Here’s a great question I recently addressed:

I’m a personal trainer from Los Angeles and I just disagree with your belief that bodyweight exercises are better or far more effective that free weights or machines. I’ve had tremendous success with my clients using free weights and machines. What evidence do you have that leads you to believe that bodyweight exercises are better than free weights or machines?

First of all thank you for your question and I’m glad that you take the time to read the information I write about. Secondly I’ve never said that bodyweight exercises are better than free weight or machine training. The truth is that I’ve used bodyweight training, free weight training (barbells & dumbbells), machine training, medicine balls, exercise bands and much more to help myself and the people I work with improve. Each one merely represents a tool I have available. One saying I go by is: “Tools not Rules”. I try to learn as much as I can about each system of exercises because one never knows when one will need it.

I’ll give you a great example of why you should know as much as you can and keep an open mind. When I worked as a strength and conditioning assistant with the WNBA New York Liberty women’s basketball team we never had a consistent place to do our strength and conditioning workouts. We worked out at Basketball City, Bally’s Health Club, Madison Square Garden & the player’s hotel rooms. On the road it was even worse as many times the players had no access to a gym. This made it difficult to maintain consistency in our workouts but we didn’t use that as an excuse. Here’s what we did. At Basketball City we used machines and dumbbells (that’s all they had). At Bally’s we had access to an entire health club but many times it was very crowded so we stuck with Olympic lifts, squatting and dead lifting as most people don’t use these exercises. At the hotel rooms players would use bodyweight exercises and exercises bands and of course the best exercise: rest and sleep. At Madison Square Garden all we really had was the court where we did anaerobic conditioning, plyometrics, bodyweight training (pushups, walking lunges etc…) and stair exercises. Finally on the road the players were introduced to stair exercises. In the hotels stair cases players would do workouts designed to improve their strength, power, flexibility and conditioning. The stair exercises were such a hit that I was inspired to produce a DVD on just stair exercises. Can you imagine if I believed that we could only get a good workout with free weights and machines!

So to answer your question: I do think that expensive equipment, health clubs and supplements get way to much credit in the health & fitness industry at the expense of making people believe that you can’t get great results without them. The truth is you don’t need expensive equipment, gyms and supplements. Secondly, my stance isn’t that bodyweight exercises are better but it is usually the best place to start. Even when I train professional athletes who use barbell squats I’m going to take a look at how they squat with no weight to check their form. Taking that further I always look to see how someone handles their own bodyweight before progressing forward and using external resistance.