5 Bodyweight Exercises That Fix 95% Of Your Problems

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Do me a favor. Raise your hand if any of these sound like something that you deal with every single day. You have a weak core, you got poor posture, maybe low back issues, achy shoulders, or tight hips. Most of us are still raising our hands because most of us deal with those every single day. What if I told you that I had just five exercises that you can do, and here’s the key, consistently, because you’re not going to require a lot of space or a lot of time to do them.

Guys, I can fix 95% of your problems with just these five moves. Let’s get to them. So, for even the most basic of fitness routines, the push-up makes its way into that daily regiment. However, the push-up is going to contribute to rounded shoulder posture, overdevelopment of those front side muscles, and lack of development for the back side muscles unless you do something different to it. And that’s where the Superman push-up becomes our first exercise.

So, whether or not you can do a full push-up or not doesn’t matter. You can do them from your knees here. What I want you to do though is, if you are able to, step one, get up into the regular push-up position, lower yourself down to the ground, and instead of just pushing back up what most people do, I want you to do what we call a hand release push-up. By doing the hand release, I’m forcing myself to go all the way down, but more so from here, I can turn this into the Superman portion of the exercise by just reaching out and then squeezing my glutes and lifting my thighs up off the ground. One move, slide it all back in, toes down, hands down, and then come up into the push-up.

And again, when we do the push-up, you want to make sure you extend all the way through, not just to the point where you feel like you have a little bend in your elbow, but all the way through and even push a little bit further. Cuz when you push further, you engage that serratus anterior muscle. That’s another important postural muscle that’s going to help us. So, again, down, lift, and push. Down, lift, and push.

Again, if I’m doing it from my knees, I’m down, lift, and push. First exercise, again, slight modifications, but most importantly, working to correct the things that the other version of the push-up is actually contributing to. Next, all you have to do is turn your body over and now we address two things that are oftentimes very linked together. We’re talking about a weak core and weak glutes. And weak glutes oftentimes lead to low back pain.

And we could also fix some of that postural imbalance that you’ve got going on too with one sequence. And what we do is we lay back on the floor, feet are going to go flat on the floor, positioning ourselves for a bridge. But with the bridge, I want you to perform the reach over at the same time. Cuz what the reach over does is we drive up, reach across, and point to or reach for a point on the ground as far back over that opposite shoulder as you can get to. And this is causing that thoracic rotation that starts to help to free up that mid back that’s starting to round on you.

Again, we reach here, but when we come back down in one move, hands go down, legs come up, and we call that the heels to the heavens. Okay, now if you’re not sure if you’re getting up high enough, you can swipe your hands on the floor like this, that way, to make sure that you’re clearing your tailbone. If you find that you’re hitting each other, then obviously you’re not clearing high enough to get up. You want to make sure that you’re moving your pelvis and not just your legs if it’s your core that you’re trying to develop. So again, we bridge, reach over as far as I can opposite side, come down, swipe, and lift.

Here, reach over, down, swipe, and come down. Again, do as many repetitions as you can, hopefully fatiguing in your core before your glutes. You want those glutes to be strong, but if that’s not the case, it gives you more information that those glutes are pretty damn weak and you need to address it. This next exercise is going to be a squat variation that’s going to reinforce some of the hip mobility or hip stability issues that you’re lacking right now. Because you need both, especially to support your low back.

So what we do is put your hands together like this, knuckles up, and you put them right up against your sternum in this position here. Now, the idea is whenever you do your squat, as long as you’re going down with these knuckles straight up to the ceiling, then we know that you’re also reinforcing good posture, you’re not just leaning over or slumping to do the squat. So, they get set up here when you’re standing as tall as you can, you come straight down. Okay, here’s where we need some hip mobility to get to a deep flexion. Again, if I started to see these knuckles point forward, then I know that I’m starting to round out in my back.

I want to stay as upright as I can. Now, how do we develop hip stability here? By focusing on developing more gluteus medius strength, which is controlling the pelvis this way. So, what I do is I perform a creeping lunge where I step back with one leg, come back in, nice and slow, step back with the other leg, and come back in. You can do it in pieces where you go down and actually have to put your knee down, that’s fine if you’re more of a beginner, but the idea is if you don’t have to put your knee down, then from this position, you stand back up again, squat down, reach back, reach back, back’s in a good position, stand up again, squat.

Every repetition starts with a squat, has one of those lunges on each leg, and come back out of it. Again, training that gluteus medius so that we have control of the pelvis this way, so we’re not getting strain on that low back that ultimately winds up in that daily low back pain we don’t want anymore. The next exercise is great for fixing those shoulder problems, right? The epicenter of shoulder dysfunction is the rotator cuff, and unless you’re specifically addressing it with exercises or stretching the opposite side, those internal rotators, you’re going to have shoulder issues, they’re not going to feel good, but we can do what we need to do with just a single doorway in your house. You’re going to leverage your body against this door.

So, what I want to do is have you take the backs of your hands and put them on the inside of the door, right? It basically is leveraging this part of the door. If you don’t have a lot of trim, you can put it against the wall. But, the back side of your hand goes against that side of the door and against this side of the door here. And then what we’re doing is stepping our feet through cuz I want to create an angle of my body backwards.

So, the further I step my feet into the door, the more of an angle I’m going to have and the harder the exercise is going to become. But, from this position here, what I want to do is pull the backs of my hands or push the back of my hands into the door frame and pull with those interscapular muscles, the rotator cuff, the external rotators pushing this way to pull my body up. So, it looks like this. From here, pull back into this position. It’s a doorway face pull.

It’s my favorite exercise now translated into the home environment. You can do it anywhere. Again, pushing back, good contraction, lean back, drive your hands back, squeeze. You can see the work that it’s doing. So, that’s part of the deal, right?

We do as many repetitions as we can to strengthen the rotator cuff that’s causing issues for you right now. But, we also have to stretch those internal rotators, the ones that are pulling your shoulders this way. So, the way we do that is just still leverage the same doorway. Right after we’re done with that set, we drop down. This time the hands are going to go on the outside of the door an