Calisthenics and Body Awareness

By Al Kavadlo | Published: July 20, 2011

There is a lot to love about calisthenics and bodyweight training – besides being fun and cost-effective, zero equipment workouts are also convenient for travel.

My favorite aspect of bodyweight training, however, is how it teaches you to become aware of the subtle nuances of movement.

Using machines instead of your bodyweight (or free weights) neglects this key aspect of fitness. Don’t even get me started on people who read magazines or watch television during their “workout.”

Lost in Space
I am continually amazed at how out of touch the average person is with their body. For example, when I ask a new client to try moving their shoulder blades without moving their arms, they usually cannot find the coordination to make it happen. However, these types of subtle movements can be the difference between learning to do a pull-up correctly and injuring yourself.

Proprioception refers to the sensory ability to feel different parts of the body moving through space in relation to each other. I almost always do some yoga with my strength training clients to help with their proprioceptive capabilities. Only once somebody truly learns to feel how their body moves, can they make significant gains in strength.

Clearly I’m not a fan of exercise machines, especially when compared to bodyweight strength training or weight training, but those of us who feel that way are on the fringes. Go into any commercial gym and you’re bound to see way more machines than free weights. In some of these places, you’re lucky if there is even a pull-up bar or an open space to do push-ups.

Throw out your treadmill!

Rise of the Machines
Most commercial fitness facilities are not designed to get you fit – they are designed to get your money. The fancy looking machines you see in these clubs are all hype. They don’t work as well as bodyweight exercises, but they sure do look high-tech! Sadly, that’s enough to trick the average person into shelling out lots of money for a gym membership they’ll probably never even use anyway.

This doesn’t mean you can’t sculpt nice looking muscles using machines, it’s just a ridiculous way to go about it. Selectorized fitness equipment movement patterns are not natural, and will have less carryover into real life activities. Plus you’re much less likely to understand the movement of the human body if you’re never really moving! If everything you do for your workout involves sliding a fixed piece of machinery along a predetermined path, you’re just going through the motions. You’re not truly creating movement.

Less is More
While modern exercise equipment has only existed for a few decades, human beings have achieved fantastic physiques since the days of the ancient Greeks. If you want to build a better body, the only piece of equipment you’ll need is something you already have – YOU! Stop making excuses and start working out!

For more information about bodyweight strength training, make sure to pick up a copy of my new book, Pushing The Limits! – Total Body Strength With No Equipment.

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    • http://www.facebook.com/RustyScissor Thần Quay Tay

      Can you show me the benefits of calisthenics excersizes compare to weight training? In my opinion,I think calisthenics grants you better endurance and the ability to keep balance, but it’s harder to get bigger and stronger muscles like weight training.

    • RobbyTaylor

      There are two ways that your body adapts to resistance training, and both of those ways result in you becoming stronger. The first, and more obvious, way is muscle growth. The second is increased neural efficiency. Both weight lifting and bodyweight training result in both of these advances, but you see the movement patterns in weightlifting are easier, which means it does not stimulate neural growth as much as bodyweight training. Additionally, since weight training is not hindered by additional bodyweight as much as advanced bodyweight training is, it is easier for your body to just grow more muscle in order to gain strength for the exercise. Thus, more of the gains you will see from weight lifting will be from muscular growth, with some being from neural efficiency. With advanced bodyweight training, additional body weight can be a hindrance because of the extremely disadvantaged positions of leverage in which your body must support itself. So any muscle you do put on will be both highly efficient and essential for your body to execute the movements that you are training (a certain amount of mass is necessary to protect the joints and simply maintain the forces involved in exercises…Olympic gymnasts get huge biceps from practicing moves like the Maltese Cross, not from doing endless bicep curls). Additionally, because the positions can become quite complex and require higher levels of kinesthetic awareness, it is easier and necessary for your body to adapt via increased neural efficiency. Thus, a lot of the gains you will see with bodyweight will be from increased neural efficiency, however a certain amount of muscle mass is physically necessary to perform these exercises, and your muscles will still respond by growing regardless. Furthermore, strength you develop with bodyweight training tends to carry over better to weightlifting than strength from weightlifting does to bodyweight training. Not only is this because of the hindrance of the additional, and relatively inefficient, muscle mass of weight lifting, but also because bodyweight training increases your joint and tendon strength just as much as it does your muscular strength. It’s not uncommon for a person who can do a planche to be able to bench press 2x their bodyweight without much difficulty, even if they never bench…but I’ve never heard of someone who benches all the time who can just do a planche without training.

      So, you see, it can be easier to get bigger with weightlifting, however either method will make you strong in a general sense…endurance is all about the level of resistance you use and how many reps you do. Obviously hand balancing skills will give you better balance than pretty much any other kind of training, and that is precisely why old time strongmen did lots of hand balancing. These men typically did not limit themselves, though; it was not uncommon for them to do copious amounts of hand balancing and other advanced types of bodyweight strength training in addition to lifting.

    • RobbyTaylor

      I disagree; you’re neglecting the possibility of adding weight to pistol squats. Doing a pistol squat in good form puts roughly your entire bodyweight (BW) as resistance for one leg in an entire range of motion. Using both legs at once, you would need to do a barbell squat of your weight. Now, to demonstrate the effectiveness of weighing pistol squats, let’s just say you weigh 200 pounds. If you do a pistol with a 20 pound dumbbell in good form, it puts 220 pounds of resistance on one leg in a full range of motion. You would have to squat a total of 440 with both legs. 440 – 200 = 240, so you would have to do a barbell squat of 240, ass to grass, just to get the equivalent of a pistol squat with a 20 pound dumbbell. Let’s say you’re really hardcore and can do a pistol with 100 additional pounds (2 x 50 pound dumbbells or kettlebells). That’s 300 pounds of resistance on 1 leg in a full range of motion. With both legs you would need a total resistance of 600 pounds. 600 – 200 = 400, so you would have to squat 400 pounds to get the equivalent of a 100 pound pistol if you weigh 200 pounds.

      Clearly, the benefit here is that you can get very strong legs with relatively light weights, meaning you don’t necessarily have to go to the gym or get a squat rack in your house to get super powerful legs, and you don’t have to load all of that weight on your spinal column. A lot of people will still make arguments for that, though, but hey to each their own. I think the pistol is definitely worth learning for anyone who is serious about fitness, because, really, who wants to go to the gym all the time just to get a leg workout? You can do pistols anywhere, without anything.

    • RobbyTaylor

      I know this post is old, but I have to say it. The ancient Spartans were a secretive society, especially when it came to their training. Little specific knowledge is known about how they trained, however several independent sources have made it clear that the Spartans heavily employed calisthenics in their training. With warriors as intense and legendary as these guys, I can totally see them doing one arm pull ups on a tree with that huge shield on their back.

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