Your Calisthenics Journey – Some Advice

We have learned a lot on our journey of body weight training, I have found a lot of things that helped move us into our goals. We feel it’s good to share these things so you can add to you training philosophy and help push you every day. Your limits are self-imposed, these will help you break them! You these tips to get your calisthenics journey headed in the proper direction.

True power and strength. Cam hits some back flips

• Program choice and structure are the most important! What you train and how you train it are imperative in calisthenics. Our training philosophy is everything helps everything. Doing only 5-6 basic movements will not get you full body ready. We want elite moves. Our program is designed with the basics in mind, but we train for the hardest moves the hardest moves. Do something you can’t do already! No more Big 6! Try big 20!

• Say good bye to ISO training splits. Switching to push and pull days with small variances is what gets you to elite. We go push, pull, push, pull, rest.

• Volume. Body weight training is not like weight lifting. You will notice that when you weight lift you are sore. Especially if you like to throw around the big weights with higher reps. with body weight training you have to bring the volume to get sore.

• Weight. Body weight in calisthenics is huge. Some of the best athletes are very light. 150 pounds! Now I’m not saying go drop a whack load of weight. That is a small athlete. However, I started at almost 220 pounds! And I have dieted down to 185 with a goal of 170. If you are like me and pushing 180-200 pounds your journey will be a lot harder. Put down the fork. Concentrate on 2500 cals a day with lots of protein and drop the excess weight. As you get stronger, and drop weight at the same time you will find you progress much faster. Pick a target and get to it.

• Our program is about doing what you can’t. EVERY workout try something you can’t do. You would be surprised how often our clients try to push the limits and actually succeed in that workout. If you normally do hand stands on a wall, do them off this time until you get it!

• Train for strength. Stop pushups and pull ups marathons, Add weight! Doing 30 reps of pushups and 20 pull ups gets you nowhere. 100 pound chins too! 3-5 reps. 4 sets, always progresses and add weight/leverage. No more endurance training if your goals are high level moves.

• Track everything. Our program comes with a progression and rep tracker. Always record every session.. You have to track success.Straight arm and grip strength are imperative, add it to your training. For grip we prefer towel hangs. Ensure from the beginning all your work is straight arm. Never start at bent arm. It comes with it. Bent arms are a hard habit to break.

• Deliberate practice. It’s about how consistently and deliberately you can work to improve your performance.

Every workout you need to look for opportunity to progress. Which is why you need to track everything. Reps, sets, progressions, weight, leverage and time. Every one of those needs to be pushed to the limit every workout. 1 extra rep, one extra set, 2 more pounds, 3 second longer hold etc. Every workout mark your improvements and current strength levels.

To benefit from training and reach your potential, you have to constantly challenge yourself.

This doesn’t mean repeatedly doing what you already know how to do, which is very easy to do. If you can handstand for 10 seconds, it’s pretty easy to do that every workout, every time. You will get good at 10 second handstands, but not 10 second one arm hand stands for example. So your deliberate practice would be to do a set of your regular handstands, but then start working on uneven hand stands to shift you training to each arm.

This means understanding your weaknesses and inventing specific tasks in your practice to address those deficiencies. This is why our program has so much content.

Our philosophy is to push your limits as they are self-imposed. This is the basis of every training session.

If you want to put this advice to good use, check out Garage Calisthenics program

Look forward to helping you on your journey…