Written By Simon Hayes, BJJ black belt and instructor at Carlson Gracie London, UK.

“I don’t do weights, i think training with my bodyweight is better”

Do you think your body knows the difference between 75kg of iron and 75kg of human flesh when it is asked to lift it? If it does it must be jolly clever!

Take the wide grip chin up, versus the same movement on a cabled Lat pulldown machine. The grip is the same, the muscles engaged are the same. If you put your bodyweight on the weight stack, the weight is the same. Your body has no idea whether it is doing chin ups or a machine.

I could go through various exercises and give the same analogy.

RESISTANCE IS RESISTANCE. IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW THE RESISTANCE IS CREATED, WHAT MATTERS IS HOW MUCH RESISTANCE THERE IS AND HOW WE MOVE THE RESISTANCE.

What ‘weights’ allow you to do is *VARY* the resistance.

Using the Lat pull down analogy again for a moment- If someone cannot lift their whole body weight to complete a full chin up, a Lat pull down machine will allow them to lift *LESS* weight so that they may complete the full range of movement of a chin up for repetitions, something they could not do on a chin up bar.

When eventually that same person gets strong enough to lift their whole bodyweight, the Lat pulldown machine will enable them to lift *MORE* than their bodyweight to encourage them to get even stronger.

Using weights allow the workout to be tailored to the individual and their goals whether the goals be sports specific or optics (the way we want to look).

Yes, we could get into discussion about stabiliser muscles and varying degrees of resistance to promote muscle growth but that is too complex for these short posts which are generally to debunk the old wives tails about lifting weights.
The message today is simple- 1KG of Human flesh weighs the same as 1KG of Iron.
Period.

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