Calisthenics is creating physical improvement and strength gain by using the body as the main training tool, more commonly known as bodyweight training. The fundamental goal of calisthenics should be mastering control over lifting and moving your body in space. Calisthenics is the most primal method of unlocking your true fitness potential.
Majority of the fitness world treats bodyweight training as far less superior than heavy weight training, reserved only for traveling, rehabilitation, or people new to exercise. People want to feel like they’re getting a good pump, always trying to lift heavy when truth is, you should be incorporating bodyweight exercises every now and then. With gyms and fitness facilities closed indefinitely, now more than ever, is the perfect time to start! Here are just a few great reasons why:
Improves Functional Strength
Calisthenics uses compound movements, involving a variety of muscles groups working together under tension. This is how your body was meant to be exercised since normal daily activities tend to require many muscles working together in unison. Bodyweight exercises force multiple groups of muscles to coordinate, stabilize, and transfer power efficiently. They train your body to work as if it is one muscle, gaining a special kind of functional strength for real life. It is the ultimate form of functional fitness.
Increases Flexibility, Mobility, and Stability
Its requires some degree of flexibility to complete calisthenic movements. Through increasing strength, your body will become adapted to increasing its flexibility to perform the movements correctly. Having proper range of motion allows your body to utilize the correct muscle groups to perform and exercise.
Protects Your Joints and Helps With Injury Prevention
Injury is one of the main reasons people stop working out. When resistance training is performed incorrectly, such as with too much weight, it can create muscle imbalances and put extra stress on your tendons and ligaments. Bodyweight training is a great way to hone your technique and form. The stress on your joints is lower making it less likely for you to be injured. Not only does it put less stress on the joints, but it also strengthens them by working the joints and tendons as they are meant to be worked.
Removes Excuses Not To Workout
Time, cost, intimidation, age…these are some of the biggest barriers to exercising. Calisthenics removes all of these barriers because you don’t even have to join a gym. With bodyweight training, you always have your gym with you. You don’t need any extra equipment and you can work out with minimal space.
Challenging at Any Fitness Level
Bodyweight exercises are great because they’re easily modified to challenge anyone offering the best of both worlds for fitness newbies or experts.
Here are some ideas for how to change up bodyweight exercises to work your muscles in slightly different, more challenging ways:
1. Slow Them Down/Adding a Pause
By slowing down the tempo, you are removing any momentum out an exercise and are forced to rely more on strength. It keeps your muscles under tension longer meaning they are being worked more. It also forces you to engage your core in order to stay balanced longer. Slowing down also forces you to focus on mind-muscle connection. When you slow things down, you have to think about what is going on with your muscles and what needs to stay engaged. This mind-muscle connection helps you engage the proper muscles more effectively. It is suggested that you experiment with slowing down the entire exercise, slowing down just the lowering portion, and slowing down just the lifting portion.
2. Speed Them Up
Adding speed gets your muscles working in a different way while also increasing your heart rate to improve cardiovascular conditioning and muscular endurance. Adding explosive power to an exercise is the most extreme way to add speed, also known as plyometric exercises.
3. Add a Pulsing Movement
Pulsing rather than going through the full range of motion is another way to keep your muscles under tension longer. It ultimately trains your muscular endurance. You definitely won’t question whether or not you activated and engaged your muscles because add pulses will leave your muscles burning.
4. Add a Half Rep
Like pulsing, adding a half rep keeps your muscles under tension longer.
5. Make Them Unilateral
Move from the classic version or a single-leg or arm variation. This not only requires more strength, but challenges your stability.
-Paulina Le, Health Fitness Specialist