Calisthenics Vs. Weight Training

Most people who workout to improve their fitness train with weights. They bench press, deadlift, squat etc. Most gyms are suited for these people, they contain power racks, bars, plates and machines. But there is another group of people who train for very similar purposes, but do it completely differently. Their gyms are filled with pull up and dip bars instead of weight racks and benches. The training method of these people is called body weight exercise or calisthenics.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and misconceptions that people have regarding this particular training method, so let's clear it all up.

Myths And Differences From Conventional Forms Of Training

Myth Number One - You can't build muscle with this sort of training. That's not true, body weight training is a form of resistance training and one of your body's adaptations to resistance training is hypertrophy or muscle growth. Here's a couple examples of people who have built their bodies through calisthenics.

Frank Medrano

Hannibal King

So body weight training does help to build muscle. But to what extent?

Well, it depends. The previous post that I wrote was all about the importance of the principal of progressive overload. And just like if progressive overload is not applied to weight training - results won't come, if it's not applied to calisthenics - you won't get anywhere.

Myth Number Two - You can't get really strong with calisthenics. Again, just like you can get relatively big on calisthenics, you can also get relatively strong. As long as you apply progressive overload, because calisthenics, is a form of resistance training, it builds strength.

Myth Number Three - You need to be short to be good at calisthenics. This one is somewhat true, but not completely. You see, the taller you are, the less leverage you have and the more mass you have to move and also the range of motion is increased. This does make it harder to do calisthenics, but that doesn't mean that you can't become good at it. People who are the best in calisthenics, like olympic gymnasts or those guys who make amazing youtube videos of themselves doing unbelievable things, like Hannibal is doing here, tend to be shorter, below 185 cm or 6 feet, but there are many people who are taller than that who do muscle ups and human flags. So being tall does make advanced calisthenics harder, but not impossible.

Benefits

Calisthenics provide you with a number of benefits:

You gain the ability to control your body in ways that you wouldn't otherwise. That develops great core strength and stability. This makes your life much easier, in general, because it becomes easier to simply bend over and wrap your shoes or just move around.
It also helps to prevent you from getting fat, because your body has to stay at a relatively low body weight to be able to do calisthenic exercises. That's because you have to move your body and the less the body weighs, the easier it will be to move it, as long as your strength is still the same.
You don't need a lot of equipment. You will probably need only a few essential things: 1.Pull up bars . 2. Dip bars. 3. Steady poles, if you want to do human flags. And not much more.
Because calisthenics is a form of resistance training, you get the benefits of resistance training that are far too numerous to discuss in detail in this post. But some of them include: Cancer prevention and treatment, better cardiovascular health, better respiratory health and just general fitness improvement.
And finally, doing advanced calisthenics is just damn impressive.

Downsides

1. There is a bit of a problem when it comes to progressive overload and calisthenics. It's more difficult to apply this principal to this training method. You see, when you lift weights, it's pretty easy to make sure that your body is being progressively overloaded. Especially when it comes to applying progressive overload to the intensity of your exercises, because all that you have to do is put more weight on the bar.

With body weight exercises that's a lot more difficult, obviously. You can do more reps, you can do more sets, you can shorten the rest periods, you can do train more frequently, but you can't really increase your body weight significantly, or at least not instantly.

But there are solutions:

Dip belts. Strap these on, put weight on them and you'll be able to do dips, pull ups and many other exercises while constantly putting as much extra weight on yourself as you see fit.
Weighted vests. You can do certain exercises easier with these than with dip belts, but ability to change weight is limited.
Simply put something heavy in a back pack, or something that can hold weight and be attached to your body, and wear it while exercising. Although weight won't be balanced and it might be more difficult and less effective to train this way, it's a cheap alternative.
So you can definitely get around the "extra weight" problem, which is the biggest problem.

And you can try harder exercise variations, like instead of doing push ups do one arm push ups, or instead of doing pull ups do one arm pull ups or uneven pull ups.

1. Other problem is the fact that there are very little isolation exercises and they require weighted vests or something like that to increase the resistance, because they tend to be relatively easy. And that does make body weight exercises less effective for focusing on a certain muscle group and making it bigger and/or stronger.

2. And last, but definitely not the least problem is the difficulty of lower body development. It kinda binds into the progressive overload problem, but because it's much more difficult to apply this principal to lower body it has to be discussed separately. Legs are very strong, and because of that, they need a lot of resistance to make sure that they grow bigger and stronger. With weighted squats all you have to do is put more weight on the bar, with calisthenics you need to progress from simple body weight squats to pistol squats and then maybe explosive pistol squats while wearing a weighted vest, but, as you can see, it just becomes really difficult to build your lower body.

Conclusion

So, calisthenics is a great form of resistance training. It gives you a much better control of your body, as well as other things around you. It doesn't require much extra equipment and you can do pull ups, human flags and muscle ups on tree branches and street sign poles. And when it comes to push ups, sit ups and pistol squats you don't need any equipment except for a stable surface.

But it also can be harder to progress and especially develop lower body strength and size. So your legs, unless you are genetically gifted in this body part, might not get as big as they could on a traditional weigh lifting style of training that has you doing weighted squats and deadlifts.

But nevertheless, you have to weigh the pros and cons between weightlifting and calisthenics and also see which training method you enjoy more and choose according to yourself.