Strength training through calisthenics is one of the best ways to work out at home or at the park, and when it comes to finding a workout routine you can fit into your daily life, calisthenics is undoubtedly without peer. Calisthenics uses your own body weight to workout your muscles, which naturally means it focuses on getting you to perform practical mobility through skills that you will actually find surprisingly applicable to your daily life. But what are these calisthenics skills?
Today we are going to go through some of these and how you can incorporate them into your training, be that at the gym or at home. So if you are interested in learning both simple and advanced calisthenics skills to practice and keep your workouts fresh, read on!
Push-ups
Push-ups are one of the most fundamental calisthenics skills, and are designed to train your arms and chest. They are traditionally categorized as a pull exercise, since they work out your triceps, pectorals, and anterior deltoids.
There are many variants of the push-up, although the classic variant with your hands slightly wider than shoulder width apart and a fully straight body is hard to go wrong with.
Good form for a push-up is to keep your shoulders level, and keep your legs and back completely straight throughout the motion, moving between a raised position and a lowered one.
The raised position should be with completely straight arms, and the lowered position should have your chest almost touching the floor. Keeping your body straight is one of the hardest parts of the push-up, but is vital if you want to master this skill!
Pull-ups
Pull-ups are the defining upper body pull exercise, the best overall exercise for your pull workouts, and able to be done with just a horizontal bar. However, pull-ups are not an easy skill!
They are actually one of the more advanced calisthenics movements, especially because the actual physical upper body strength a pull-up requires is quite significant!
This is because you are lifting your entire body weight off the ground just using a bar, which comes to the equivalent of lifting a very large amount if you were doing traditional weight training with free weights.
This weight is also why it is important to practice this skill, as you need to learn proper technique to be able to do it safely!
It would be worth to compare both calisthenics and weight training to see what works better for you or what you would be prefer.
Muscle ups
The muscle up is an exercise that carries some degree of prestige among beginners and intermediate calisthenics practitioners, since it is a combination of a pull exercise and a push exercise that requires a significant level of strength to even be able to do properly.
A muscle up requires you to lift your body weight above the bar and push upwards, going from hanging completely under the bar to lifting yourself above it with straight arms.
It is often referred to as a compound exercise, since rather than just working a single muscle group, it combines two movements to work two at once. It works your entire upper body, working your back, shoulders, arms, and to a lesser extent even your chest as well.
You can learn to do the movement in two parts to get the technique right, and then link it up to complete the whole move. It requires practice, and that's okay! That said, the satisfaction when you finally link it together with proper technique is unforgettable!
Chin-ups
The natural sibling of the pull-up, and an even more focused bicep exercise. The chin-up is a motion very similar to the pull-up, except with an inverted grip, which places more focus on your bicep strength than most other calisthenics pulling exercises.
It's just as difficult to perform as a pull-up, meaning once again it is worthwhile to practice good technique. However, it's still a good pull exercise that works well with the others to increase your upper body strength.
Between this, pull-ups, and muscle ups, you have the makings of a very solid pull day workout routine!
There are plenty of different calisthenics exercises you can choose from for your routine.
Handstands
The handstand is a very simple but still challenging position that you should start learning as early in your calisthenics journey as possible.
This movement doesn't even require any bars or even any actual mobility, but is a position which being able to hold will make you able to do many more advanced movements.
One of the most overlooked parts of a handstand is that beyond balance, you require a significant amount of arm strength and core strength to be able to hold properly.
While it's very easy to step into the position, the balance a handstand requires as well as the core and arm strength to hold it can make the movement quite challenging for beginners. This is why it's good to start with the handstand as early in your calisthenics fitness journey as you can.
Handstand push-ups
The natural but significantly harder progression of the handstand is the handstand push up. You should obviously not start learning this skill until you have mastered the handstand, but once you have, it is a good move to keep the balance of the handstand and the upper body strength of a push-up all in one.
The handstand push up is mainly designed to build shoulder strength and balance, and by extension also becomes very dependent on the strength of your stabilizer muscles and wrists.
Leg raises
Time to move on to some calisthenics skills that focus on your legs! Leg raises are actually not an exercise that trains leg strength, instead being a core exercise.
They train your lower abs and external oblique muscles, and depending on what you use to support your body weight it can also train your grip strength and flexibility. However, if you are a beginner, it is best to do them on a pair of parallel bars rather than trying to do them hanging from an overhead bar!
Front Lever
A great pull exercise that requires a lot of back strength and very strong grip, a front lever is a more advanced exercise that is sure to impress your friends just as much as it will test your grip strength.
Front levers are a good way of pushing your balance and stability to a high level, requiring your stabilizer muscles to be just as well-trained as your actual back and arm muscles.
It's generally an easier movement to do on a fixed bar, but you will see even better results if you do it without the help of fixed grips using hanging rings.
One of the benefits of Calisthenics is that you don't need a lot of equipment.
Back lever
A slightly easier skill than the front lever, a back lever places more focus on your core strength than your back strength. The key difficulty of this skill comes from keeping yourself parallel to the ground, which will test both your core strength and your shoulder strength.
A front lever and back lever may seem quite similar, but while both require impressive strength, they require it in almost entirely different muscle groups.
Sit-ups
A calisthenics movement so classic it still forms a core part of the Canadian army fitness test, the sit-up is a core exercise that trains your abs and can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it.
Sit-ups aren't an exercise that requires as much practise as some of the others on this list, but are still very much worth incorporating into your strength training to improve your overall core strength.
You will likely find that even if you can do sit-ups more easily than you can do pull-ups, doing significantly more sit-ups in each set will quickly remind you why this exercise shouldn't be overlooked!
Body weight squats
There seems to be a near endless variety of squats you can incorporate into your workout routine, but in many cases the classic body weight squat is hard to beat. You can easily mix in others as well, of course, but a classic leg movement will rarely not be a useful part of your leg day workout.
Body weight squats can again be as easy or as difficult as you want to make them, depending on whether you make any modifications to the movement.
For instance, a single leg pistol squat makes the movement significantly more about balance and core strength, whereas turning it into a jump squat can allow you to focus more on training explosive power than consistent strength.
This list is of course by no means anywhere close to exhaustive, and you can find as many exercises as you can think of to add to your workout routine. This can make building the right workout plan for you more difficult than you may think, but it doesn't have to be!
If you want help making the perfect calisthenics workout plan for you, or just help in working on your form, reach out to a Superprof personal trainer.
The expert calisthenics coaches here on the Superprof website can give you all the support you need to turn your workouts into the most optimal versions they can be. And with many of them offering their first coaching session for free, why not give it a try?
There's never been a better time to take your fitness to the next level!
Did you like this article? Leave a rating!
Loading...
