Bodyweight Exercises

[leathernvouges]

You're on the right track leathervogues, but why wait until you plateau to add in pushups and situps?

Any exercise you do is burning calories. You burn more calories than you eat in a day, you lose weight. So the more exercise that you are able to perform, the more calories you will burn, the more weight you will lose.

Now there are a lot more technical aspects to losing weight than I'll go into to avoid confusion but the key is getting the most for your money out of your energy stores when it comes to how much exercise you can fit in.

Cardio is the most important thing you can do when losing weight. At least 20-30 minutes straight of keeping the heart rate elevated (whether it be through straight running, combination of running/ speed walking, swimming, biking, etc) is necessary for the heart to experience strength and endurance gains. As the heart becomes more efficient, you get more bang for your buck with exercise, which is what makes cardio so important.

Now, If your cardio is running, although running is a full-body exercise, the primary muscles you are tiring are going to be the legs. So after you run, you're presumably too tired to effectively continue exercising your legs right? That's where pushups, core, and pullups really help you. Yes, the muscles involved will be fatigued, but not as much as the legs. Pushups, ab work, and pullups/ chin-ups all work different muscle groups, so you can effectively fit a run, pushups, ab work, and pullups/ chin-ups into every training session. Stretching is also non-fatiguing, but keeps your heart rate elevated.

So, instead of just a 20-30 minute run, now you add 15-20 minutes of pushups, ab work, pullup/ chin-ups, and stretching to the back end of your workout, and you've gotten almost an hour of having your heart rate up and burning calories.

By exercising different muscle groups back to back, you avoid excessive fatigue, but can get more out of your workouts if you're looking to lose weight. So yes, make cardio a huge part of your base, but whether it be weighted or non-weighted exercises, add a heavy dose of other exercises and stretching into your workout routine. Whether you're using weights or not is generally irrelevant for your purposes, as long as the loads are light to moderate and the reps are kept high.

My problem was always time when I was starting to plateau at just 2 miles I would run the bleachers to go along with it then once I hit that plateau that's when I started the pushups & situps if I do all that from the beginning I'm gonna have to do more n more and ill end up spending hours just for a satisfying workout