What is Calisthenics
Exercises that uses only the weight of your body as resistance are known as Calisthenics. And just as any other resistance training, the goal of performing calisthenics is to promote muscle growth and strength. Originating from the Greek words “Callo” which means beauty and “Stenos” which means strength.
Calisthenics rose to prominence in the 19th century by the father of gymnastics Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. And fitting enough there’s nothing really that is a better embodiment of beauty and strength than gymnastics.
Is It Good for Building Muscles
Since calisthenics uses your body’s weight as resistance it is also known as body weight exercise. And the big question about body weight exercises is- How effective it is for building muscle and strength? Or if it is as effective as lifting weights? To understand this, we need to understand how muscles grow and get stronger.
Muscular and strength adaptation occurs when a stimulus or resistance is applied to the corresponding muscle at a high enough intensity to invoke muscle overload. Simply put, the more weight you move with your muscles the more your muscles adapt and become bigger and stronger.
But it doesn’t mean that any type of weight movement will work. Take jogging for example- although it can be very taxing on the heart muscles and promote cardiac muscle growth they would not promote much skeletal muscle growth, not even in your legs.
The problem here is that the stimulus is not strong enough to target all the legs muscle fibers. We have three different muscle fiber types- one of which is used for endurance known as type one and the other two are used to provide great amounts of force known as type 2 fibers.
Since running doesn’t require large amount of force from your legs, type 2 fibers are hardly fatigued and not a lot of muscle growth occurs. It is also the reason why many do not consider jogging as a calisthenics exercise even though it only utilizes your body’s weight.
But other calisthenics exercises do in fact elicit high enough of the demand to hit those large muscle fibers.
Take a pull up for example where on average people can hardly even do five. The movement demands all fiber types to fire and eventually exhaust, thus, promoting muscle growth.
Push-ups are another good example of a calisthenics exercise that can illicit muscle growth, especially for beginners that struggle to do even 10. But eventually you will run into the problem of not having enough resistance.
As tough as it may be to get your first 10 push-ups, eventually 10 will be just an easy warm up. When you start hitting 20, 25 or 30 pushups easily then we run into the same problem as we saw with Jogging.
Of course, you can definitely modify the push out to make it tougher such as elevating your feet on a platform but ultimately, you’re not changing the amount of demand on the muscle groups involved in a standard push up. Instead, you begin shifting the muscles involved in the movement with feet elevated push-ups. Your anterior shoulders begin taking the brunt of the resistance instead of your chest. So if you wanted to build your chest, you won’t have enough resistance and you might be thinking why not just add some weight on your back. Well, at that point, it is no longer just body weight thus no longer calisthenics.
The next natural progression is using weights. As great as Calisthenics can be there will be a point where certain muscle groups, especially the strong muscle groups, such as your chest legs and hips will eventually need greater resistance.
Also since calisthenics requires you using multiple muscle groups to perform an exercise which isn’t a bad thing at all in terms of natural and functional development but it does make it tough to isolate certain muscles.
Now that’s not to say that calisthenics cannot build an aesthetically appealing body, after all you have guys looking like this from performing just body weight exercises but when you compare them to this there’s a clear difference in muscle growth between the two regiments. Even Olympic gymnasts have to use weights to push their maximum potential.
This is not to say that Calisthenics has no place in anyone’s exercise program, you just have to understand its uses.
The great thing about calisthenics is that it’s absolutely free. All you got to have is the ground you walk on and a park with bars. The only time you have to spend money is buying things like suspension systems or gymnastic rings.
For beginners, body weight exercises will provide all the necessary compound movements that are usually found in a beginner program and doesn’t require you to motivate yourself to go to the gym.
So if you do Calisthenics and you like your results, stick with it. If you feel like you are starting to hit a wall then it’s time to move up to weights.
Also Read: Walking 10000 Steps Everyday – The Most Powerful Medication that We Have
