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!

🌟Students often don’t realize the importance of strength and mobility in everyday life, especially those who aren’t athletic.

This was the case for Lily, a 23-year-old student from Paris, France. She was first taught that her body was already capable of everyday life. But after performing some simple movements, she then realized how unprepared her body was for some basic tasks.🥺 

If you’re a full-time student or have a full-time desk job, you must read Lily’s story! ⏬⏬

🤔Realizing the Problem: Sedentary life

“About a few years back, I realized that being a student. I had basically a desk job. I didn’t do much to work with my body to exercise.”

Lily didn’t have any background in fitness way back. She was a full-time student, so unless she had a regular workout routine or was required to play sports, she basically had a sedentary life. Students are required to sit around 9 hours and even more if you add up the time studying out of school hours. The situation could have worsened during the pandemic, even though the situation is slowly normalizing.

☝️The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise or 75 minutes of high-intensity aerobic exercise. On top of that, full body strengthening exercise of at least 2 times per week is needed.

University life can be hectic similar to a working individual. But everyone should still get enough exercise to maintain good health and the capacity to move even if you’re still young.

“I could perform daily tasks like walking and stuff like that. I didn’t have any problem because I’m still young. But as soon as I try to do a bit harder, like climbing stairs, gardening, and others, my body can’t really keep up.”

Everyday tasks have varying degrees of difficulty. While easier and simpler ones, like walking and standing up from your chair, have already been ingrained in Lily’s routine, other simple movements may seem easy but become demanding if your body isn’t prepared for them.

For example, climbing up a steep flight of stairs requires a good amount of endurance, ankle mobility, quad strength, and hip strength, as well as a general baseline of physical fitness.🏃

Gardening requires a multitude of full-body mobility. You’ll need enough thoracic mobility to be able to bend your spine forward, as well as have good lower body mobility to squat for extended periods of time while tending to your plants.

In Lily’s case, she realized that she needed some help to improve her strength, mobility, endurance, and general fitness level to function well in her everyday life.

So she took action and sought guidance on fitness apps to help her achieve her goals.🎯

Lily knew what she wanted with her training. She was looking for a routine that included bodyweight exercises, but back then, she didn’t know that it was calisthenics. She only knew that she was looking for movements like push-ups, squats, and pull-ups.

She encountered numerous fitness apps and also encountered some problems along the way. And here’s her first problem.

“I started downloading fitness apps and trying out fitness apps. But it never worked out well for me because it’s free. So like a bank of exercises but no routine. I just had to do all the work myself.”

The first few apps Lily downloaded were free. And as expected, they mostly provide little value as well. The free apps offered random exercises and didn’t really guide Lily toward her goals. There was no direction, no structure, and no guidance.

You might argue that because the apps were free, that’s why they did not give anything more, but the free apps didn’t even offer the potential to give more.

“It was only with three levels: beginner, intermediate, and hard level, and there was really no sense of progression, it was either too easy, and I didn’t progress, or it was too hard. I could do the workout.”

Another issue Lily encountered was leveled fitness apps. Workouts are always divided into stages. The problem with this is that within these stages, there is still a spectrum of different levels, stages, and differences within each level. Not all beginners can do push-ups. Not all intermediates can do the same push-up variations.😢

This is an outdated format of training that follows a cookie-cutter-style approach. It doesn’t take into account individual differences. Level training can lead to two things, as mentioned by Lily:

• 👎You don’t progress because the program could be too easy and there’s no bridge to close the gap between the next level or because the exercises are too difficult, which doesn’t allow you to perform the movement efficiently to create enough training volume.
• 👎You get injured since the workout doesn’t prepare you enough for the more challenging variations. You’re forced to work with a workout that’s too difficult for your level. Your body responds by compensating with a bad form which can easily lead to injury.

You can read more about this topic here: 📍The End of Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced Workout

Eventually, Lily stumbled upon The Movement Athlete app, and that’s when she finally progressed in her workouts.

Progressive: The secret to improving

“It started with push-ups on the wall, and that’s basically something anyone can do, and from that, I kept on doing some progressive harder and harder workouts until I could get a really good technique and really see how my arms should move and how my shoulders should react and stuff, and that’s how I developed a good technique for my push-ups.”

Lily has already been doing “push-ups” before encountering the TMA app. However, it was only when she tried the app she realized that she needed to regress to an easier variation. The TMA app starts with an assessment to check one’s current skills, strengths, and weaknesses. That’s when she found out that the push-up that she was doing was with bad form, so each rep didn’t really count.

That’s the beauty of calisthenics. Weaknesses manifest through bad form since exercises use the whole body to move the body weight even though specific muscle groups are being targeted.

In Lily’s case, with the push-ups, she had to start with an easier to develop every muscle group for the full floor push-ups. This applies to every calisthenics fundamental that the TMA app teaches and trains.

🤸Adaptive Training: The Secret to Longevity

TMA pushes further the personalized approach to a greater degree by offering an adaptive style of training. The app does this by applying the concept of auto-regulation. It seems like a complex, fancy term, but it basically means that the program is adjusted to Lily’s current skill level, energy levels, and mood based on that day and her previous training.

This level of adaptiveness is crucial for maintaining longevity. Let’s discuss this more by analyzing the popular motivational cliche of “no pain, no gain.” 💯

While at first glance, it makes sense that you will push your training even if it’s painful, this statement is taken out of context. If you push you’re training until a level of pain, you expose yourself to the risks of injuries and/or overtraining. Not ideal in the long run.

👊However, if we take a step back while just maintaining a level of difficulty that’s still challenging, we can still make progress. For example, studies show that training until failure (when you can no longer do a single rep with good form) IS NOT crucial to building muscle. You don’t need to go all-out every single session to make gains.

In addition, other factors can affect our energy for training, such as our sleep, other responsibilities, and nutrition. Pushing 100% every session is exhausting and can lead to overtraining, that’s why autoregulation is crucial if you want to keep on training consistently throughout your lifetime. It’s much more enjoyable as well!

🙌Support and community: Learning together

“There is also a good community. They send us emails every now and then with some info with some knowledge about fitness.”

The Movement Athlete aims to develop a community of individuals who love to move, regardless of calisthenics, weightlifting, or other disciplines, to improve the body and the mind. We invite everyone who becomes a Movement Athlete to join this community so we can share our experiences and grow further as a community and as individuals.

As they say, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”💯 Fitness is a life-long journey. Having like-minded individuals by your side (or, in our case, online)  will help you stay on your track toward longevity.

✨Knowledge bank: Always a student

“There is also a large knowledge bank on the app with lots of stuff, articles of videos you can watch about fitness to know how it works, to know how your body works, what you should eat and stuff like that.”

Besides the personalized training Lily receives from the app, she also gets more information on fitness and healthy through TMA. Remember that in fitness, the workout is just one part of the equation. Various factors can affect your training, such as your recovery and nutrition, with TMA covered in separate articles.

In addition, TMA also shares the philosophy and principles behind the training through the TMA blogs. Understanding how the training works will help her further maximize her training and personalize her approach to fitness. The more she tweaks her training towards optimization, the better her progress in each workout.

You can read more of TMA’s content here: The Movement Athlete Resources