Are weight exercises as effective as lifting?

Many people think that to build strength, you need a set of weight or membership in the gym. Air squats are fine for beginners, thinking goes, but real workouts require equipment.

But is that true? Or maybe body weight exercises, such as hip bridges, dips and throws, can get the same benefits as pumping iron?

Research suggests that for most people the answer is yes. Your body does not care if you make an impression or pumps. “The muscle is agnostic,” said Anoop Balachandran, assistant to the Professor of Exercise Sciences at City University of Fresh York. “It only recognizes muscle tone.”

To say that, for each of them it has some advantages. Here’s what you need to know to get the best results from strength training.

The secret to success is failure.

Regardless of how you do it, strength training basically requires muscle exercise until it is almost exhausted to become stronger.

“We generally say that you have to train until a moment of failure, so that you try to do the exercise until you can,” said the scientist from James Steele exercises, head of research at Kieser Australia, chain of exercise and health clinics.

Dr. Steele said that if your goal is to get stronger, numerous studies have shown that similar results from weight or lifting exercises can be obtained. For example in Small test 2022He and several colleagues asked regular exercises in Minnesota to switch from their routine training to body weight training at home. Strength changes, at least over three weeks, were similar.

The same was true in Japanese experiment Comparing the pumps to the impression on the bench-go caused similar strength and muscle growth. And A Small test 2022 It was found that increasing the mass with the same number of repetitions was more or less as effective in two months as increasing repetitions of the same weight.

In other words, the effort counts, not what you raise. When you are stronger, the exercises you do will naturally be easier and you need to find ways to maintain a high level of effort to improve. In the strength room it is effortless: “Just put on a slightly more weight,” said Dr. Balachandran.

But if you rely on body weight training, you will have to find other, maybe more inventive ways of progressing effort. For example: increasing repetitions, enabling tools such as exercise teams or finding increasingly complex versions of exercises, such as placing legs on a chair to hinder a push-up.

Do weights have a greater risk of injuries?

Yes, free weights can cause damage, but not because you are stretching for excessive muscle interrogation. Dr. Steele said that the weights themselves are danger. Some Epidemiological examination Strength training injuries leading to ER visits in the period of 17 years showed that the most common mechanism of injury was the drop in weight to the victim.

When it comes to injuries to joints or muscles, we don’t really know if one type of strength training is more problematic, because “no one has ever compared these two,” said Stuart Phillips, a Kinesiology professor at McMaster University at Ontario, Canada. Although probably heavier loads often used in weightlifting would cause more deformation, and thus a higher risk.

Dr. Phillips said that no matter what kind of training you choose, learning the right technique, proceeding slowly and warming can reduce the chance of injury.

What if you just want to keep your health?

Of course, not everyone conducts strength training to get a lift. Some of us just want to age well and remain sturdy enough to perform daily activities without falling or hurt. Dr. Steele said that in this case it is good to stop a few repetitions without a complete failure.

While most official guidelines in United StatesIN Britain AND Canada Dr. Steele said that I recommend strength training twice a week Best available tests He suggests that you can still get the greatest benefits from one weekly training session.

“I usually tell people to strive twice a week, because if you miss one session, you will still get to a minimal effective dose,” he added.

More critical than the strength training you conduct, and even as often, it is to find something that you will consistently do, said Jasmin Ma, an assistant to a professor who studies exercises at the University of British Columbia.

“It must be part of your lifestyle,” she said. It should be a habit for life, such as brushing your teeth.

Christie Aschwanden is a writer from West Colorado and the author of “Good To Go: What the Athlete in all of us can learn from strange teaching about recovery.”