When to Add Weight to Bodyweight Exercises

Are you mindlessly following tradition when it comes to adding weight to bodyweight exercises? Are you forced to hit a certain (and highly arbitrary) repetition number without an external load before moving onto an external load?

Here’s what you need to know about adding weight to bodyweight exercise, no tradition attached.

 

Do you ever do seven reps per set? How about nine? Eleven? Thirteen? Probably not. Most of you probably stick to threes, fives, eights, tens, and other popular numbers.

We stick to tradition.

The numbers are just an example here—as I’m sure some of you purposely do sevens, nines, and elevens to stick it to the man (like me). The point is that we unconsciously follow tradition. (Or consciously disobey tradition. Maybe Vegeta can empathize.)

The tradition of mastering bodyweight exercises looks something like this: you need to hit a certain ability with your body weight before adding an external resistance. In other words, don’t do weighted chin-ups until you can do ten bodyweight chin-ups. Don’t bench press until you can do fifteen push-ups. (The tradition of repetition numbers has some relevance here, as most body weight progression traditions use repetition traditions to reference ability, which means we’re officially traditionally overdosed. Numbers are arbitrary, but this is just another obsessive compulsive quirk of mine.)

Don’t walk before you can crawl, is what it all essentially amounts to. Seems sensible enough. Add weight when the bodyweight version of an exercises gets easy.

But I’m an odd ball. The step-by-step progression never worked for me with bodyweight exercises. I want to say it’s because I didn’t know much about programming back when I first started training these exercises, but a recent handstand incident tells me otherwise.

When I started training, I couldn’t even do one chin-up. I haphazardly built my way up to five reps, but couldn’t break further free.

Despite five repetitions being a bane, three rep sets were a breeze. So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense: weighted chin-ups with three rep sets. I was able to consistently add weight to these, which then drove up my unweighted reps.

More recently, a handstand anecdote. My handstand training has been sporadic (an issue in itself, I know), but I’ve struggled with consistent long duration holds. Then I started doing single repetition free standing negatives, and handstand push-up work against a wall. Both of these made me much “stronger” and more comfortable on my hands.

Looking back, I’ve prematurely — at least, by most standards — added weight to bodyweight exercises with success. Let’s find out why, and whether or not you’re a candidate.

Limiting factors of bodyweight exercises

Bodyweight exercises have two big limiting factors: strength and skill.

Exercises with a strength limiting factor don’t have much of a learning curve, nor are they all that complex. Chin-ups are a great example. Most know how to do a chin-up. There’s no secret: hold on and pull yourself up.

Exercises with a skill limiting factor are generally more complex, and have more “moving parts.” The poster child of exercises handcuffed by skill is the pistol squat. Not being able to do a chin-up is a different animal than not being able to do a pistol. There are a lot more “issues” that arise during the pistol, which is why some very strong people can’t pistol.

Skill is a matter of integrating a multitude of strengths together. With the pistol there’s balance, ankle mobility, strength of the squatting leg, and strength of holding the other leg in the air.

So the first part of determining whether or not to add weight to a bodyweight exercise is determining whether you’re hindered by strength, or whether you’re hindered by skill. The easiest way to find your answer is to think in terms of brute strength. If you’re held back by more than a matter of powering through another repetition, then you might need more than strength.

The standard chin-up is a brute strength move, so it benefitted from more strength (seems simple when it’s put that way, doesn’t it?) But here’s an anecdote of the flip side.

When learning both the pistol squat and one arm push-up, I took a different approach. Absolute strength of the working muscles wasn’t the limiting factor. No amount of weighted push-ups, bench pressing, or any other loaded pressing was going to help me one arm push-up any better.

I needed to learn how to coordinate my existing strength specific to the one arm push-up. So what did I do? Trained them every day. Just a few reps. Not always intense. Never fatiguing. Just enough to “learn” how to coordinate my existing strength in a way specific for the execution of the one arm push-up.

No exercise is absolute, and how to add weight

It’s important to note, with the above example, some exercises waive between strength limiting and skill limiting. Something like a pistol squat can be limited by both, making this a not-so-absolute journey. This roadmap will serve the general purpose:

Notable strength limited bodyweight exercises:

• Push-ups
• Inverted rows
• Parallel bar dips
• Chin-ups

Notable skill limited bodyweight exercises:

• Handstands
• Muscle-ups
• Pistol Squats
• One arm anythings

(With a unilateral exercise, the first concern is whether or not the limb at work is strong enough to complete the movement. Assuming that it is strong enough, the unilateral aspect then brings about balance, counteracting rotation, and other issues less hindered by brute strength, and more hindered by coordinating strength together, which is more on the skill side of things.)

This skill limited list is rather loaded, as they all require strength. You can’t muscle-up unless you’re decent at pull-ups and dips. But I defer to what I said earlier about asking the question of brute strength.

Is this a brute strength thing? If so, maybe you need to build some strength.

Is this a skill thing? (Are you losing balance? Resisting rotational force?) If so, maybe you need more practice.

Take each movement for what it’s worth. Handstands have a lot of skill. Frequent practice is good. But perhaps the handstand balance is tough because you don’t have the strength in the position. Same can be said for the pistol. Depending on how strong your legs are, it could be one or the other.

Remember that the body is smarter than we think. I won’t accelerate what it feels it can’t decelerate. It won’t lift what it feels it can’t grip securely. So you’re struggling with body weight exercises, from a repetition standpoint, consider prematurely adding a load. Even if you don’t hit a magical number of repetitions, tradition be damned.

Your biggest concern when adding weight: the lower intensity, higher repetition work prepares the tissues for more intensive training down the line. So just be careful and use a safe progression.

This is going to be übercomplex, so get a pen, paper, calculator, iPad, iPhone, mass spectrometer, and compass. But if you do it right, you should be alright in the long run.

Start light. My weighted chin-ups started with 2.5 pounds, and I simply added 2.5 additional pounds every week. Otherwise, not only would progress stall early, but you’d also risk tendonitis and the likes. This also works well for parallel bar dips.

So there’s no hard rules here. But don’t succumb to tradition without giving it some thought.