Get Excited About Bodyweight Training With Peloton’s No Equipment Necessary Collection

As exercising at home pushes our workouts in different directions, we recognized the need to make strength training even easier. That’s why we created the No Equipment Necessary class collection, focused on bodyweight strength training, to inspire you to push yourself beyond your limits with nothing but your body. Now, don’t get us wrong—we love weights, too. They’re a great and necessary part of a strength training routine. But if you’re working without a ton of specialized gym equipment, it’s still very possible to give your body a challenging and rewarding workout. Bodyweight training affords us the opportunity to get back to basics and challenge ourselves in different ways, leading to a physically challenging and mentally stimulating workout that you’ll want to keep coming back to again and again as you track your progress.

Whether you’re already an evangelist for bodyweight workouts or you’re new to the game, we’ve put together workouts that will challenge you and change you. This collection will take you through a mix of bodyweight, core, and HIIT workouts ranging from 10 to 30 minutes with seven of our world-class instructors: Andy Speer, Becs Gentry, Matty Maggiacomo, Olivia Amato, Rebecca Kennedy, Selena Samuela, and Robin Arzon. As always, each instructor brings his or her own philosophy and style to the mat, so we encourage you to try all of the classes and find something that inspires you to connect with your body and build your strength.

The real benefits of training bodyweight go well beyond the fact that you don’t need equipment. Peloton instructor Rebecca Kennedy believes strongly that bodyweight movements deserve to be a permanent fixture in your routine. Kennedy grew up as a gymnast and a dancer, so she knows a thing or two about the power of her own body—and she wants you to discover the power of yours, which she calls “the best piece of equipment in the world.” Indoor or outdoor, entire home gym or just a small corner, bodyweight workouts are adaptable to many different spaces. However, not all benefits of bodyweight training are as obvious as the convenience factor. Here are all of the reasons bodyweight training is Rebecca’s favorite way to train and why we want you to get excited about our No Equipment Necessary collection.

Building A Strong Foundation

Because these classes ask us to use our whole bodies, you’ll engage your muscles in a different way than you would with traditional strength training. One example of this is in our feet: as long as you have a surface clear of debris and are only training bodyweight, these no-equipment workouts are a great way to strengthen your feet over time by taking the classes barefoot. We recommend starting out with beginner classes and moving slowly, and once you’re more comfortable you can ramp up the intensity from there.

Kennedy points out that training without shoes strengthens the “intrinsic and supportive muscle groups that often get overlooked in other styles of training,” meaning that bodyweight training engages deeper muscles that play an important role in stabilization and movement. These aren’t your external muscle groups, so they aren’t visible like, say, your biceps, but these muscles set a strong foundation that is incredibly important for a healthy and functional body.

More than just strengthening muscles deep within your feet, Kennedy says that training bodyweight without shoes on “enhance(s) our neurological feedback,” letting your bare feet send more information to your brain because they have a more direct connection to the ground, which enhances your mind-body connection over time.

As you progress through bodyweight training, the benefits for your mind-body connection are not limited to your feet. Instead, you gain a better understanding and awareness of your entire body. Kennedy compares this to dance: She says that because bodyweight training makes us focus on every movement, it “teaches you awareness of where your body is in space, like a dancer knowing exactly where they are in the middle of their tenth pirouette.”

As you train your stabilizing muscles and increase your mind-body awareness, you’re setting a foundation that will make you stronger in anything you do.

An Undeniable Sense of Accomplishment

While bodyweight training may be “getting back to basics” because we’re not using any equipment, some of the moves are anything but basic. You might not get everything right on your first try, and that is okay! These classes provide you a great opportunity to come back to again and again, celebrating your failures and successes along the way.

Whether you’re working on transitioning from knee-supported push-ups to traditional push-ups or mastering the intricacies of a Turkish getup without having to look at the instructor the whole time, Kennedy knows that there’s an undeniable rush as you make progress and everything starts to make sense: “When things start to ‘click’ and you feel organized, stacked and strong in your movements without relying on equipment to do it for you, and then begin to progress the foundation, there is no denying the sense of accomplishment.”

As you’re getting started, you might not be able to get through an entire HIIT workout or core strength sequence without taking a break, but through consistent effort you’ll get better and better as you come back to the workouts—there is no better feeling than earned progress!

Same Movements, Different Difficulties

Another benefit of bodyweight training is that you don’t need to use varying weights to create varying difficulties within familiar movements like pushups, squats, and planks. If you’re feeling good, you can challenge yourself by adding more reps or modifying the speed of the movement. On the other hand, if you’re not at your best and need to modify, you can always take a step back and make the exercise a bit easier.

Kennedy explains the dynamism of bodyweight training: “Bodyweight training can be slow and fast, low impact and high impact, easy and challenging, steady to dynamic, low intensity and high intensity, it all depends on how you go about it. We can train our cardiovascular system as well as our musculoskeletal system. We can even take one movement and change it from being simple and easy to being complex and difficult by simply altering the time under tension, adding more movements, increasing the amount of reps, increasing the amount of total volume in one workout or over time, or shifting the move to an incline or decline.”

As you get into a routine with bodyweight training, these workouts are the perfect way to test your progress over time! After consistent bodyweight training, we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much more confident you’ve gotten handling your own body, which might inspire you to up the difficulty and keep challenging yourself in different ways!

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So, what are you waiting for? Go try the No Equipment Necessary collection today!