My doctor told me to do bodyweight exercises only and lift no weights.
Saying lift only your bodyweight makes the load you are lifting seem trivial. But it really isn’t. It’s like saying here’s a cheque for 5 crore ‘only’. That ‘only’ feels like it doesn’t belong in that context.
If you perform a bodyweight squat, you are literally loading your legs with close to 60-70 percent of your bodyweight (legs and feet account for roughly a third of our total weight). So a 70 kg human being is squatting 42 to 49 kgs with a bodyweight squat.
With a single leg squat add the weight of the non working leg and you’re up to 85 percent of your weight on a single leg. That’s me squatting 65 kgs on one leg in a single leg squat. OK, make it 60 kgs given how stupidly skinny my legs are.
Same goes for a push up. You doing a floor push up are using your upper back and shoulders to push 60-70 percent of your bodyweight. Some people muck this up with a hideous plank or arched lower back. So a 80 kg person is producing enough force to move 60 kgs of weight to the floor and back up.
On a pull up it’s close to 80-85 percent of your weight. So a 70 kg person is literally pulling 50-55 kgs of load against gravity towards the bar and lowering it back down.
So when you squat with a 10 kg dumbbell. That’s 10 kgs over and above 50 kgs. That’s just 20 percent more. And most of us are capable of much more.
So lift with confidence. Whatever you think is heavy, there’s probably more you can lift. Unless Eddie Hall or someone stupidly strong is reading my piece.
If you need inspiration from how much biological structured can tolerate, just remember we’ve tortured ants to figure out they can withstand 5000 times their weight in load before disintegrating. Read about that gruesome study here:
https://lnkd.in/gzHrAjtm
