Beginner’s Guide to Calisthenics for Audiophile Nerds

This, but at any age. The problem with getting older (well, one of them anyway) is that your caloric needs change, along with the way you metabolise fats and sugars in your 40's and 60's respectively based on recent research. As a youth you're sucking down food because you're literally building a human being. When you carry that habit over as an adult, and often in more sedentary office jobs, you grow out instead of up.

I'm in my 50's and realizing exercise gains importance as you age. It's not just about maintaining a healthy weight, it's also about strength and "frailty". Falls are one of the biggest killers as you get older. Bob Saget and Ivanna Trump are two recent well known examples. Shit that motherfucker Bob was funny as a daschund dragging its dick in the dirt. His stand-up vs his public image always tickled my funny bone. Big loss.

Strength training helps prevent falls as well as promote apoptosis/autophagy and the replacement of senescent cells. Senescent cells are a marker of biological age. It will also hopefully allow me to put off the hip replacement I need because of stupid shit I did in like 7th grade by strengthening the muscles that stabilize my hip.

One type of weight training I haven't seen mentioned is cycle training (NOT 'ROIDS!), which I learned when I went back to school to get my biochem degree. Hey, athletics are important. They're also an easy "A" as an elective class.

With cycle training, you first discover your single rep max in several exercises like squat, bench, etc. Then you start with high reps low weight, and every week you up the weight and lower the reps building towards your single rep max. Any body part gets a day of rest after you work it. Your final week is three sets of one lift each at your previously determined max. Then you take some time off from lifting, and start over with a higher max a few weeks later. It's very effective at building strength. Should probably throw in some cardio for good measure, it's important too.

Oh, and strengthen that core! A weak core makes for a weak body. Planks, various squats and crunches, whatever strengthen that core.

 

It is essential to learn how to brace and breath during heavy effort - be it heavy lifting or executing a kick in martial arts.

Spine, core musculature and facia form a complex system of relatively uncompressible rod-like structure in the middle and pulley system surrounding it. For the spine to opperate like steady rod the internal pressure of lungs and muscles help squeeze hold it straight and stable.
Strength coaches will teach that the main utility of a lifting belt is not to support your core and spine, rather help you understand how breaching and breathing should get you to perform well without one.

Pavel Tsatsouline and Andy Galpin are good online resources to learn this.

Advanced or elite lifters rarely do any core specific work, when they do, it is some fix for imbalance or managing some injury.

For beginners whose core is like a wet noodle, dedicated core work gets them started in a safe manner.

 

Speaking as a part time dance teacher, it is remarkable how often people completely forget to breath. Or rather, they are focusing so hard on a specific task that it overrides other crucial instinctual things.

For example, if you're just standing there and I shove you, most people will naturally step out in the direction they were pushed and not fall over. Human instincts control your balance and self-correct immediately. If I tell you to step in XYZ pattern with your feet, some people wind up not only tripping on their own feet but forget how to even balance themselves because they lock out their natural instincts.

Breathing is no different. Soooo many people hold their breath in mid movement when it's not even a hard exertion.

 

So far this is one of the all time greatest threads here on SBAF.

Still recovering from work place injury that took place almost a year ago. Time to dust off the pull up bar in the garage, kettlebells, and just ordered a set of parallettes. LETS GO!!

 

So, like 95% of Americans?

 

So much this. It's always a conscious thing for me, "remember to breath, remember to breath..." and at the correct time both in and out. Except when I used to run, I had a very regular breathing pattern that was part of my running rhythm.

 

I have the opposite philosophy: I regard my lungs as the breathing experts, and don't tell them what to do in the same way that I don't tell my kidneys how to do filtration.

I recognise that there are times of exception.

 

Lungs have similar 'automation' as eyelids. It is beneficial to force close your eyes if you see bunch of shit flying your way, for an example of exception .

Breathing has incredible depth of utility - going back to the very beginnings of society. The meditations going back before time of Buddha. And latest research involving vegus nerve and the medulla oblongata.
The breathing controls how you are and you can control breathing to guide how you are.

 

Rings are absolutely elite. I thought I had plateaued my bodyweight dip (15+ full-rom on a standard dip bar), but moving to rings forced me to start progression again at 5. The instability really does increase difficulty.

Another rings exercise that humbled me was the chest fly. After maxing out the machine chest fly that I have access to, I was surprised with how high I needed to place rings in order to perform the similar amount of reps. I'm now working to lower the rings session by session. Good stuff.

Regarding failure training... in my view it's essential if one wishes to move beyond the novice stage. Beginners should obviously focus on perfecting technique and training consistently. But you really don't how fit you are until you test your performance maximally. Doesn't have to be 1RM, but I have found anything between a 5-10RM is fairly accurate at predicting 1RM performance. I think most lifters would have around 6-12 months of serious gains when they start taking their movements to positive failure. They would see consistent increases in reps/weight on any given movement for that time period. Then another plateau will be hit but you'll likely be well into intermediate strength standards. Progression beyond that requires dedicated programming.

On general programming... I remember getting into Mentzer/HIT years ago now. I always liked training hard, but I was skeptical about the low-volume low-frequency approach. I was doing something in between a bro-split and Push-Pull-Legs. I started applying HIT style with my existing training frequency, and I got great progress. But eventually I had to move the frequency down to see the progress. If one truly desired to train 5x per week in the HIT style, you'd end up treading water or even seeing performance go down as fatigue accumulated. Ironically, now I'm down to the Consolidation program. I train 2-3 times per week, depending on where I place my cardio sessions. Auto-regulation being the key for me.

 

When someone says they want to get the movie-star six-pack, the good news to tell them is, hey, you already have abs. Bad news is that they're under layers and layers of fat.

 

I'm coming from an endurance perspective (cycling) but the sports literature is lately teeming with evidence to support that a lot of us are overtraining. Especially with regards to HIIT overtraining.

 

• I probably started out from intermediate level in most stuff, thanks to my background in heavy physical work and martial arts. Interesting exceptions being pullups - where I was relatively the weakest.

• I get thrill out of highest intensity stuff and initially went to full failure, which worked well for about six months.

• Then, hit a plateau - as expected, felt drained and unmotivated. Looking back, this was the first time I overtrained. After unintentionally reducing volume, I progressed again.

• I repeated this mess multiple times until eventually I discovered the undulation programming. Linear progressive overload is not sustainable - learned the hard way.

It would be fun to discuss how everyone programs their training, and how it turns out, what do you think?

It is the opposite wrt performance level as many think - the stronger you get, the less you can take yourself to failure.
There are cheats of course - juice etc balances the equation, but I assume none of us here are on sauce.

Then there is the question how far do you even want to go? Most people are happy being generally fit.

Just about anyone can get to a good level of fitness and simply enjoy lifting, running - the practice - without even caring about any progress, enjoying the gift of movement.

- edited morning verbal diarrhea out -

 

It is joy to read someone using rings. I've invited many strong buddies to my barn gym. Some of those able to bench press 2x their BW. I showed them ring dips - it was hilarious to see them utterly fail at doing even 1 with bodyweight only. The stability component is very hard. It is not even that they lack the stabilizing muscles - the neural 'driver' is not there yet.

Ring flies are a blast. Only downside is that the force curve is very uneven.
Ring pushups are truly great. The best variation of pushups there is. Only reason I am not doing those, instead I do pushups on parallets, is because I only have 2 sets of rings installed - I couldn't be bothered to set the height every time I do dips and rows.
You can properly row on rings - excellent supplementary movement to pullups and would assist on progressing, if regular pullup is too hard to start with.

The upside, other than insane development in upper body and core, is the freedom of movement in all directions, the movement pattern follows your anatomy. On dip bars your wrists are fixed, so is the width. Dip bars limit the ROM and make dipping deep more dangerous in terms of injury risk. As you have experienced, on rings, through out the range of motion, there is no point where it is easy. On bottom your pecs are on fire, on top your tricepses are screaming. There is constant strain on all the pushing muscle groups (pecs, front delts, triceps). If that was not enough suffering, for 30..60 seconds your core needs to be a brick. There was this rage over 'time under tension' in lifting circles a few years ago - well, dips on rings are constant 'time under tension', hahahaa. I rate heavy ring dips on bar with deficit Bulgarian split squats in terms of overall suffering - and I love these both.

Some time after starting to do ring dips I got often accused of using steroids - tricepses and pecs just blew the f up. I can't fathom how this movement is not more popular in BB circles.

 

RP is more body building focused group, but the overlap to calisthenics is significant. This graph visualizes hypertrophy stimulus, not strength.

For pure strength I would modify (based mostly on my own exp n=1) the SFR to be broader, already starting strong at 3 RIR - at least on the lifts I am not still advanced. (Deadlift, upright press). On the flip-side, proper str work is less than 7 reps. Doing 3 or 4 of 7 is grease-the-groove modality - which won't stimulate much muscle at all, but will hone the neural component, and bullet proof the tendons. Yet another catch is - str requires less volume for progress - you can game the fatigue by doing less sets a week, and get away with 0..1, even -1 RIR - that could work well in tapering period.

Everything in calisthenics is in context of compound movements (massive systematic fatigue component). Bodybuilders do isolation - where going 0 RIR every time 20 sets a week on lateral raises or biceps curls is ok.

I am sure nobody here is confused - how with same muscle mass one dude can be a lot stronger than the next one.
Climbing is interesting on the other end. Cali is something in between weight training and climbing with maternal coaching from gymnastics.
Here is a fun example:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u6BRLkEkerI

 

To add context - it is already strong as hell when done with bodyweight, incline and through deficit (blocks, books or parallets). People who have only bench pressed regular barbell (ROM is not that great) are often surprised to find how hard it is for them.

 

This thread is now veering more into the general fitness thread, which is what I hinted at earlier. The best info I've found regarding strength vs. hypertrophy and related matters is the Renaissance Periodization YouTube channel.

Remember if you're training for strength, you need to give yourself three days recovery between sessions because otherwise your body will not have adequate time to recover. Hypertrophy training is a bit easier to recover from.

I focus my training on what helps me to perform better and have less pain doing the activities that I care the most about: hiking and pickleball (in that order). I disagree with the assertion that isolation exercises are only for bodybuilders; they can be very helpful for us regular joe amateur athletes as well.

One example: I've had knee pain while hiking for years, largely caused by atrophy from sitting at a desk job and not working out for years. I did regular bodyweight stuff and some training with light dumbbells, but it wasn't helping much. What eventually helped me was to rachet down my training frequency to two times a week (Monday and Wednesday), leaving three full days before my big hikes on Saturdays. Monday was focused on lighter weights and hypertrophy. Wednesday was focused more on strength, with higher weight and lower rep ranges. Lots of single leg exercises and core stuff, similar to how runners should be cross training. On off days, I walk around the neighborhood and do core or mobility stuff at home.

I was starting to be able to hike further and farther than ever before, but was still getting knee pain from my IT band syndrome. Some of that could be attributed to overuse. I was taking on more than my joints and muscles could handle. What eventually really helped me to kick things into the next gear was figuring out where my weaknesses and imbalances were and then focusing on training those out in ways that made sense based on the forces that would be placed on the muscles during hiking.

Most of the time, my knee pain would appear when going downhill. Eccentric contraction on slopes of varying steepness. I found this article about leg extensions and decided I'd try them out with my physical therapist. We found that despite being able to squat fine (likely relying more on glutes) extensions were very hard to do. I struggled with 5-10 pounds for reps (single leg). So I focused on those for the last two years, just one workout per week, in addition to my other compound movements like deadlifts and squats of varying kinds.

Leg extensions closely mirror the forces that are put on legs by athletes stopping and starting quickly, but also people like me hiking downhill.



Just today I've worked up to three sets of 15 reps at 115# (two legs), up from 110# last week. Long way from 5-10# (single leg) failure last spring.

Last season I was able to do multiple hikes of 20ish miles and anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 feet of vertical gain (and descent) in rugged terrain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I finally achieved a long-term goal of hiking all the 4,000 footers in NH on the AMC's recognized list as well. Took me 2.5 years to do it.

But I still have low back pain after playing pickeball. I imagine this is because I'm 6'4" and have much further to bend to hit low balls. So this year I'll be focusing on strengthening my QL and other muscles in and around my low back. Already noticing some strides there.

Just be patient. Listen to your body. And don't overtrain. Pushups hurt my left elbow for some reason, despite strengthening my shoulder and back muscles, so I just do chest flys and seated chest press instead. That works for me, whereas other people may have no issue taking the calisthenic approach. The end goal should not be to get better at calisthenics for calisthenics' sake, but rather to improve your health, within your body's range of limitations, in a way that helps you achieve your goals.

 

As long as pullup bar, gymn rings and parallets are in the discussion, we can call it calisthenics. We are going to cheat when it comes to legs and low back training, as cali does not make much sense for that.
Calisthenics is tightly related to gymnastics and climbing, while adding a bit of flair into the mix. If you are great at one, you do not suck at the others. It is in a sense more mainstream and easier to do without proper coaching.
Calisthenics can have overlap in terms of hypertrophy and some carry over in terms of ability to regular gym lifting, for sure. The analogy to audio would be that both DS and multibit dacs produce sound, but we can have different discussions for each. Or tube amps vs transistors.
Here, I am guilty of flooding the thread with 'non-beginner stuff' - but it is all calisthenics.
The hard, boring stuff. I might later on share some of the more skill based stuff I have practiced.
It would make sense to take the food (for sure it matters) and running (I run, bike and hike regularly) discussion to some other thread, as that is not specifically related to calisthenics at all.

This statement does not hold in my experience, neither I can find anything to back it up as a general rule.
There are many schools of strength from Olympic stages to Powerlifting. They differ greatly.
The Soviet school would suggest practicing moderately every day, maybe resting one day. The classic US Powerlifting school would suggest 2..3 very hard sessions a week. Lately there are many things in-between. All of those schools have brought podium places in strength sports.
For normal average people the same stuff works in simplified form just as well. You need to think and do less, but both schools work. There is matter of taste and individual suitability as well.

Mike Israetel and the crew are focused on hypertrophy - at which they truly appear to be at the top of the game. They give ok advice for strength, but there are much better resources for that.

Sure enough. Modern BB do bulk of their work with some form of compounds - it is simply many times more time efficient. The mistake beginners often do is to make isolation their main objective - they progress nowhere. The stimulus is tiny and in a few muscle groups, but still takes significant time.
For physiotherapeutic tool and for very advanced athletes to dial in the last few %, isolation is very useful.

 

This is underrated thing. Many people would simply ignore and develop the issue further. I have done this kind of mistake myself a few times. I had tendonitis in my forearm for half a year for showing off with weighted pullup without warmup - karma spanked me. Fortunately it passed.

Then I had something going on in my left shoulder that prevented me to do kettlebell press - probably from the around the head mobility swing I attempted with too heavy weight for warmup. I could do military press just fine or handstand pushup. By that time I was smarter and did lighter kettlebell work and the thing went away in a few months.

 

Here's a stupid simple program I would follow if I didn't have access to any weights. If you had a set of rings and somewhere to mount them (tree, rafters, etc) you could do all this.

Pull 1:

• Pull-ups, 2 sets to failure
  • If you can't do full reps, use a stool and do controlled negatives. You can also use this as an intensity technique no matter how many full reps you can do
• Inverted Row, 2 sets to failure
  • Setup so that you are rowing to your belly
  • Can be done with overhand or underhand grip
  • Raise legs or lower rings to increase intensity

Push 1

• Dips, 2 sets to failure
  • If you can't do full reps, do controlled negatives
• Push-Ups, 2 sets to failure
  • Can be done on ground, but rings provide a deeper range-of-motion
  • Elevate feet more to increase intensity, until you're doing almost a handstand push-up

Run 1

• 30 minutes Zone 2 run

Pull 2

• Pull-ups, 10 minute EMOM
  • EMOM = Every minute, on the minute. When the second hand hits "12" you begin a set of a fixed amount.
  • For example, if you can do ~3x8 pullups, you should aim for 10 sets of 3 reps. You may need to drop your reps in the latter sets
  • This forces you to do high quality reps with maximal force output on every set.
  • This is arguably a more intermediate/advanced workout, but even if you can only do a few pullups, you could still do 10x1 and it would be effective

Push 2

• Dips, 10 minute EMOM
  • Same principle as Pull 2

Run 2

• High Intensity Run, Pick 1 (or alternate)
  • Crazy 8's
    • Find an open field and setup 4 cones in a ~25yd square.
    • 1 lap = Sprint diagonal, walk/jog side, sprint diagonal, walk/jog side, back to starting point
    • Sprints should be 100% maximal. Rest in between laps until you feel your gas return.
      
    • Obviously very dependent on your current conditioning, but you can progress this by recording your lap speed and/or number of reps in a given time period.
  • Hill Sprints
    • Find hill that provides enough incline for a 30-60 second run at full effort
    • Walk down hill to complete rep, no need to jog
    • Rent in between laps until your gas returns
    • Progress this by recording your lap speed and/or number of laps in a given time period.
      

I would run this in whatever order was convenient to my schedule, and also depending on how I was recovering. Sprinkle in rest days as needed.

There's a lot advanced calisthenics stuff you could add as you progress, but I am not experienced in any of those movements. You could say this really isn't a calisthenics program at all, but rather a minimalist program that incorporates calisthenics movements out of convenience.

 

When you add horse-stance (exercises) and kettle-bell sets to basic calisthenics routines you can go pretty far.

From my fencing days and obsession with martial arts I learnt that lunges and certain stances help to improve your balance and core.

Kettle-bells add a level of strength and flexibility you do not expect. I now work out with a 6KG and 10KG. 12 to 16KG are on the horizon.