Calisthenics For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to Calisthenics For Dummies, your guide on the journey to your best body through the most functional form of fitness.

About This Book

This book is intended to be one-stop fitness shopping. It can become the only equipment you ever need to work out your entire body again, quickly and effectively.

Whether you’re an elite athlete or someone who hasn’t exercised in decades, whether you’re 18 or 80, you’ll discover all you need to form your fitness foundation and build your peak physique in this book.

We teach you to rebrand athleticism by dissecting its secrets. We show you how calisthenics doesn’t train you for a specific sport — it trains you for life. Each workout helps prepare you for the muscular, joint, bone, and even mental stresses of life. That’s what real fitness does. The fitter you become, the more you can move through life with ease.

This book walks you step by step through a lifelong bodyweight exercise program and addresses some special needs people have, such as working out with limited mobility.

The most important takeaway from this book is proper joint alignment. You’ll find tips and techniques peppered throughout the book to help you achieve this, because it is the only way to reach your own personal pinnacle of fitness, safely, for now and for the rest of your life.

Conventions Used in This Book

We’ve established the following conventions to make it easier for you to navigate this book:

New terms are in italics, and we define them for you.

Bold text highlights key words in bulleted lists and action parts in numbered lists.

Monofont sets off web addresses.

Foolish Assumptions

In writing this book, we've made some assumptions about you:

You may be afraid that working out is going to be too tough, take up too much of your time, or be a drudgery (it’s not!).

Whether you consider yourself fit or not, there’s probably some key elements missing from your fitness foundation. Without a strong foundation, whatever body you build is going to be more fragile and prone to injury than it should be.

How This Book Is Organized

This book begins by helping you feel comfortable with calisthenics, and progresses into teaching you exactly what you need to reach your individual goals.

To make the content more accessible, we divided it into five parts:

Part 1: Total Fitness, No Limits includes three chapters that explain why calisthenics are the most effective and efficient method of exercise for everyone, the secrets to attaining your best body, and how to say motivated.

Part 2: The Exercises includes seven chapters of over one hundred exercises covering floor routines, developmental movements, and strength training exercises for your core, legs, chest, shoulders, triceps, back, biceps, and forearms.

Part 3: The Workouts includes two chapters designed to help you set goals, including and a 13-week program you can modify to your ends.

Part 4: Calisthenics for Special Circumstances includes four chapters covering nine-minute workouts, how to work out when you’re pregnant or have limited mobility, and also how to help your kids get excited about fitness.

Part 5: The Part of Tens includes two chapters that give you a buffet of tips to tone and tighten and how to be successful, as well as a chapter that debunks the top ten bodyweight training myths.

Icons Used in This Book

In the margins of almost every page of this book, you find icons, which are there to alert you to different types of information. Here’s what they mean:

Tip This icon saves you time and energy by showing you a helpful method for doing something.

Remember This icon points out important information you need to know as you develop your drawing skills.

Warning This icon points out potential problems and positive solutions.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the book content, you can find valuable free material online. We provide you with a Cheat Sheet that serves as a quick checklist, including information about the performance pyramid, how to be successful, how to work on your technique and posture, and more. Check out this book’s online Cheat Sheet by searching www.dummies.com for Calisthenics for Dummies Cheat Sheet.

Where to Go from Here

Although everyone can gain something from every section of this book, Parts 1-3 contain the exercises you need for lifelong fitness success. It’s important to note that virtually everyone can benefit from not only the exercises and workouts themselves, but from understanding the secrets to moving through life like an athlete.

Feel free to skip over chapters in Part 4 if none of those special circumstances apply to you, although an unfortunate reality is that most of us will face limited mobility from a (hopefully minor) injury at some point. Part 5 is intended to help build your fitness wisdom. After all, it’s difficult to do something effectively without understanding why you’re doing it.

Part 1

Total Fitness: No Limits

IN THIS PART …

Discovering why calisthenics is the most effective and efficient method of exercise for all bodies and abilities.

Learning the secrets to attaining your best body and moving it through life with ease.

Setting specific goals, staying motivated, and overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of success.

Chapter 1

Calisthenics: When Your Body Is Your Equipment

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Checking out the benefits of calisthenics for all bodies and abilities

Bullet Learning why calisthenics is better than any other workout

Bullet Getting results fit for an Olympian

Bullet Discovering eight abilities you’ll build through calisthenics

Congratulations! You’re now holding the only thing you need — other than your own body — to get into the best shape of your life.

We’ve already done the hard work for you: Distilling three decades of experience and a billion-dollars-worth of complex sports science down to a simple, lifelong program that takes less than 1 percent of your time each week.

The exercises in this book comprehensively and methodically cover all muscle groups, joint functions, and athletic skills. And they’re for people of all abilities. They can help you get and stay strong, lean, healthy, mobile, and injury free.

Calisthenics: For All Bodies and Abilities

With calisthenics and bodyweight exercises, you use the body you have to build the body you want. You don’t even need to use equipment or machines. You were born with world’s most advanced fitness machine: You.

What’s so great about this fitness machine is that it’s always there. It is the one and only thing you are never without. It’s no longer necessary to spend hours at a gym. In fact, you don’t have to go to a gym at all.

With these workouts you will not waste a single moment of your valued time using ineffective training methods. And no longer will you be able to use the #1 excuse for not training: I don’t have the time.

Because bodyweight movements are the safest and most functional exercises, they are for people of all athletic ability levels. The ones in this book are tailored to suit many needs and lifestyles. Clear, concise, and complete, we bring these exercises into your home, workplace, nearby park, or wherever you like.

Remember The metric of your merit is not based on the amount of weight you can lift. Instead, it’s all about performance. Gauge your success by how properly you can perform an exercise. This is the most fundamental idea of calisthenics.

Posture and ideal joint alignment determine performance in all you do. Proper performance, as you’ll soon see, determines your athletic skills, and in turn, your appearance. At the end of the day, we all want to look good.

Why Calisthenics Is Better than Any Other Workout

This section outlines the top eight advantages that calisthenics has over working out with equipment. These are the reasons so many people who start a bodyweight program actually stick with it.

You save time

Let’s do some quick math. Say it takes you 25 minutes each way to get to and from the gym, and then another 45 minutes to use a bunch of machines. That’s one and a half hours per workout. Do that three times a week, and you’re at four and half hours. That’s over half of a work day. Who wants to sacrifice that amount of time?

With calisthenics, there’s no packing, traveling, parking, or changing at the gym, then doing it all in reverse to get back home.

Also, trying to work out your whole body by exercising muscle groups separately, with machines and dumbbells that isolate only certain muscles, is unfunctional and inefficient. It takes far less time to get a full body workout when you’re actually doing full body exercises.

You save money

Instead of fancy fitness contraptions, gym memberships, parking, and gallons of gas, for just the price of this book, you now have a lifelong fitness program.

You save space

You only need to temporarily create enough space to lie down in. And there’s no need to store whatever latest contraptions are gathering dust in your home.

You can do it anywhere

You can turn any area into your fitness center: Your bedroom, living room, garage, driveway, yard, office, park, playground, beach — you name it. And if you’re traveling, there’s no need to search for the nearest gym. You can turn your hotel room, just like almost any other place on Earth, into a full fitness center.

No gymbarrassment

Plenty of folks want to get in shape, but cringe at the thought of putting themselves on display at a fitness center. But with bodyweight exercises, you are the boss now: Crank those tunes up as loud as you please or watch whatever channel you want. No gym clothes required. (In fact, no clothes at all are required.)

It's always open

Early in the morning, late at night, Christmas, New Year’s, snowstorms — you name it. You can work out wherever and whenever it fits your busy schedule.

It's safer

Many people who try aerobics hurt themselves, even when it’s low-impact. By using motions that are natural for your body, these low impact bodyweight exercises help you avoid the myriad chronic and acute injuries like joint problems associated with weight lifting. Of course, you should always consult a qualified doctor before beginning any fitness program.

You will not stop seeing results

This is not some short-term fix or fad, but a fun, functional program that will never stop working for you. Variety is the spice of life. This book provides many ways to vary these exercises so you won’t get stuck in a rut. Instead they’ll remain enjoyable and they never stop increasing your fitness. Keeping your muscles guessing is how you keep them growing.

Getting the Results You Want

For thousands of years — from Ancient Greece’s Olympic athletes to tomorrow’s Special Operations forces — humanity’s greatest physical specimens have not relied on fitness centers in their towns or dumbbells in their homes. Instead they mastered the art of moving around what matters most: their own bodies.

Become stronger

Rarely do you do anything in life that isolates only a single muscle group. Our bodies were designed to become stronger as a whole. It’s how you not only look your best, but feel your best.

But most weight training exercises only isolate certain muscles, requiring a fairly small portion of your body’s total muscle mass. In contrast, even the most focused bodyweight exercises not only emphasize your targeted muscle groups, but, unlike using those fancy machines in the gym, they develop your stabilizer muscles that surround the targeted area as well, and do a far better job of that than using free weights either. This creates more muscle, and more muscle means burning more fat!

Burn more fat

These exercises will crank your body’s metabolism better than using weights or aerobics, because they build more muscle. And muscle is the most metabolically expensive tissue we can manipulate, meaning it burns up a lot of calories — even at rest.

This is a prime example of the snowball effect: The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, and so the less you have to worry about what you eat. While the less muscle you have, the more likely it is that extra calories will turn into fat. And so you’re more prone to become overweight, and get stuck in a never-ending battle of guilt vs. goodies when it comes to food.

Get better with age

It takes about ten calories a day just to keep one pound of muscle alive, even if you are completely inactive. An extra five pounds of muscle can burn up to 1,500 calories in a month — that's the equivalent of five pounds of fat per year, which more than reverses some negative effects of aging on your metabolism.

Regain your youthful metabolism

One reason many people gain weight as they age, especially beginning in their 30s, is because they have less muscle than they had in their late teens and early twenties. As we age, our bodies naturally lose muscle, especially if we become less active. This muscle tissue loss results in a decreasing metabolic rate. And then, if you continue to eat like you did when you were younger … Well, you’ll slowly gain weight, pound by pound, month by month, year by year, until one day you look in the mirror and wonder, What happened? This is how the average American adult gains 2.2 pounds per year.

The key to eliminating accumulated body fat is regaining your youthful metabolism by regaining your muscle through strength training.

Live injury free

Most aerobic activities carry with them a great risk of injury. Even so-called low impact classes or activities like stationary cycling are not necessarily low-impact. Things like running are extremely high-impact, damaging to your knees, hips and back. Aerobic dance is even worse.

Sure, you’ll hear the occasional genetic exception declare that they’ve never been injured doing these exercises. But overuse injuries are cumulative and often build undetected over years until it’s too late, leading to a decrease or loss of mobility as you age, which, in turn, too often leads to a shortened lifespan.

In contrast, the movements in this book, when done properly, have virtually zero impact. You’ll be moving your body how it was designed to move. Not how it gets broken.

Getting Comfortable with Bodyweight Exercises

To beginners, it can feel pretty weird trying to exercise without the typical exercise machines. Instead, you’re going to start using your body the way it was meant to be used — the way you used it when you were first learning to crawl, walk, run, and climb.

Use muscles you didn't know you had

With the proper bodyweight movements, you can isolate and work all your muscles. Everything from your neck to toes are fair game and tied together. You’ll discover muscles you have and muscles that might that have atrophied in our modern sedentary lifestyles. You will literally become a stronger person.

Get off the bench

Your arms were made to push and pull your bodyweight, not to grasp handles on machines or metal bars while you sit on a bench. I mean, lying down on a soft surface is just fine — when you’re sleeping. Sitting on a cushioned seat is fine if you’re driving, or looking at your computer or TV. But not if you’re doing real exercise.

Discovering the Eight Abilities You'll Build Through Calisthenics

We realize most people are reading this book because they want to look and feel better, not necessarily improve their balance, flexibility, and coordination. But this is a common misconception and many programs put the cart before the horse. By focusing on developing these eight skills, you will make your best gains, both in ability and in appearance.

In the decade I spent honing military units assigned to carry out the most dangerous missions, it was always my experience that the individual with the best development in all areas of physical ability succeeds the best operationally.

This program develops the entire spectrum of physical skills. Form follows function. You look your healthiest by being your healthiest. Your physique and your fitness are determined by the degree to which you possess the following eight qualities that define