Join the tribe of Movement & Calisthenics Athletes – people just like you that are working with their own body weight to get strength, lose fat build muscle, recover from injuries and live their best lives!

👆Today I want to show you just one argument as to why you can build more strength with calisthenics than weightlifting… And this might just be a little counter-intuitive

This realization was the main reason why I dropped weight lifting years ago (you don’t need to, weightlifting has its place).

👉 One thing I love about calisthenics is that in order for you to advance your abilities and your skills, you have to advance your technique. There are various ways of progressing with calisthenics.

So, when I first started getting into bodyweight strength training I had a major change in my mentality.

I was a weight lifter for years and it really struck me that I couldn’t do some of the basic calisthenics movements.😞

The first time when I went on the floor I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to even try to planche or do a manna.

It was the first time in my life where I started thinking about, how do I change my technique not weight?🤔

How do you work smarter not harder?🤔

I took the advice of an early mentor and started doing a full range of motion.

Suddenly I went from doing 50 pushups to doing 20. This was tremendously frustrating but my mentor’s wisdom quickly shown through.

Within weeks not only I started getting better results but the way I was thinking about my body and my training changed.

 What is strength💪 really?

Regardless of how you define strength, the truth is that if you want to enhance your body’s abilities, you need more than just strength of muscles.

There are plenty of other factors in play like

• • ✅ strong tendon and ligaments
  • ✅ strong joints
  • ✅ flexibility and mobility
  • ✅ balance and stability
  • ✅ control 

🔎Just imagine strength being like horsepower in an engine…

….No matter how powerful, you can’t control it if your tires are worn out…

So if you keep on adding just horsepower to your car you will end up with a lot of horsepower, but if you will not take care of everything else, you also will have worn off breaks, broken interiors, and tires that are bold.

You see where I am going with this?

This is a bad idea.👎

You are building your own death trap.

Or you will end up not being able to use that horsepower or you will crash. Simple as that.

And this is exactly what happened at the end of my weightlifting career.

Where I just kept on adding all the weight, more horsepower but I had no ability to control it in any way. I had a lot of strength but I had a bad shoulder and a 🩹bad knee, and my back was hurting. It was only a matter of time until I seriously injured myself.🤕

When I first started with calisthenics I tried to do a Pistol Squat.

Gosh, that was frustrating!

I couldn’t do it and I quickly figured out that it’s because pistols aren’t like my normal strength exercises, they’re a balance exercise too!  

And it was true, I had all the horsepower and I could not use it properly. My balance sucked. 😣

🏆Calisthenics will highlight and then erase all your weaknesses

If you read Convict Conditioning you know that Paul Wade was dead on with his advice.

Progressive calisthenics with its movements will naturally go after whatever you are weak at: balance, strength, mobility etc, challenge you and give you a chance to develop an all-round fitness level.

Before you even know it,  everything is strong.💪

🏆Develop all-round strength for life

👉 So if you want to get stronger you need to build a base a fundamental strength. You need to develop all the other fitness qualities and physical abilities for you to be able to handle your muscle strength safely.

Once you improve your brakes, tires, and interiors then we can put more horsepower. That enables you to improve your skills and perform more advanced movements. It keeps on building on each other and keeps ongoing. Because of that  all-round aspect of calisthenics, you can actually build more strength than just with weightlifting.

So you can actually build more strength in the long run with progressive calisthenics than weight lifting.

It’s pretty freakin’ powerful.

This simple mental shift in thinking enabled me to advance my training into time.

This is just one of the millions of advantages of progressive calisthenics, and I will share more thoughts with you as we go along.

If you are looking to get started through this ancient way of strength-building I highly recommend you to check The Movement Athlete Academy.