another progression would be doing a Bulgarian split squat, where you elevate your back foot. For a lot of your clients, that would probably be a lot more challenging and will help them build strength.
We have variations for all different types of exercises. Pull ups are a fantastic way to build strength with body weight only. In the Body Weight Strong program we go over different progressions for this exercise also. You can start with the suspension trainer, go to an inverted row, then do a pull up by giving yourself a little boost, and then go to a full pull up.
Same thing applies to the push up, we give different progressions to make it harder. If you have clients that are starting with knee push ups you can progress them to doing hand elevated push ups on a box or tire. That’s a great intermediate exercise to try to work up the strength to doing regular push ups. And then as they get stronger and more fit you can eventually work up to a one-arm push up.
So make sure you’re working in those higher exercise progressions, you’re working at a lower rep range, and doing more sets. Instead of 3 sets of 25 reps, now try to do 5 sets of 5 reps of the harder exercise variations.
Number two, also try to keep it relatively low fatigue. If you’re trying to build strength, you shouldn’t be trying to smoke your clients out. You can add a finisher at the end of the workout to make sure your clients leave feeling like they got a great workout, but not every single set of the day needs to smoke them out. Most trainers can get their client’s heart rate up, but it takes a skilled trainer to be able to work these strength progressions. That’s what’s going to give your clients a nice balanced workout and development- they’ll get strong and they’ll get in great condition.
Those are just a few tips on how to work strength into your body weight training programming. If you want more exercises, a full 12 week program, and more progressions you can use with your clients, be sure you check out the Body Weight Strong 2.0 program HERE: http://georgettepann.com/BWStrong2
Thanks, that’s it for now! Talk soon –
Forest
