A Calisthenics Checklist You Must Be Aware Of

3 key factors that determine your calisthenics journey

If you have read my previous pieces you’d know that I am a big fan of calisthenics. I can’t do anything about that. But what I can do is, tell you the checklist you must ensure while getting into or even maintaining your calisthenics journey.

Calisthenics is all about mastering your body. Mastering your body involves strength, balance, mobility, and flexibility.

There are 3 fundamental points you must keep in mind while performing calisthenics exercises. With no further due, let’s dive in.

Stability

In almost any calisthenics exercise you do, you can’t ignore this key factor. In fact, when it comes to calisthenic skills, it is a very big determining factor.

Of course, this also counts with many exercises with weights. Especially the compounds like military shoulder press, deadlifts, and barbell rows demand a high amount of stability as in calisthenics exercises.

However, the biggest difference comes when you try to isolate a muscle group. Let’s take an example of tricep extension.

With weights, you do skull crushers by laying down on your back on a bench or triceps pushdown, completely isolating your triceps with very less involvement of other parts. But in calisthenics, you isolate this part using sphinx push-ups or diamond push-ups, where you need to stabilize yourself using your core strength in every rep.

Stabilization always plays a huge role in calisthenics. Whenever you train a certain body part, you always need to have a decent amount of strength in other parts involved in that exercise too.

Obviously, I am not against weighted isolations because sometimes you desperately need them. When you are recovering from an injury, or you have certain weaknesses it is always good to isolate.

Range of motion

If you have even a little bit of knowledge about lifting weights, you would know how important a role does range of motion play.

There’s no point in avoiding a full range of motion just to hit a higher number of reps than your partner. The same applies to calisthenics too. When you try to hit a high number of push-ups or pull-ups, avoiding a full range of motion is nothing but ego-lifting.

With a full range of motion, you avoid imbalances that can be caused by avoiding a certain part of the movement. Avoiding a certain part of the movement means you are just neglecting the strength for that section of the movement, and in turn, muscle growth of the particular muscle required for that movement.

Of course, it makes no sense if you need to sacrifice your form for the full range of motion. For example, if you can’t perform a proper deep squat, you must not go down deep. Instead, go down till your body doesn't lose the form and work on your hip and ankle mobility.

Balanced movements

Calisthenics has a wide range of bilateral exercises, i.e., you’ll need more than one limb to perform the exercise. But every exercise can be made difficult according to your strength level by removing one limb or moving to a higher progression.

Some of the most renowned unilateral calisthenic exercises are single-arm pull-ups and push-ups, and pistol squats. Though there are easier variations of them.

With bilateral exercises, there's always a chance of imbalanced muscle growth due to a lack of body awareness. Maybe you might lean to your stronger side during push-ups to compensate for the weaker part, this will lead to better growth of the side you lean toward.

So having proper coordination and body awareness is a must with calisthenics. One more example can be while pushing yourself up during push-ups, if you can’t engage your core it’s also a harmful practice. One thing you can do in such cases is swallowing your pride and move to an easier variation.

Due to a potential imbalance in muscle growth, it is always advised to incorporate unilateral versions or archer versions of your exercise. By archer versions I mean archer push-ups, archer pull-ups, or archer squats. If you find them difficult, you can always start with an easier variation like an inclined version of archer push-ups, or single-arm or archer Australian pull-ups.

If you find that one side is weaker than the other, you can increase the volume of the weaker side and decrease the volume of the stronger side.

If switching to one arm or one leg is too difficult, another good idea is to film yourself during your sets and see if you are performing your reps correctly or not, and what to do if incorrect.

The Takeaway

• Every calisthenic exercise requires a significant amount of strength in each body part involved just like any compound exercise in weight lifting.
• You can’t completely isolate a muscle group. So it’s better to switch to a weight lifting isolation exercise if an injured muscle group is needed for targeting a muscle group with calisthenics.
• Any exercise is incomplete without a full range of motion. But if you aren’t mobile or flexible enough, you don’t need to compromise your form. In such cases, you can avoid a full range of motion, but you need to work on your mobility and flexibility of the required muscle group.
• Always include unilateral or archer versions of the exercise you perform to avoid imbalanced muscle growth.
• If switching to a single limb is too difficult, you can film your workouts and see where you’re going wrong.

So those were some important points you must ensure to have a happy calisthenics journey. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new.

Thanks for reading!!

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