Top 5 Weighted Vest Body Weight Exercises for Results

Try These Weighted Vest Body Weight Exercises

Ask any personal trainer what the best weighted vest body weight exercises are, and you’ll get a response. Probably a different response than the next personal trainer you ask. Keep asking around, and you’ll get a long list of “best” body weight exercises. Put them together, and you will have a compilation of pretty good exercises with no equipment required! (Maybe better than “pretty good,” depending on the credentials of the personal trainers you sampled). But something will be missing when you separate the parts from the whole. The criteria must be broadened. You may have gotten pretty good answers, but you were asking the wrong question.

A person cannot just do one exercise and expect a total body metamorphosis. That type of thinking would be tantamount to thinking you could just switch your Coca-Cola for mineral water and turn into a lean mean machine. To change your body size, you have to make many conscientious changes your diet. To change your body shape, you have to commit to a compound series of excellent exercises. Put those superb exercises together, and you have a great workout. Do that regularly, and you have a program. Programs change physiques, not isolated exercises. Do that with a weighted vest and you accelerate your results. Research shows that training with a weight vest gets results.

So, the question to ask would be “What are the Top 5 Body Weight Exercises?” With expanding the scope, you make it possible for a trainer to give you a series of exercises to target quads, glutes, hamstrings, core, pecs, lats, deltoids, triceps, and biceps; develop muscular endurance and strength; cardiovascular endurance; flexibility; and change body composition. That’s way more appealing that any progress you could have realized from one isolated exercise.

Here are the Top 5 Body Weight Exercises that are ideal to add a weighted vest to:

1. Triceps Push-Up with Contralateral Reach
2. Standard Push-Up with Side Plank
3. Push Plank with Hiccup
4. “Super” Stance Jacks
5. Plyometric Lunges

Let’s go back to the nutrition story. Changing from Coke to mineral water would be a small change. Changing your donut and coffee breakfast to steel cut oats and kale juice may be a bigger change. The biggest change may be switching every nutritionally sparse meal to a nutritionally dense meal (and doing that day after day, week after week). You’ll achieve great results from that. But if what you seek is the more than great- if you want to achieve the ultimate success, you’ll go even a step further and hire a licensed dietitian.

If you were to perform the Top 5 Body Weight Exercises with my recommended prescription of 1-minute of each exercise with 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50-second rest periods between each, respectively, and repeat that circuit twice (3x total), you would have a great workout. Do it regularly, and you’d have a great program. But if the apple of your eye is the ultimate workout, you should go one step further: add a weight vest.

Research on weighted vest use has recommended training with 5-10% body weight with the weight vest worn during up to 50% of the training sessions for a period of 3-4 weeks. See: Effect of Weight Vest Suit Worn During Daily Activities on Running Speed, Jumping Power, and Agility in Young Men. You should also consider adding a weighted vest to your warm up routine, which a study showed had positive impact on performance. As always, check with a medical professional before starting an exercise program or adding a weighted vest.

Looking for a weight vest? I recommend the Hyper Vest PRO weight vest for men and women. It is a compression vest that hugs snug to the body. The patented design allows the material of the vest to stretch horizontally to stretch with you as your diaphragm contracts and your chest expands (when you start breathing like a beast!). However, it won’t stretch vertically or shift up and down while you’re running/jumping/moving. Most weighted vests are cumbersome. They’re intended to make your workout better, but they end up just getting in your way. The Hyper Vest Pro is the single exception. The tiny steel plates positioned throughout the vest (front and back) protrude half an inch from your body. The weight adds challenge to your body weight workouts without constricting movement in any way, and can have other health benefits such as building bone density.

I have created this video to demonstrate, teach, then join you for the Top 5 Weighted Vest Body Weight Exercises. I’ll take you through the exhilarating circuit that we build with the exercises one time. On your own, run through that circuit twice more. Keep that up by doing this circuit regularly, watching your diet, and over the course of several weeks you will look and feel great. With the Hyper Vest Pro, you will surely agree: this is the ultimate functional workout! When you are ready for more intensity try this workout for MURPH from Julie Foucher.