Bodyweight Strength Expert Moves - Pistol, One-Arm Pushup, One-Arm Chin-up
After attaining the basic bodyweight strength moves of the Pushup, the Chin-up, and the Sit-up you can continue on your path to higher and higher levels of bodyweight strength as long as you desire to. As you get further and further down that path you will find yourself being able to perform more and more bodyweight based exercises and strength feats with more and more ease. You will also find it getting easier and easier to perform higher reps on the basic bodyweight exercises. Being able to perform sets of 50+ pushups or 20+ chin-ups is not uncommon among high level bodyweight strength adherents.
There are a few very high level exercises that most people will never attain and most don't even care to. However, these exercises are the next major step on the bodyweight strength continuum and many people will want to aim at them. If you are one of those people then good luck to you as you push yourself harder and harder to achieve higher and higher levels of bodyweight strength.
We consider these next major checkpoint exercises to be Pistols, One-arm Push-ups, and One-arm Chin-ups.
In our opinion and indivudal who has avhieved the following has achieved a ver, very high level of bodyweight strength that they should be very proud of and find very functional in their ability to perform highly impressive strength feats in general because of the natural strength carryover that being a master of these few exercises provides.
Men
10 pistols
10 one-arm pushups
3 one-arm chin-ups
Women
10 pistols
5 one-arm pushups
3 cheating one-arm chin-ups
Once these are achieved, the primary way to continue to progress your bodyweight strength will be through the use of added weights on these exercises as well as continuing to use added weights on your other basic bodyweight based exercises. Also, increasing reps can be of some benefit but performing more than 10 reps on an exercise will typically not increase strength but will instead only increase endurance (which can actually reduce strength when dealing with high intensity strength exercises).
This last statement may be confusing but basically it is important to understand that strength and endurance are on opposite ends of the spectrum and training towards one end of that spectrum can result in a loss of ability on the other end of the spectrum due to adapation being specific to the stressor and the stressor needed for strength development and endurance development being opposites.
At low to intermediate levels of athletic ability this differentiation matters much less than it does at a high level of ability. This is why beginners will often gain strength and endurance at first regardless of what type of training they are doing. But over time as you progress further and further in one direction, your progress becomes more and more susceptible to reversal if you switch your training stressors. This is a longer discussion that deserves the full atention of a complete article however. For now, let it suffice that at high levels of strength, performing high rep sets can become counter-productive to strength development.
There are a few very high level exercises that most people will never attain and most don't even care to. However, these exercises are the next major step on the bodyweight strength continuum and many people will want to aim at them. If you are one of those people then good luck to you as you push yourself harder and harder to achieve higher and higher levels of bodyweight strength.
We consider these next major checkpoint exercises to be Pistols, One-arm Push-ups, and One-arm Chin-ups.
In our opinion and indivudal who has avhieved the following has achieved a ver, very high level of bodyweight strength that they should be very proud of and find very functional in their ability to perform highly impressive strength feats in general because of the natural strength carryover that being a master of these few exercises provides.
Men
10 pistols
10 one-arm pushups
3 one-arm chin-ups
Women
10 pistols
5 one-arm pushups
3 cheating one-arm chin-ups
Once these are achieved, the primary way to continue to progress your bodyweight strength will be through the use of added weights on these exercises as well as continuing to use added weights on your other basic bodyweight based exercises. Also, increasing reps can be of some benefit but performing more than 10 reps on an exercise will typically not increase strength but will instead only increase endurance (which can actually reduce strength when dealing with high intensity strength exercises).
This last statement may be confusing but basically it is important to understand that strength and endurance are on opposite ends of the spectrum and training towards one end of that spectrum can result in a loss of ability on the other end of the spectrum due to adapation being specific to the stressor and the stressor needed for strength development and endurance development being opposites.
At low to intermediate levels of athletic ability this differentiation matters much less than it does at a high level of ability. This is why beginners will often gain strength and endurance at first regardless of what type of training they are doing. But over time as you progress further and further in one direction, your progress becomes more and more susceptible to reversal if you switch your training stressors. This is a longer discussion that deserves the full atention of a complete article however. For now, let it suffice that at high levels of strength, performing high rep sets can become counter-productive to strength development.