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!

This is the story of Beau- The Movement Athlete

Athletes performing calisthenics skills and exercises are mesmerizing to watch. It usually catches anybody’s attention and often stimulates the interest of people.💯

✨Attracting Attention With Skills and Fundamentals

“I started my calisthenics journey about a year ago. Because in 2019, I put a calisthenics gym in my local park. And if I were just walking my dog, I’d always be walking past it. “

The beauty of calisthenics is that you can train anywhere anytime. While it can be trained with no equipment at all, it’s ideal to get some pieces of equipment so you can work on the calisthenics fundamentals and build a solid foundation for learning skills.

The common equipment needed is the following:

• Dip station
• Pull-up bars
• Low bars or gymnastics rings

And that’s about it. From there, you can already train hard toward mastering the basics. You can read more on the equipment needed here: 📍7 MUST-HAVE Calisthenics Equipment.

However, if you have access to a local park, then you already have free access to every exercise equipment you need. Monkey bars can be used as pull-up bars. 📌Low-hanging bars can be used as a dip station. 

Then you can add affordable and portable gymnastics rings for more advanced athletes or bring a set of resistance bands for beginners.

This is why the local park is a go-to spot for calisthenics practitioners. And luckily for Beau, there’s a community of calisthenics in his area.

🎯Motivation to Start Calisthenics

“I’d always see athletes doing incredible things. And then one day, I was just like, you know what? What have I got to lose? Let’s do it.”

One of the main reasons why calisthenics piques people’s interest is the skills and amazing body control through calisthenics fundamentals. Seeing people perform gravity-defying skills is breathtaking.🤯

Here are some calisthenics skills people are working on, and you can click the respective links in case you’re interested in learning them:

• Handstand
• Planche 
• Front Lever
• Press to Handstand 
• Ring dips
• Push-ups
• Pull-ups

And good for Beau, she took the plunge and reached out to the calisthenics community. 

👀Perfect for Beginners to Advanced Athletes

“I didn’t really have much background in fitness. As someone who is primarily performing arts, I did have the advantage of having certain levels of flexibility and basic strength. But I wasn’t an average gym girl. I wasn’t into weightlifting. So I was starting out as a pretty much beginner. I couldn’t even do one pull-up.”

Commonly, pull-ups and push-ups are marked as beginner exercises. 😎However, the truth is that these movements are challenging if you’re going to start from a relatively low starting point of foundational strength. So there’s nothing to be ashamed of in admitting so.

In Beau’s case, she’s starting with 0 pull-up game. But luckily for him, calisthenics provides a progression approach using exercise progressions. Progressions are a set of exercises that lead to the specific move you’re trying to work on.

For example, in Beau’s case, he needs to work towards pull-ups. There are exercises that he can use that will help him build strength, mobility, and control for him to master the pull-ups.

✅Here’s a brief of exercises he can work on:

• Inverted rows
• Band or leg-assisted pull-ups
• Eccentric pull-ups
• Pull-up hold
• Chin-ups
• Then finally, the actual pull-up

Read more here: 📍Beginner’s Guide to Pull-ups

These are just the brief of the main exercises, but there are other accessory exercises that he should work on to boost his progress further.

😢Hitting a Plateau

“For about eight months, my first eight months, I progressed quite quickly because of the people around me. But then I felt like, with my skills, I was starting to plateau.”

After training with the calisthenics community, Beau made great progress with strength and overall body development. Unfortunately for him, the beginner gains stopped, and he needed a smarter way to approach his training.

While the straightforward way of approaching plateaus is to train harder, calisthenics, especially when learning skills, is a bit more complex than that.

“Considering the work I was putting in, I wasn’t making the progress I felt I should be making. And it really demotivated me. “

Demotivation is a killer of progress. It can frustrate you and eventually make you quit your calisthenics journey. Calisthenics is mainly physical, but this discipline has numerous mental aspects, especially when it comes to creating motivation and maintaining discipline.

“So when I discovered TMA, it really just made everything more consistent because I feel that TMA really helps structure your program.”

Luckily for Beau, he finally found the solution to his plateaus through The Movement Athlete app.

Progressive overload should be enough to facilitate progress for a specific exercise. However, if you want to boost your progress further, a smarter program structure can play a major role.

The Movement Athlete app’s training structure is divided into four major elements:

👊Strength – This is the bread and butter of the progression that focuses on developing the main exercise. Remember that calisthenics’ main goal is to build strength.

🤸Skill – In this section, more technical movements are focused as well as improving mobility. The skill elements tend to be lower intensity so you can master the full range of motion. However, mobility is also improved strength if done with a complete range.

💪Muscle – Bigger muscles mean a higher potential for strength. Don’t worry about getting too bulky. A bodybuilder’s physique takes time to develop, and you won’t get too bulk unless you implement specific isolation exercises to supplement your training.

🏃Endurance – This element focuses on muscular endurance, or your muscles’ capacity to train for longer periods of time. It’s usually low intensity, so exercises depend on your skill level.

Breaking down the elements of the workout into blocks allows for addressing any potential weak links that might be hindering your progress. In Beau’s case, this helped break his plateau.

In addition, two more features made headway for Beau.

Tailored Program

“It gives a personalized program.”

Beau got a tailored program based on his lifestyle, skill levels, and goals. This means that the workouts fit exactly his strengths and weaknesses. The program provides just enough challenges for Beau; it is not too easy or hard.

📍Cookie-cutter programs are an old-fashioned, ineffective approach to fitness. There’s a risk of the workout being too difficult which can lead to injuries or lack of progress. It could also be too easy building training plateaus and frustrations.

This type of ineffective programming is rampant on the internet, but it’s easier to create than a personalized one.

If you want to achieve progress efficiently and safely, then taking a personalized approach to calisthenics is your best bet.

👇Here are the elements TMA tailors for Beau:

• Exercise selection
• Exercise intensity
• Programing structure
• Training duration & frequency
• Workout type and targeted muscle groups
• Ideal calisthenics skill path
• Accessible training equipment
• Starting point for each exercise

As you can see, 🌟TMA approaches personalization comprehensively. Doing so makes the program fit Beau’s exact skill level.

🤸Adaptive Training

But what makes TMA so far ahead of other calisthenics programs is not just personalization but making the program adapt to the user’s current situation, energy levels, mood, and previous training session. This adaptation is called auto-regulation.

📍Auto-regulation makes the program challenging enough for Beau, even though she’s not having the best days for training.

In the real world, while we would always want to keep our progressive overleaf in a linear fashion, this is not possible because of many factors affecting our energy levels and capacity to train. One day, you might have your best training session ever. The next might immediately be the worst! If you try to progress linearly constantly, you might burn out too fast or not enjoy the workouts when it gets too tiring.

With The Movement Athlete app, Beau doesn’t get those types of workouts that are too draining but still with progressive overload. Auto-regulation is the key to sustainable workouts that can help you maintain long-term progress throughout your life.

⚡️Gamified Tracking

“It’s also great how it shows your skills percentages and helps you track. And it is really personalized, which obviously is the key feature.”

And part of the adaptiveness and personalized approach is the tracking feature of the TMA app. The app provides a gamified tracking interface where you can unlock skills through levels and show progress through percentages.

This tracking style helps you quantify your progress which is always motivating and keeps you accountable in your training.

Because of these adaptive and personalized programming, Beau has been enjoying these benefits from The Movement Athlete app and calisthenics.