Soccer legend Carli Lloyd said she switched from weightlifting to bodyweight workouts during her career, and it improved her performance

• US women's soccer champion Carli Lloyd said she started doing more bodyweight workouts in 2008.
• Lloyd previously did more weightlifting but wanted to focus more on body functional movements.

Many big-name athletes and celebrities, like soccer legend Carli Lloyd, have adopted a training routine based around bodyweight workouts instead of weightlifting.

Lloyd, a two-time Women's World Cup champion, said she decided to swap weightlifting for bodyweight workouts early in her professional career, and the switch had a positive effect on how she performed as an athlete.

In college at Rutgers and during the first few years of her professional career, Lloyd said she did a lot of weightlifting, including Olympic lifts, power cleaning, and jerk lifts, but it didn't make her feel quite right on the field.

"I just felt like I was a bit heavy from it," Lloyd told Insider. "So when I transitioned from college to the pro level they were still sort of integrating those Olympic lift exercises, and I just wasn't feeling great, so I stopped doing that. I mostly was doing bodyweight stuff like plyometric training."

Lloyd said she stuck with just doing bodyweight workouts for the majority of her career, and it helped her play at her physical best. She led the US Women's National Team to two World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019 and won two Olympic gold medals in 2008 and 2012, before retiring this year after the Tokyo Olympics.

Lloyd said she did incorporate a little bit of weight equipment back into her workout routine to help rehab a knee injury in 2020, but it was just functional movement training with added weight, as opposed to the heavy Olympic lifts she did in college.

"I do use weights now, but if the weights are used in the actual movements that you do on a normal basis and on your field and in your respective sport, then I think it's fine," she said. "But you're never in a squat position on the field with 300 pounds of a bar on you and doing that motion, you know, you're always on the move."

Lloyd stays fit these days by using the FlexIt LIVE virtual training sessions, which allow her to train from home with a remote instructor, she said.

For bodyweight exercise, Lloyd's go-to workouts throughout her career have included push-ups, sit-ups, and yoga.

Lloyd's favorite bodyweight workouts include boxing, yoga, and weightless squats

Bodyweight workouts, also known as calisthenics, are exercises that mimic the movements we use every day to improve overall body functionality.

The equipment involved in bodyweight workouts isn't about adding extra resistance with heavy weight, but rather utilizing a person's bodyweight as the resistance in multiple ways. Equipment used in bodyweight workouts include resistance bands, boxing gloves, or boxes to jump on.

Lloyd said bodyweight exercise improved her soccer game because her performance on the field depended upon skills like speed, agility, and body control, as opposed to pure strength.

She said some of her favorite bodyweight workouts included boxing, push-ups, sit-ups, bodyweight squats, yoga, and plyometric movements that include a variety of jumping exercises. But Lloyd's biggest training focus were workouts that built core strength.

"Your core stabilizes everything," Lloyd said. "I really realized throughout the course of my career how important the core was. It's for everything, it's for takeoff, it's for turning, so I spent a great deal of time doing a lot of core exercises, like jumps and high-knees, where I lift my knees all the way up to my chest."