Can body-weight exercises like push-ups and sit-ups be as effective as lifting weights?

If there is something that the coronavirus pandemic has taught us is that the convenience of working out at the gym may not always be so. In 2020, several gyms closed down and gym-goers like me had nowhere else to exercise. Staying fit became a challenge and people had to find ways of maintaining a calorie deficit including adopting tougher measures like OMAD and using calisthenics.

Calisthenics vs. Weights

Calisthenics are body-weight exercises. One performs these exercises relying only on the body and nothing else. It is arguably a more convenient way of working out than any other form of exercise because your body is always with you. You can hit a pushup in the bathroom or do a few sit-ups in your office. You can also do some lunges and squats during your lunch break. But can calisthenics only be as effective as weights?

Of course, many people would want them to be so that they can save on going to the gym. Haha. In the USA alone, about 87.6 million gym-goers spend about $34.8 billion on gym memberships every year. Well, their effort is not in vain as I shall explain.

Doing calisthenics is an effective workout for an individual starting their workout. For a beginner, lifting one’s body weight, for instance during pushups, can be heavy because of low strength. The individual will have to keep building their strength until they reach a point that they can lift their body with much. That is why at the beginning, one may find doing 10 pushups difficult but they become easier to do with time. And the fitness journey relies on improving the challenge to make the body work harder. If you can do 200 pushups, you will need to do more using different variations of the pushups to make the challenge harder. The body will lose some weight initially when the challenge is tough enough. But after some time, calisthenics offer little benefit because it is not a challenge heavy enough for the body. If you have limited time on your routine and are not after a body like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, then you are probably good with doing only calisthenics.

But if you desire a body sculpted so well that you see the anatomy of your muscles and vessels unveil before your eyes, weight training is the way to go. With weights, the challenge can never reach a limit because you can always increase the weights. Weight training also offers several different exercises that can target specific groups of body muscles with a higher intensity, unlike calisthenics. But, I would encourage you to combine both weights and calisthenics to boost mobility and flexibility.