Calisthenics for those who don't know, Is a form of resistance training where your own body weight is used to make exercises harder. Due to only using your bodyweight as resistance, calisthenics has long been praised for building great, athletic looking physiques with minimal equipment.
Weight training is the most common type of resistance training, and is common for a reason it allows you to continually add weight to an exercise making progressing much simpler then calisthenics. Just add weight.
Now what if I told you there was a 3rd option one where you could have your cake and eat it too. Leverage all of the advantages both mediums of training have to offer. The minimal amount of equipment and the ease of progression of traditional training.
Well my dear gym bro there is, weighted calisthenics. If you now find yourself asking if weighted calisthenics movements are any good or if that's just a recent trend. Id like to ask you a question you'll think is unrelated.
What your main exercise for legs?
Now if I'm lucky you'll be one of the 80% who said the squat. Most will agree the squat is the king of all exercises (at least leg exercises) but if you were to think about it for a second you may come to the conclusion that the squat is actually a weighted calisthenics movement.
You may use a barbell as your added weight instead but the squat is a fundamental human bodyweight movement. One we've done far before barbells existed and it has had a profound evolutionary effect on our leg strength. You are already doing weighted calisthenics, and its likely the most effective part of your training.
So let me introduce you to 2 more members of exercise royalty.
The Weighted Dip
The king of pushing exercises. Has been called by many experts "The Squat Of The Upper Body" and considering the last paragraphs praise of the squat I don't feel I need explain the meaning of that title.
Many of you, if id asked would have declared the humble bench press. the king of pushing movements and it certainly isn't a bad candidate, but the bench press has a fairly impactful drawback, that being the limited range of motion the chest goes through. Being a bench press the exercise finishes when the bar reaches the chest but the chest can go through a much larger range of motion then that.
The dip however fully explores this range of motion at the bottom of a dip your chest will be fully stretched underload.
Now weighted stretching has not yet been shown to dramatically increase hypertrophy in human studies ,but in some fairly unethical study's done on birds. Weighted stretching had a insanely powerful muscle building effect in birds. Yes you heard me JACKED BIRDS.
Despite how funny that sounds its highly likely there a similar but smaller effect in humans. This effect although its full effectiveness is not fully understood is absent from the bench press, but not from the dip.
so who is this last and final member of exercise royalty?
The Weighted Pull Up
I would like to start by admitting I have a personal bias towards loving this exercise. Weighted Pull Ups Took my physique to the next level.
Pull ups in general are a fantastic exercise and I do not believe there's really a replacement for pull ups. Immediately you'll suggest the Lat pull down, and that's fair it works the same muscles groups and even looks like the same movement, but the rate of progression in both strength and size that weighted pull ups posses is just far superior then a Lat pull down in my experience, and that of my clients.
This is likely due to the weighted stretch on pull ups, which is far more extreme then on a Lat pull down, and you'll feel it the first time you strap heavy weight to your pull ups. Now I mentioned the potential benefits of weighted stretching for muscle growth in a previous paragraph, but for weighted pull ups this effect is 10x more extreme as the Lat's (the back muscles that give you that sought after V shape) appear to be hyper responsive when it comes to weighted stretching.
While it is just my own anecdote. Since I got strong on weighted pull ups (+30kg for reps) my Lats have quickly become one of my best body parts. Honestly if some divine entity forced me to choose only do 1 exercise for my back it'd undoubtedly be weighted pull ups.
Its also one of the most functional exercises you can do.We as Homosapien evolved to have the strength to pull ourselves up and over things.
I hope by now your enlightened to the benefits of Weighted calisthenics, if by now your fired up and ready to start implementing these exercises into your workouts, there's some basic equipment you'll need. Most of that equipment you need, we actually sell here at Sly Fitness (and the rest is a work in progress).
So if your interested in staying on the same website. Here's some of that equipment below.