New Year's Motivation- A perfect Opportunity to get started with Calisthenics

Are you ready to refresh your training in the new year, and reach your fitness goals you've been aspiring to attain? Or maybe you're already an experienced gym-goer, but you're bored of your usual split and are looking for something fresh to ignite your fitness passion. New and exciting objectives, other than lifting increasingly more weight. The new year is a perfect opportunity to set brand-new goals, instill new routines, and start a fresh slate. If achieving incredible body weight control and super-human strength, while developing a muscular physique sounds intriguing to you, then Calisthenics might just be the perfect new fitness avenue for you to consider pursuing in the turn of the new year.

Here are 3 styles of calisthenics, perfect to get you started on your journey.

Bodyweight Training- Basics

The most straight forward entry into the world of calisthenics. There are countless highly effective exercises that can be performed with little to no equipment, and using solely your own body weight. The classic exercises, usually prescribed to beginners in the sport, can include the following;

• Push-ups
• Pull-ups
• Dips
• Inverted rows (Australian Pull-ups)

These 4 exercises effectively target all 4 planes of both vertical and horizontal pushing and pulling, allowing you to develop foundational and functional strength in the right areas- a prerequisite for future advancements into more complex exercises. 

If you're a beginner, consider experimenting with these 4 exercises for a couple of months, allowing your body to get adjusted to moving your body through space in these planes of movement. Eventually, as you get stronger you will be able to modify the exercises and heighten the intensity, performing increasingly more difficult variations.

You can check out our blog with tips on creating a workout program, perfect to get you started!

Skills Training

Skills can be a big motivation for someone to start calisthenics. If you've ever seen someone performing a human flag, muscle ups or handstands, then you've come across some of the basic skills that intrigue a lot of newcomers to the sport. Learning calisthenics skills can be extremely rewarding and fun, as well as impressive. Also, if you're bored of your current training routine, skills can be a great new addition to your training to make things interesting again. For example, if you're a gym-goer interested in learning some bodyweight moves, you could consider challenging yourself doing a few sets of handstands against the wall before every session. Eventually, with consistent practice, you'll be able to balance a freestanding handstand, and will be able to move on to other skills to develop a repertoire of moves.

The beauty of this is that your motivations and goals in fitness to train will be refreshed in a new direction. Other than just getting stronger, performing more reps, or increasing the weight, your goals can now shift into performing increasingly more exciting feats.

We have a post on why you should train static skills, for further information on the subject.

Weighted Calisthenics

If building muscle is a priority of yours, and you've already developed your basics to a strong level, adding weight to your basic exercises is a fantastic and scalable way to create progressive overload.

From the standpoint of hypertrophy (building muscle), once you can perform an exercise for 15 repetitions, anything more than that starts to enter the realm of endurance training. If your goal is to maximize muscle growth, as well as explosive strength, then weighted calisthenics can be the perfect tool to use. You can use a Dip Belt to attach weight plates or kettle bells to yourself and perform pull-ups and dips for example.

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Not only is it satisfying to be able to pull or push an excess of your own bodyweight, but it's a perfectly scalable way to progress as well. You can slightly increase the weight over time and aim to hit the same amount of reps.

Another huge benefit of weighted calisthenics, is the development in explosiveness. Once you become comfortable doing pull-ups with an additional 20% of your bodyweight attached to you for numerous reps, performing the same exercise with only your bodyweight will make you feel like you're flying on the bar. This lends itself perfectly to developing your muscle ups or other skills, if that's a priority of yours too.

Discover 5 reasons you should do weighted calisthenics, in another post we created!

Those were 3 ways for you to ignite your fitness journey in the New Year in Calisthenics style. Use the surge of motivation to spark you in the right direction and set yourself new goals that excite you. We wish you all the success in your training!

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