Calisthenics is the act of doing exercise where your own bodyweight provides the resistance to motion, and uses no equipment other than your own body. On the other hand, Weight training, or resistance training, is exercise where you use weights as resistance to motion, using equipment and machines to allow you to more easily adjust the difficulty of your workout.
But which is better? Which is a more natural fit for your fitness goals? And can you incorporate both of them into your workouts? In this article, we will address all of these questions and more, so you can build the best possible workout routine for you to reach all your fitness goals!
What are the advantages of calisthenics over weight training?
Calisthenics has several major advantages over weight training, although naturally these advantages are not without drawbacks of their own, as otherwise nobody would bother with weight training at all! But what are these advantages, and are they worth it to you?
As you may have guessed, the majority of the advantages that calisthenics has over weight training come down to either convenience, or a more natural approach to training your fitness.
However, there are some more nuanced and specific advantages of calisthenics that you might not have thought of at a first glance!
There are different calisthenics exercises you can choose from.
Calisthenics is free to do, and convenient!
One major advantage of calisthenics is that it is better for anyone who doesn't want to travel to the gym, pay for an expensive gym membership, and overall anyone who wants to fit their workouts into a tighter time slot.
In the busy modern world, nobody can blame you for this! Since calisthenics is purely done with bodyweight exercises, it doesn't require any machines or weightlifting equipment, and can even be done from your own home if you know what your workout routine is going to be.
This can be a huge time save obviously, but also can make it much easier to stick to a routine. Since the real best form of gym workout routine is the one you can stick to, the best thing for your health is finding workouts you will actually do, and calisthenics can make this much easier!
Calisthenics provides a good workout to multiple muscle groups at once
Another advantage of calisthenics is that it provides a workout to multiple muscle groups at once, and many calisthenics movements will help all of the muscles traditionally grouped into your push, pull, core, or leg areas.
For instance, a pull-up works your shoulders, biceps, back, and stabilizer muscles to varying degrees.
This can be a great way of increasing the versatility of your workout, and by extension of these natural compound exercises training your muscles in a good balance.
By comparison to other forms of exercise where you might end up with an unbalanced muscle system, calisthenics will develop all of your muscles in relatively equal and even amounts. This is of course one of the best possible benefits, especially for those who are building muscle for general health reasons!
Calisthenic exercises are easy to modify
Bodyweight exercises are also exceptionally easy to modify, allowing you to perfectly tune your workout to your exact fitness goals.
Whether that is trying to burn a specific amount of calories or fat, or reach a certain level of strength or increase your specific capabilities in a sport, you can easily adjust an exercise to fit your needs.
You can make adjustments to make an exercise focus more on your core or on the push or pull motion, depending on how you vary the movements.
Calisthenics trains flexibility as well as strength
The other big advantage of calisthenics is that it also has a heavy focus on flexibility! Flexibility is one of the best health benefits of fitness that you won't read about so often, but muscle training without flexibility is far less useful.
Just lifting heavy weights isn't especially useful if you can't do anything with that strength! This is why even if you don't do calisthenics, incorporating free flexibility movements into your gym workouts will help your fitness dramatically.
The real advantage here is that calisthenics hits two birds with one stone by doing both.
Working on your technique will improve your calisthenics skills.
What are the advantages of weight training over calisthenics?
Of course, there are plenty of significant advantages to weight training as well by comparison.
Since you have access to equipment and machines, you will find yourself much more free to tailor your workout to specific fitness aims and make better use of variable resistance to make your workout exactly what you need it to be.
This is of course one of the cons of calisthenics by comparison, you are restricted to only using your body weight. Of course, there is actually a wide variety of advantages to weight training, which we will go through here, so read on!
Easy to progress and change difficulty of exercises
One of the biggest advantages of weightlifting by comparison to calisthenics is that you don't need to change your movements at all to make them harder! If you want to increase the difficulty of a workout, you can simply use a heavier dumbbell or add another plate to the bar.
This is even easier with some machines, where all you have to do is adjust the weight on the cable machines for example to make the exercise harder! Very simply put, this is by far the biggest advantage of weight training.
Specific movements can be made as easy or as difficult as you like just by changing the weight, meaning you don't need to be constantly changing your workout plan. If you like structure and consistency, this is definitely one of the nicest benefits!
Easy to work specific muscle groups and build muscle mass in specific parts of your body
The other big advantage of resistance weight training is that you can specifically target certain muscle groups more directly in a way you wouldn't be able to with calisthenics.
With free weights you can do this while still working the stabilizer muscles as well, and with machines you can do even more targeted movements to build muscle in exactly where you want it.
You can work individual muscles using machines, which if you know exactly how you want to balance your physique can be a very powerful tool. If you want to get into bodybuilding, for example, then this ability to take real control over exactly which muscles you are training is beyond useful!
Allows you to focus on proper technique
Another great benefit of weight training is that you can build up to a working weight over time.
Technique is much more important than the amount of weight you are lifting, and as such the ability to work out proper technique using a lower weight and then build up to the actual working weight you want to reach once you have good technique is very useful.
With calisthenics, since you are using your body weight, you have to master technique while still using the working weight, which can be more challenging.
However, in reality good technique should always be a focus whether you choose to do calisthenics or weight training, as both will only build muscle mass when movements are done properly!
Which is better, calisthenics or weight training?
Hopefully what we have managed to illustrate above is that to compare calisthenics and weight training, neither is really strictly better than the other. They both have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to which you should choose, and neither can perfectly replicate the things the other does.
The choice as to which is better therefore comes entirely down to what you want to get out of your workouts. However, this all leads to the real best answer, which is that as with all aspects of personal training, the right answer is often a mix of the two!
Can you mix calisthenics and weight training?
Naturally, you can very easily combine a calisthenics workout routine with a weight training routine. One of the most common ways to do this is to simply incorporate both into your gym plan.
On your push day, you can split it such that half your push exercises are calisthenics to work all your push muscles, while the other half use free weights or machines to target more specific muscles.
The same philosophy can be applied to pull, core, legs, or any other split that you are going for. The chances are this will work all your muscles in the best way possible!
Of course, the real most important part of any workout routine is still, and will always be, appropriately timed rest days to allow the muscles to actually repair and grow, so don't forget these!
Personal training and fitness in whatever form you decide to go for will always be difficult. However, you can make this daunting challenge feel much more manageable if you aren't facing it alone!
A personal trainer like those found here on Superprof can help you build a workout routine that actually works to hit your fitness goals and build the physique you want, in the shortest time possible.
So if you want to get fit fast, look no further than a Superprof fitness coach, and with many of them offering their first session free, there's never been a better time to get started!
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