Fitness & Coronavirus - Bodyweight Exercise Book Reviews

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Mar 22

Written By Adam Fisher

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Takeaway Points:

Due to the recent expansion of coronavirus, many exercisers are forced to begin working out from their homes.
Fortunately, bodyweight training, when done right, is an adequately adaptable method which is more than enough to help you achieve most fitness goals.
In order to get a good overview, I spent a lot of time over the past week reviewing the major bodyweight exercise books I’ve seen recommended over the years. If you’re interested in learning more about bodyweight exercise, these books are a good place to start.
In the coming weeks, I’m planning on posting a lot more writing about the topic of bodyweight fitness.

Bodyweight Training In The Viral Apocalypse

This past weekend, I attempted my last gym workout for the near future. I had just finished my current training cycle a couple weeks before, and wanted to test my deadlift 1RM for the first time in a couple years of consistent volume progress, so I was planning to do an extended peaking cycle (similar to my Deadlift Every Day program) and then attempt a personal record of about 5kg.

Unfortunately, coronavirus changed all of that. Faced with the fact that the virus is spreading rapidly and that aggressive self-distancing measures are required to minimize that spread as much as possible, I realized that I would certainly not have the full month or so of planned training that would enable me to nail my new max. So instead, I gave it a rushed attempt this past Sunday, which failed about as expected.

The only reasonable outlook, of course, is one of working out from home. I’ve never been particularly good at bodyweight exercises - I like knocking out high rep or weighted pullups, dips, and pushups as accessory exercises, but they’ve always been secondary to my primary goal of muscle mass and strength, built using the barbell movements.

The good news is that, contrary to what some ignorant trainers and lifters might tell you, bodyweight alone is sufficient to build a great deal of strength and muscle, particularly when you are intelligent about your use of exercise variations and changes in leverage which you can manipulate to increase the difficulty of these exercises.

One piece of bad news is that strength is highly context-dependent both with the type of exercise used and the weight used in this exercise. This means that while you can do as many pushups as you want, you’re likely still going to lose some strength off your bench press even if you’ve gained a bit of muscle mass in the meantime. On the other hand, you can relatively quickly regain strength upon return to serious barbell training, especially if you’ve been staying active and maintaining your muscle mass elsewhere, so bodyweight training sets you up for success once you’re able to return to the gym.

Another piece of bad news is that it’s easy to do bodyweight exercises wrong, or at the very least, in a very suboptimal way. When I was first starting out as a lifter, I was mostly following whatever training whims suited me for that week. This was before I got a training certification, before I got into powerlifting, and before I learned a lot of the important lessons I learned in that process. At the time, I had a deep appreciation for Bruce Lee, and I often tried to mimic his training practices in my own training even though I had goals that were ultimately nowhere near his.

This included large doses of core training that, I realize in retrospective, did very little for me except tire me out. Every day, I would make sure to put aside at least a half hour to do core training - I would stream a half hour tv show and do crunches the entire time, resting as long as needed and training for as long out of that half hour as possible. Eventually, I gave up this routine as it showed me almost no results.

The average trainee can easily fall into the same trap. Since bodyweight exercises are not as simple to progress as barbell or dumbbell exercises, where you can just add weight as the number of reps gets unmanageably high, many bodyweight trainees progress their workouts simply by adding more reps, without really focusing on making those reps harder. The end result is that workouts quickly balloon to unmanageable lengths as you end up finding that you need to do hundreds of reps in order to beat your previous workout.

Let’s imagine a simple example. A trainee starts off by doing 1 pushup on day 1, 2 pushups on day 2, and so on. By the end of a single year, the trainee is now doing 365 pushups per day - assumedly, split up into a number of sets to manage the load, but let’s imagine that the trainee can only do sets of 30 at a time - this means that they now have to perform 12+ sets to get in a sufficient workout. Adding up a few minutes rest per set plus the time it takes to complete each set, you may find that such a workout may take upwards of 45 minutes, depending on how lazy you are about the strictness of your rest periods. And this is just one exercise! If you wanted to train a variety of other exercises in the same workout, they’d all suffer from the same problem.

I’ve never been particularly good at calisthenics, but it’s always something I’ve been a bit interested in, since I worked at a CrossFit gym where I was gently mocked for my lack of speed, mobility, and ability to perform some of the classic gymnastics/calisthenics movements. Unfortunately, I’ve always dedicated 100% of my energy to my primary goals, and haven’t had the chance to really get into mastering the bodyweight exercises. Being stuck in my house, I’ve got all the time in the world to focus on it now!

I’ve also had to swap over a lot of my clients to more bodyweight or home gym focused routines. As a result, and as a result of my personal interest in mastering bodyweight exercises, I decided to look into the most popular bodyweight exercise books out there to brush up on some of their tips and tricks for effectively progressing your home workouts. Reading through them furiously, I’ve finished them all within this week.

Obviously, this list is far from exhaustive, but here are the handful of major books that I’ve regularly seen recommended over the years. Those books are:

Below, I’m going to collect my major thoughts on each of them. If you don’t care too much about the individual books and just want to skip to the summary, jump to the “Summing It All Up” section below.

Convict Conditioning - Paul Wade

You can’t write a fitness book without spending about 45% of the book talking about your (largely irrelevant) personal training philosophy, about 45% of it exhaustively explaining exercises (when videos would do a much better job much faster), and then about 10% of the book actually laying out the expected exercise program. I’ll refer to this as the “45/45/10% rule” from here on out. Convict Conditioning fits this description perfectly.

Wade is ostensibly a former convict with a deep passion for fitness, who has mastered the various “forgotten arts” of bodyweight training thanks to his disciplined focus and long time behind bars. I say “ostensibly” because Wade is also notably reclusive - he has never been photographed and no one knows who he really is. This, in conjunction with the fact that some of his descriptions of prison life seem a bit - romanticized, to be frank - lead me to be a bit suspicious. But I could be wrong! I could just be talking crap.

Half of the book is dedicated to mostly pointless exploration of his personal training philosophy. This includes a lot of factually untrue statements about how dangerous bodybuilding-style training is for your body and how good bodyweight-style training is for your body. For example, he claims that for most of history, no one used weights to train (not really true), and that bodyweight training is responsible for all the great warriors of history (probably partially true, but swinging around heavy weapons repeatedly probably meant a lot more). Most of the claims are not really worth dignifying with a detailed response, suffice to say. This stuff is mostly harmless, if irrelevant. I’d take it all with a grain of salt.

Eventually he gets down to the meat and potatoes of the program. Wade recommends training variations of just six major exercises (squat, pushup, handstand pushup, back bridge, lying leg raise, and pullup), and provides a progression of 10 variations for each exercise that you can use to progress. He also provides a rough structure for how to train these variations, but avoids getting too deep into the exact reps, instead focusing on number of challenging sets - a very good program structure, frankly. He recommends taking it slowly, training often, and adding reps infrequently, focusing instead on frequency of training to get in a good effect.

I’d take the earlier segments of the book with a huge grain of salt, but the later segments of the book are actually very well done, and the training program suggested is just the right combination of good structure and plenty of flexibility for individual trainees. It really does come through.

You Are Your Own Gym - Joshua Clark and Mark Lauren

Instead of the hardcore convict vibe, this book starts out instead with the hardcore military vibe, discussing the training of US soldiers - to have their bodies prepared for all kinds of challenges.

After the early bits however, the book quickly departs from the standard 45/45/10% split I mentioned in the above section, instead spending much of the time debunking classic fitness myths. When I got to this section of the book, I had a little bit of a laugh to myself. “This is soooooo 2010’s fitness industry!” I thought.

For those who aren’t aware, I started getting into the fitness industry proper around 2012, when I graduated university and started working immediately on my training certification so that I could find a job. At that time, “evidence-based” fitness was just coming into fashion thanks to the greater interest in sport science in recent years, and so there were a lot of these types of bloggers and fitness writers who made a big name for themselves aggressively dunking on the older broscience-style training philosophies.

But at the same time, this created a lot of copycats (myself included, I am not too proud to admit) who didn’t really have an excellent grounding in the science but wanted to seem like they did. This became a problem, because these copycat trainers would often simply parrot the things they saw in the blogs of other evidence-based trainers, or they would try to draw overly confident recommendations from somewhat flimsy scientific backing, all the while believing that they were intensely superior to the old “broscience” trainers. There were (and are) plenty of good evidence-based trainers out there, but the popularity of the concept (as always) leads to problems.

Sure enough, I checked the date of publication for this book, and it came out in 2010. Truly a product of its era.

Most of the mythbusting is somewhat accurate, although some of it is a bit overzealous and misguided in spots. It’s mostly worthwhile if you haven’t heard a lot of this before, but it’s not really directly relevant at all to bodyweight training. That out of the way, he spends the cursory 45% of the book exhaustively explaining exercises, and then the remaining 10% setting up the program.

Amusingly, for a book about being your own gym, a lot of the recommended exercises aren’t just bodyweight-only exercises. Many require some level of equipment, although he takes efforts to try to focus on things you might find around your house. Sometimes it gets a bit silly - for example, doing lateral raises to train the shoulders (a classic dumbbell exercise) but doing it with phone books instead since you’d be more likely to have those lying around the house. Naturally, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a phone book and I’ve got a set of dumbbells at home. In most cases it would be way easier to do a lot of these exercises with the proper equipment instead of the improvised equipment suggested.

Ultimately I’m not really a fan of how the book or the programming ends up either. By the time you get to programs, you’re just confused by the numerous exercises that you’ve had to look through, but which don’t ultimately get used. The workouts themselves are OK, but they’re not particularly adaptable or flexible, and I’d say they’re probably the least compelling.

Naked Warrior - Pavel Tsatsouline

Pavel’s Naked Warrior is, in contrast to YAYOG, a bit more of a blast from the past - it belongs a bit more to the old school style of training where everything was based around broscience, charismatic coaches, and vague nods towards the vague notion of being “hardcore”.

Instead of the usual 45/45/10% format, I’d say the book is essentially about 90% Pavel talking training philosophies, a scant 10% lent to explaining exercises, and then virtually no effort put into sketching out a program.

Pavel believes effectively in only two exercises - the single arm pushup, and the single leg (pistol) squat. These exercises, naturally, are challenging enough that almost no one can do them right away, so most of the exercise explanation is focused on variations for these two exercises.

The rest of the book is mostly dedicated to Pavel’s very brosciencey training recommendations, lots of lecturing about how you need to master your breath and your core in order to succeed, and so on - not terribly useful, really. For programming, his only recommendation is that you train every single day, you do whatever you can for practicing these two exercises, and that’s really it!

Ultimately, this is probably my most negative review - it’s a book that’s high on style, minimal on substance, and not particularly helpful.

Get Strong - Al and Danny Kavadlo

I don’t know if you know who the Kavadlo brothers are, but they haunt me, like twin ghouls who exist solely to terrify me. Each has their own YouTube channel (why do they have two different YouTube channels?) and I used to run into Al’s videos all the time. His videos are always perfectly fine, but at the same time somehow deeply unsettling. His catchphrase “I’m Al Kavadlo, and you’re.... Working out!” makes me groan so violently that it scares my cats. He smiles at weird times. He’s bizarrely excited about every single thing he does. But I have to hand it to him, he seems to be having a ton of fun, and I only wish I were half as excited to do what he does, as he is. His videos are probably the best on YouTube for getting good calisthenics info that I know of.

Get Strong dispenses with most of the usual “philosophy” pleasantries and instead just gets right down to the exercise explanations and programming. There are some weird bits - the book later devolves into Q&A’s which seem weirdly self-aggrandizing (“You have great tattoos! Should I wait to get tattoos until I’m jacked like you?”), and the book seems to take excessive pains to paint the Kavadlo brothers as fitness superstars. They are, I guess, to some extent, but it’s still a bit weird. The book is also jam-packed with photos of the Kavadlo brothers showing off. By the end, the book essentially just copies directly a few of the brothers’ various blog posts and articles (here we get into the philosophy bit, in reverse order) which are vaguely relevant.

That said, I think a lot of the structure is actually pretty solid. Like Convict Conditioning, you’re given a clearer path for progression and plenty of tools for flexibility, without being completely overwhelmed with too much variety. The programs give you options for how to progress and how to regress your workouts depending on how you’re performing, and that puts it kind of a step ahead of stuff like Naked Warrior or YAYOG.

Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength (Second Edition)

Unlike many of the other books on this list, Overcoming Gravity completely avoids the stereotypical 45/45/10% formula. Instead, it’s about a pure 50% theory and 50% exercise diagrams, and it’s also much longer and more detailed than probably the rest of the books combined.

Unlike some of these other books, it’s very clear that Low is very versed in modern sport science, and makes a huge effort to position bodyweight exercise within this knowledge base. This is incredibly helpful, especially for me - as someone well versed in exercise science, but mostly how it applies to other lifting sports, this served as a very useful tool in bridging the gaps in my knowledge. Low takes great effort, for example, to explain how powerlifting strength programs work, and then shows how bodyweight exercises tie into the same theory.

I had to skim through a lot of the book to get through it in a reasonable amount of time - admittedly, I already know a lot of the theory already, and didn’t need to absorb all of it. However, it’s very exhaustive - Low covers every aspect of training, including things like long term scheduling, fatigue management, warm ups, cool downs, and so on. If you’re someone without a solid sport science background, you may find this a lot more useful than me, albeit it may take quite a while for you to absorb and process it all.

Since Low is a gymnast, this book contains a lot more than what you see in the typical calisthenics programs seen in the other books in this list. Frankly I was very excited to learn a lot more about the gymnastics movements, as many of them are a lot more technically exciting and impressive, as well as aspirational.

The programs in the book revolve around a single spreadsheet which Low has put together, and which is freely available online. The spreadsheet essentially outlines, much like Convict Conditioning, a series of progressions you can use to move from easier to harder versions of the same exercises as you improve. Low’s advice on how to practice and program for these exercises is maybe a bit more confusing, but he does a good job of providing a lot of different options for trainees of various skill levels to follow. Unlike Convict Conditioning, this progression spreadsheet is much bigger and more complicated, featuring a lot more than just 6 exercises. He also mixes in some important relevant barbell and non-bodyweight exercises.

Overcoming Gravity is big, expensive, and exhaustive - just right for me, but maybe a bit intimidating to newer exercisers.

Summing It All Up - What Should You Get?

Ultimately most of what’s in these books isn’t terribly new if you’re pretty well-read on the evidence-based fitness community, but the biggest strength that these books have is that they lay out some of the variations and training methods you can focus on to help bridge the gap between basic and more advanced movements.

I think that the best single generalist book to get is probably Convict Conditioning. Ultimately, the workouts and variations are structured best in this book, and I think this is (surprisingly) most useful for trainees of all kinds of skill levels. I’d just skip most of the early-book philosophy stuff, which feels a bit off track.

Tied for first place is Overcoming Gravity. It’s easily the highest quality book on this list, but it’s probably a bit too intimidating for beginners. If you want expert advice though, that’s the book to go for.

My next best recommendation would be Get Strong. It’s simple, it does the job, it works.

After that, You Are Your Own Gym is solid if you just want a ton of exercise explainers. I wouldn’t follow the programs, honestly.

Naked Warrior may help if you’re looking to tackle the single leg squat or single arm pushup, but it’s basically lacking in everything else, including practical programming knowledge.

Any of these books will likely help (aside from maybe Naked Warrior) if you’re just looking for a solid base of information about where to start.

My Training Plan

I recently revealed my basic daily workout routine, which I took up in order to maintain a baseline level of fitness and help increase my results a bit by getting in a bit more training volume throughout the week. I’m essentially going to be stepping this up, following something similar to the plan laid out in Convict Conditioning, with the addition of some dumbbell exercises, and eventually building into some of the more advanced gymnastics movements outlined in Overcoming Gravity.

My plan is to train 4-5x/week, with 1 day being dedicated solely to trying to practice harder variations so that I can get better at them. During the other days, I’ll basically just be training pushups (building up to one hand variations), squats (building up to one leg variations), leg raises (building up to dragon flags), nordic hamstring curls (building into bridges), planks (and other core exercises), pullups (and band pullaparts), handstand pushups (and lat raises/DB presses), and some dumbbell loaded arm work (bicep curls, tricep extensions). I’m also hoping to get into some of the more advanced gymnastics moves, if I can.

The plan is pretty simple:

Day 1 - 3 challenging sets each: handstand pushup (or variation), pushup (or variation), pullup (or variation) plus all daily exercises (squat, band pullapart, arms).
Day 2 - 3 challenging sets each: squat (or variation), nordic leg curl/bridge (or variation), planks (or variation) plus all daily exercises (squat, band pullapart, arms).
Day 3 - Practicing more advanced variations to try to master them. No set routine, just putting 30 minutes or so into having fun and practicing whatever feels good.
Day 4 - 1 timed set each: handstand pushup (or variation), pushup (or variation), pullup (or variation) plus all daily exercises (squat, band pullapart, arms).
Day 5 - 1 timed set each: squat (or variation), nordic leg curl/bridge (or variation), planks (or variation) plus all daily exercises (squat, band pullapart, arms).

The challenging sets in days 1/2 are basically just what they sound like - I do a number of reps to near exhaustion, take a rest, and repeat. These are progressed using a standard set-addition style similar to what I use in my bodybuilding style training. Week 1 is 3 sets, week 2 is 4 sets, week 3 is 5 sets, and week 4 is 1 set of as many as possible, as a progress test for the month. In the second month, I simply reset and start over, aiming for 1 more base rep on each set. This means that if I do 20 reps/set in month 1, I’d do 21 reps/set in month 2, and so on.

The timed sets in days 4/5 are set to a 2 minute timer, with a style I call density sets - the idea here is to complete as many reps as possible in 2 minutes, resting as much as needed. Once I get to the point where I can do 2 minutes straight of unbroken reps with minimal rest, I can add time (+15 seconds) and repeat until I can hit unbroken reps on the new time.

For cardio on this plan, my approach is to go running in my neighborhood periodically, of course avoiding unnecessary contact - ideally running later at night when most people are in their houses. Depending on how the spread of the virus progresses, I may instead opt to do some aerobics-type stuff at home.

Other Coronavirus Concerns

You’re at home! You’re self-distancing! For the love of god, please limit your time outside and don’t go to the gym. Keep paying your gym membership if you’re on a monthly rate - your gym needs dues to survive, and who knows how long this will last, you may be able to go back to it sooner than you think. Get stuff delivered, or be careful if going out to your local store.

Staying at home means a huge loss of movement. Typically, most of us burn a lot of calories just from walking around, traveling to work, and so on - all of which vanishes if you’re working from home and sitting all day. Be sure to get in regular movement to prevent loss of metabolism and health when working from home - going for a walk in your area, setting aside 20 minutes to do some stepaerobics or to walk up and down your stairs, or so on.

Likewise, working from home means that you’re going to likely be dealing with the psychological effects of isolation. Having a strong routine is a powerful antidote to feeling overwhelmed by this isolation, and that means taking up and solidifying a new set of habits. Exercise will likely be an important part of that, but be sure to take up other rituals and routines to help organize your day. I’ve been working from home for 5 years, so I certainly know the feeling!

If you’ve got the cash to setup a more functional home gym (and not just stick to bodyweight exercises), you should check out my home gym guide. Now’s the ideal time, and if you can make the investment, it’ll save you a bunch in gym dues down the line, as well as save you a lot of travel time, gas money, social contact, and so on. Depending on what kind of space you have, you may not even need to worry about sticking to purely bodyweight workouts at all.

If you’re starting off from a point where it’s hard to manage bodyweight exercises, it may help to try weightless (no load) exercises instead. These exercises are a useful bridge from non-activity to activity, especially if you’re dealing with injury or disability.

Please, don’t fall for dumb “hacks” and “cures” for coronavirus. It is a virus, you cannot fight it by megadosing vitamins or choking down a ton of turmeric, drinking bleach, or any other stuff you see shared on Facebook. Please, also don’t fall for the foolhardy “it’s not a big deal” mentality - people are dying. More people are going to die if you’re not cautious. Positive actions can help save lives.

I’ll be writing more on the topic of bodyweight exercise over the course of the next few weeks - expect a lot more practical information on training!

I hate to be that guy, but unfortunately I have seen some of my clients cancel recently due to the virus. If you’re interested in coaching to help skip the process of figuring it out for yourself, or know someone who might be interested in coaching, I’m looking to take on a few new clients to fill those empty slots. I haven’t been actively seeking out clients in over a year, so these slots may fill up quickly. If you’re interested, let me know by contacting me on the coaching page.

You, too, can get jacked during the viral apocalypse. Go about it the right way!

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.

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