Bodyweight exercises

Bodyweight training is the foundation everything else builds on. Every exercise here needs floor space and nothing more, which makes it the default for hotel rooms, small apartments, parks and travel weeks. It is also where most people should start. Learning to control your own body through a full range of motion pays off later when you add weight to it.

You will hear that you cannot get stronger with bodyweight alone. That is half right. You cannot add plates, but you can change leverage. Elevate your feet, slow the lowering phase down, pause at the hardest point of the rep, or move to a harder variation of the same movement. Setkit lists these as progressions and regressions on every exercise page, so a push-up that has stopped being hard sends you to the decline push-up instead of to a higher rep count.

Bodyweight movements are also what circuits and Tabata are built on. There is nothing to load or unload between exercises, so transitions cost no time, and getting tired is less dangerous than it is under a loaded bar.