What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.com.
Today we're going to cover the pros and the cons of calisthenics.
Bodyweight exercise, bodyweight training.
Some people argue that there's no point in doing bodyweight exercises, especially if
you're trying to build muscle mass.
Others will say it's the best thing you could possibly do.
Where do I sit on this?
I think there's some good and some – maybe not bad, but not as good things – about
calisthenics.
I want to cover them all in the video.
As our mom always said, "Jeff if you're ever going to say something not so great about
something, make sure you start with the good."
So we're going to start with the pros here.
Right off the bat I will tell you that there's no doubt that the most inexpensive option
when it comes to training is going to be bodyweight training, right?
You don't need anything to get going.
The period of entry is very, very low.
Now you can see here, just in a typical home gym you might need a bench, or you might need
some dumbbells.
Here I have the ATHLEAN blocks.
That would be a good enough start, but it's certainly not inexpensive.
It's going to be an expense.
Let alone if you want to continue to build out that home gym and start getting machines
like this the expenses can go very, very high.
The same thing can be said if you have to have a gym membership.
Even though memberships have come down in price, it can certainly become and expense
for people over time.
Now, if you're going to train with your own bodyweight you might have to still start buying
something eventually.
Maybe just a pull up bar like this, but it's certainly not anything compared to what you
have if you just needed to be able to use your own bodyweight and the space around you.
The next in our top four actually builds off that point.
That's the fact that you can to bodyweight exercise anywhere.
It really removes the excuses because you don’t need anything elaborate in your surroundings.
As a matter of fact, on my yearly trip to Canada in the summers, I find myself with
no access to anything but my surroundings; but nature.
I can get the job done.
You guys have actually seen me incorporate stones and rocks into my training if need
be, but I've done a complete workout even from the back porch just because I know how
to use my own bodyweight and space.
It does provide, again, a better entry point, especially for those people that are a little
bit inconsistent with their training because they tend to find the excuses.
There's no excuses because you can drop down and give me 20 anywhere.
Now, the next one is actually central to our belief system here at ATHLEANX.
That is the athleticism component.
There is nothing more athletic than a good bodyweight exercises.
That's because most of the time, number one; they're compound movements and they allow
us to move multiple joints at once and coordinate that movement together and really transfer
that power throughout the kinetic chain.
Whereas we have a lot of isolation movements that we do in the gym.
I mean, let's face it.
If we're doing a straight barbell curl, or a dumbbell concertation curl then there's
not a lot of athleticism involved in that.
There will be benefits to that, which we'll cover over on this side, but for the fact
of the matter, right now a compound exercise is going to allow us to move our body more
athletically in space.
So there is a benefit that we have at ATHLEANX.
We're always trying to make things more athletic.
We can take that simple curl and do something more athletic like a builder's curl, which
puts our body in motion, or not just a simple, single plane lunge.
We can do what we have here, which is our three way lunge.
You hit all three planes at once.
So I'm not saying that you can't be athletic in the gym even with weights, but our bodyweight
movements will allow us to do a lot of crazy things a lot more athletically, that will
have a good carry over if we are in the field of competition, or even just the field of
life.
Finally, our fourth pro on the calisthenics side is that they are actually really good
for conditioning and fat loss.
It's because of the way that we can program them and their flexibility of being programmed
for this purpose.
Conditioning workouts will definitely benefit from the more bang for your buck exercises.
Again, the compound movements that will allow you to burn more calories in a shorter period
of time.
That's where they come in really, really handy and because they're flexible enough to be
able to be programmed into a lot of different styles of training – like hit training,
or overall circuit training – we know that we can get a better result from doing our
bodyweight training than we can in fixed plane, single joint exercises that won't give us
that caloric burn.
Again, maybe it won't even give us the space in the gym to move around from implement to
implement, barbell to dumbbell, to whatever.
We can do this in short period of space, wrapping all these points up into one, but fitting
into this purpose.
Okay, now we have to shift our focus to the other side of the board here.
The first thing we want to point out is that these calisthenics, or bodyweight exercises,
may not be the best fit for you if you're already training with an injury.
You see, one of the assets of them being that they're compound in nature can also be why
they're detriments, in that they don’t allow you to be very specific – or joint specific
– if you're trying to train around an injury.
Sometimes, being able to isolate a single joint and not involve multiple muscles to
pull on that joint in different directions is exactly what you need.
You can do that with a very specific use of a band, or sometimes we use a lighter dumbbell.
You can't necessarily do that as well with these bodyweight exercise, which can make
it a little bit challenging if you're already a little bit banged up.
Next up on our list of cons actually deals with one of the benefits again.
While these actually are more athletic, it does mean that it requires something else
from you.
That is, a little bit more coordination.
Now, if you're the type of person that tries to throw a rock at the ground and you miss,
you may not be the most coordinated person in the world.
That might make these exercises a little bit difficult for you to start out with.
I'm not saying you can't improve here, but out of the gate it might present a challenge
for you.
Yes, it's a lot easier to lift something straight up and put it down.
Lift it straight up, and put it down.
But we already talked here about the benefits that are going to outweigh the cons, it just
might take you a little bit longer to get there.
Number three, and probably the biggest issue when it comes to bodyweight exercise are that
there are going to be harder to progress, and it's certainly not going to be as intuitive
to you of how to progress them.
So you kind of have to have a pretty good understanding about the way your body is moving.
Let me give you an example.
If you're in the gym and you want to know how to progress your strength levels you can
always add a 5 to the end of the bar.
You might even be able to add a 2.5 if you're trying go for really small, incremental changes.
But you know how to do it.
You can add weight continuously until you can't add weight anymore.
Now, with bodyweight exercises you can certainly make them harder or more difficult, but there
are two major problems.
Number one: it's not as intuitive as how to change the exercise to make it more difficult.
Some people don’t know how to reposition their bodies to make that exercise more difficult,
or in some cases, easier.
On top of that though, the jumps that you have to make, even in the smallest change,
might equate to a 30lb or 50lb increase in the load that you're having to accommodate.
That may not be doable for a lot of people.
So you might be stuck at a plateau for a really long time trying just to get another rep,
or another rep, not necessarily being able to add onto that weight, or the perceived
weight that your body is lifting, as it would be if you were in a gym just adding weight
to the end of a bar.
Last, but not least, it's probably the biggest con of them all.
That's the fact that we all know that bodyweight exercises won't allow you to build muscle,
or get strong.
It's one of the biggest cons out there.
As a matter of fact, whoever is telling you this is conning your ass into believing that
because, guess what guys?
This ain't true.
You can absolutely build new muscle and get stronger with bodyweight exercises if you
know how to apply them and use them the right way.
They don’t always have to be used in the manner of higher reps for conditioning benefits.
We all tend to think that's true, but all you have to do is think of certain exercises
like one armed pushups, one armed inverted rows, front levers, single leg pencil squats,
or plyometric pencil squats.
There are very difficult exercises that require a level of strength to perform them.
I will tell you this, the only thing that your muscles know it tension.
The currency of your muscles is always tension.
Whether that tension is derived from a barbell, or a dumbbell, or your own bodyweight is irrelevant.
It's the fact that you have to apply that level of tension in a high enough manner to
create overload.
If that’s in place you're going to build muscle.
I show you how to do that in ATHLEAN0 because I'm a big believer that this is just such
a lie; it's so not true.
We know you can build muscle by doing that.
You can drive tension through the roof if you know how to program it.
ATHLEAN0 puts all that together in a six week program and it shows you how to take yourself
in one of our phases – not just to failure – but through failure, but stepping down
the exercise just enough that the point you thought you couldn't get any more reps out,
we can alter your body's positioning to actually allow you to get just a few more out and,
again, drive that tension through the roof to create that overload.
If you're looking for that program, guys, it's over at ATHLEANX.com.
In the meantime, if you've found this video helpful, if you like the pros and cons let
me know.
I'll cover more of these in future videos, but most importantly I'll cover the videos
that you want me to cover here on this channel.
You've just got to let me know what you want to see.
All right, I'll be back here again in just a few days.