Preventing Upper Body FAIL through bodyweight exercises
I totally believe in the power of bodyweight exercises in order to get stronger/build muscle/feel invincible/look super sexy 
I used to have zero upper body strength when I was younger. I remember in 4th grade, the only "F" I had ever made in my academic career was in P.E. because I couldn’t do a pull-up. I thought the grade was a sham since our instructor didn’t do anything to prepare us for this exam- lame.
Another story of upper body FAIL happened when I was a sophomore in college attending a sorority recruitment workshop. We noticed that the room we were in was connected to another building and if we jumped out of the window- we could play on the roof of the other building. The roof was about 6 feet from the window so we had to climb down and then climb back up. I manage to get on the roof but we had to quickly get back inside the other building before we got into trouble. Well my fat and out of shape self experienced humiliation because I couldn’t climb back inside the window. Even one of my sorority sisters was like "geeez Jessica, where is your upper body strength?!?" So that was another motive to build up
I was a fatty in 2004 like so:
Third story of upper body FAIL. I started taking martial arts when I was 19 (shortly after the previous situation had occurred) and our instructor made us do 10 pushups/10 situps in between karate routines. At that time, I was doing “chick pushups” on my knees but since I was a white belt, I shared classes with 5 and 6 year olds. These kids were doing real pushups and knocking them out. So in order to not feel like a loser, I MADE myself do real pushups. I was slow, it hurt- a lot, my chest and shoulders were so sore for a while BUT eventually I built up in which I could out pushup these kids lol.
Back to my pullup story so prior to doing a trillion pushups in karate this was me attempting to do pullups
I would just get on the bar and hang. But after a year of karate, I tried this again, hopped up on the bar and stayed up there thus proving the power of bodyweight exercises in order to build strength.
Going further, my next goal was to be able to do pullups/pushups/dips without any help. I accomplished this a few months into bodybuilding training around the beginning of 2009.
Naturally goal-oriented individuals never settle for where they currently remain. Sure I can do bodyweight exercises but I want to take this a step further and set new goals:
- 20 consecutive chins ups and eventually one hand chin ups
- 100 consecutive push ups and eventually one hand push ups
- weighted dips
My gameplan for my currently bodybuilding regime is to add muscle starting next month. I have spoken with my coach about this and he is all about me incorporating bodyweight exercise enhancements in order to meet my personal goals and add muscle at the same time.
I found these awesome links with training plans that I want to start next Monday:
http://chin-ups-training.com/training-routine/
The chin up program requires mandatory push ups in the morning so I figured I could incorporate this with the 100 push ups plan
http://hundredpushups.com/week1.html
Initial test results:
5 dead hang chin ups
20 consecutive push ups
Other awesome bodyweight exercise resources:
This one has several articles regarding a variety of bodyweight and endurance training http://www.dragondoor.com/articler/
Includes pictures for the visual learner such as myself http://www.beastskills.com/tutorials.htm
Realistically I will see results withing 6-8 weeks but I will keep you all posted 
Keep on keeping on!
