Building momentum with a new training program could be one of the most difficult challenges in fitness. The uphill battle can be especially steep when you feel like you’re starting from a dead stop. Even worse, momentum can quickly dissipate once you encounter a few obstacles that life throws your way sooner or later.

Thankfully, calisthenics helps you overcome many obstacles and barriers that slow you down. Its simplicity and efficiency make it easy to quickly get moving without going to a gym or setting up costly equipment. Calisthenics exercises are also time and energy-efficient to practice, so you don’t need many different exercises to get an effective workout. This is especially true when starting your journey towards strength, weight loss, and better health.

However, just because bodyweight training is simple and efficient doesn’t mean you can start doing endless push-ups and getting results without a well-designed plan. Many beginners start their fitness journey with calisthenics, yet most of them crash and burn within the first several weeks because they lack a balanced plan. All of the hard work and determination in the world will only cause you to hit a wall at a higher rate of speed if you don’t know how to navigate such obstacles.

Many believe the only nutrient you need to build substantial muscle is protein. Most don't know the importance of carbohydrates in muscle production. First, let's cover the basics: macronutrients include protein, fat, & carbohydrates. When we eat food, all macronutrients can be digested in one way or another to provide our bodies with a source of energy. Even protein can be stored as an energy source if it isn't used for protein synthesis or muscle building right away. I'm sure you've heard it 10x over that you need to eat protein within a 60- minute window of working out to help build muscle. But did you know eating carbs with protein helps increase muscle retention and growth?

This article is meant to help people determine what kind of training will help them reach their fitness goals faster and safer by evaluating advantages and disadvantages of both calisthenics and weight training. 

I'd like to begin by saying that I absolutely love both of the modalities and while being a "calisthenics guy" I promise to do my very best to be as objective as possible. I’ve been in the fitness industry for around 14 years and during this time I had a chance to learn from some of the best coaches in the US like Charlie Wengroff, Patrick Ward, Danny & Al Kavadlo, Brad Schoenfeld, Jeremy Battle and many more bright people who were kind enough to share their knowledge. 

During the first 4 years as a personal I was almost entirely focused on using weights like barbells, kettlebells and dumbbells when working with clients as well as for my own training routine. Objectively speaking, I was doing well with my clients who were getting stronger and leaner, and as a byproduct they were becoming healthier. My own training was going great too - I was doing heavy back squats, turkish get ups, bench press, deadlifts and was just starting to dip my toes into Olympic lifting when I tweaked my knee and had to lay off most of my training for a bit. While that minor injury slowed me down, the truth is I started to get very bored and unmotivated with weight training well before that injury and the reason I was getting into Olympic lifting was because of the lack of enthusiasm with my training routine. 

Exercise can be a fantastic vehicle for helping you get what you want in life. From health and wellness, to a more attractive body exercise can help you get there. It could even be an effective means to increase your level of happiness.

Unfortunately, it can also be a soul sucking drain on your happiness and quality of life as well. It all depends on your approach.

Here are 3 practical ways to ensure your fitness habits make you happier.

#1 Focus on progress rather than just the goal

Placing all of your hopes of a happier life on achieving a singular goal can be one of the most detrimental habits you can engage in. This is a specially common in the weight loss community, where people believe that they will be happy once they lose the weight or build the body they want.

Exercise can be a fantastic vehicle for helping you get what you want in life. From health and wellness, to a more attractive body exercise can help you get there. It could even be an effective means to increase your level of happiness.

Unfortunately, it can also be a soul sucking drain on your happiness and quality of life as well. It all depends on your approach.

Here are 3 practical ways to ensure your fitness habits make you happier.

#1 Focus on progress rather than just the goal

Placing all of your hopes of a happier life on achieving a singular goal can be one of the most detrimental habits you can engage in. This is a specially common in the weight loss community, where people believe that they will be happy once they lose the weight or build the body they want.

Who says you can’t have it all? When it comes to results in fitness you can certainly have it all.

You can get results quickly.

You can get BIG results.

And you can get results relatively easily.

Here’s the catch though; you can only have two of those characteristics at a time.

Yes you can have all three. You just can’t have all three at once. The more you pursue two of those, the more it’s going to come at the expense of the third.

But don’t let that discourage you. The power of choice is yours. It’s just a matter of figuring out which combination is right for you.

Fast results that are big.

Sleep is one of the most important variables and a healthy lifestyle. It’s the foundation for effective diet exercise habits to fully take route and become as effective as possible. Even the best diet and exercise plans become an uphill battle when sleep is compromised.

There are plenty of ways to improve your quality of sleep with healthy habits, but the best way I find to ensure I get a good night sleep is to expose myself to intense physical exercise several times a week.

There’s a simple and almost instantaneous thing you can do to make your workouts much simpler, easier, less stressful, and much more effective.

Yet few people ever take this small step that can send tsunami ripple effects through their life.

This simple step is to clearly define exactly what you want to accomplish in your workout before you even begin your warm-up.

Yes, I’m talking about goal-setting; a mundane activity that many coaches preach you should do, but I’m going to share with you how to make it actually work for you.

Many people set goals that relate to their long-term overall fitness goals. Losing weight, building muscle, getting stronger; these are all great goals to have, but they are often too vague to clearly define what you need to do in a single workout.

While large outcomes certainly take time, it’s refreshing to change our perspective and realize that you don’t have to wait years, months, or even weeks to experience benefits from your training. You can probably achieve more progress than you think in a fairly short period.

Improvement and progress are always right in front of your nose. It’s not necessarily something miles down the road but something you can achieve by taking a single step forward.

Take the example of a session I had the other day where a simple change in technique greatly reduced the amount of stress on a client’s knees within minutes. Or how adding just a little more protein or plant-based foods to a single meal can quickly improve the quality of your diet.

Growing up, I was always a little nervous about the temptation of instant gratification. When I first started to get into fitness, I figured that anything that brought quick satisfaction was a sign that I was resisting temptation and not being tough or disciplined.I didn’t understand then that while some decayed gratification is certainly a part of any successful process, it’s important to recognize that avoiding as much pleasure in life can also severely hurt your success.

Fundamentally, we human beings are emotional creatures. We can know all of the facts and scientific logic behind achieving success in life and fitness, but we ultimately strive for some emotional fulfillment, which is much more potent in the short term than the long. This means that short-term gratification can be a supremely potent motivating factor toward success, provided we can implement it productively.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to get in shape is overstressing a single metric for measuring success along their journey.

In other words, they get so wrapped up in progressing one measurable variable that they compromise the results they strive to attain.

Goodhart's law states that progress ceases to be a viable measure of success once it becomes a target. In other words, making the weight on the scale your goal makes your weight a less reliable measure for success in losing body fat once your goal is to “lose weight.” Making a goal to do a single-arm push-up or lift a certain weight ceases to be a reliable measure of your strength once you make that your primary goal.

It’s not that such metrics are bad; it’s just that they are no longer the most reliable way to measure progress for several reasons:

What would happen if you did one set of a particularly difficult exercise every day for a month?

Would you overtrain? Would you build strength? Or would you just get so sick and tired of the exercise that you never wanna do it again?

That’s exactly what I said out to discover a little over a month ago when I decided to do a set of handstands and back bridges every day. Here’s what I discovered.

#1 I became much more comfortable with doing the exercises.

The biggest change over the past month is exactly what I started the experiment to accomplish, which was to become much more comfortable with doing handstands and bridges.

I always felt awkward and uncoordinated while practicing them and so I didn’t practice that much which only further made me feel awkward. But practicing them more frequently ensured that I became more comfortable and even got to enjoy doing them.

Since I can remember, there’s long been a standing debate about which type of cardio is best for losing and managing body fat.

On the one hand, some claim that slow and steady is best due to it’s high calorie burn and relative stress on the body due to its moderate intensity.

The other camp claims that high intensity and short duration is best. High intensity saves time because it doesn’t require as much duration, and it can also lead to other performance and health benefits, like an increase in VO to max beyond what you would get with the low to moderate-intensity cardio.

Both forms of cardio have pros and cons. Low intensity can be easier on the joints but harder on the schedule due to its time-consuming nature. High intensity can improve performance and strengthen the cardio system, but it can also be more exhausting and hard on the body.

If you ask the average person what the most important calisthenics exercises, you’re likely to receive an answer along the lines of push-ups and pull-ups. Or maybe it would involve dips and core work. You probably wouldn’t hear much talk about training the lower body, especially anything addressing the hips and hamstrings. Even serious calisthenics athletes often turn to weight machines or free weights to work those muscles or even neglect them with direct training entirely.

However, if you ask me what the most important calisthenics exercises are, it would be bridgework. Hands-down, that is the most beneficial and impactful training anyone can do for their health and fitness.

The reason is simple: bridges offer a unique host of benefits that directly counter many of the negative consequences we experience from modern sedentary living. They engage and strengthen all of the muscles along the entire backside of the body, including the glutes, hamstrings, calves, and spinal erectors. Moreover, they stretch and mobilize the muscles along the front, including the chest, shoulders, and hip flexors.

One of my mentors, Coach Dan John, once taught me that “repetition is the mother of implementation.” It’s a lesson we all would be wise to understand and adopt, especially when getting in shape or reaching your fitness goals.

As a coach myself, I have to be honest with you. There’s nothing I can give you that’s ever going to make much difference to your body. Seriously, the potential influence of anything you do will always be rather small. Even the most extreme habits that push your mind, body, and lifestyle to the limit will hardly move the needle toward the results you want.

Which is why the power of repetition is so important. Being able to perform even a small activity repeatedly will make even trivial habits a much bigger influence on your goals. Eating protein at each meal or doing twenty push-ups may not seem like much, but repeating those habits almost every day of the week will compound their effect into a substantial outcome over time.

There are many inherent advantages to calisthenics training. There’s the simplicity, independence, and learning cool techniques you can show off at parties.

But a unique benefit is the inviting call to make training fun and more playful than feeling like a robotic drone in conventional strength training.

There’s just something about moving your body through space that invokes memories of messing around on the playground or schoolyard. Calisthenics can be such a great way to break out of the monotonous grind of conventional strength training, and here are 3 great ways to do that.

#1 Use total rep/time sets.

I use this strategy to break up my routine if it’s getting stale. Essentially, you decide on the total amount of reps you want to do, and then you do as many sets as you like to accomplish that.

For example, you may have fifty total pull-ups to do, so you can start doing five at a time and then change to three or even two. The number of reps in each set isn’t important, just doing the total amount of work.

Energy Makes Everything Possible

The more energy you have, the easier it is to build muscle, lose weight, and improve performance. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Low energy makes even small achievements easier to accomplish. Thankfully, some of the best ways to improve your energy level are simple and natural.

#1 Consistent Sleep Habits

Sleep is the biggest influence on your energy level. In some ways, I would even consider it a higher priority on your health than diet and exercise! Poor sleep habits will always compromise your health and fitness regardless of how disciplined your nutrition and training habits are.

Like diet and exercise, you don't need "optimal" habits, just consistent ones. Try to get the same amount of sleep each night while going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time.

Rest is an essential part of any fitness program. Training is hard on the body, and calisthenics is no exception, although many people find they aren’t as beat up and tired from bodyweight training, which means they don’t need as much recovery.

It’s a myth that you need to recover from exercise and training. You honestly don’t. Fundamentally, you need to recover from stress and fatigue, a variable consequence of physical training. The more stress you experience, the more recovery you need, and vice versa.

But some people find they can recover faster if they practice some light activity on their days off. This makes sense since being more sedentary can often make the body feel more stiff and tight compared to if it was still moving a bit.

The key word here is “light” activity. I’ve witnessed far too many times when someone engages in some light activity, and they keep adding more volume and intensity until they add a whole nother workout to their program.

Bulking and cutting are common in weight-lifting circles, but what about bodyweight training? Sure, you want to build some muscle, but adding excess body weight due to a bulk seems counterproductive to calisthenics training. So, is it good to still bulk and cut if you primarily do calisthenics?

I usually discourage people from getting caught in an endless cyclical trap between bulking and cutting. Not because adding excess weight can hurt calisthenics performance, but because I’ve long found it doesn’t bode well for most people’s physical development either. Here are several reasons:

#1 Bulking requires cutting, and often vice versa.

A bulk and cut cycle is often a self-perpetuating, high-cost, low-return cycle. It’s like the cardio trap, where you eat a lot because you do a lot of cardio, but then you feel the need to do so much because you eat so much.

"Careful, you don't want your body to get used to your workout or you’ll stop making progress.”

It's an understandable belief; if your body gets used to your workout or exercise, you'll stop seeing results. Some experts even claim you'll lose results because the workout won't be as hard on your body, and you'll regress.

But the fact is, you don't need to worry about having your body get used to your workout or the exercises you do. You WANT your body to get used to what you're doing as much as possible and as quickly as possible.

The reason is simple; you can only progress once you become more comfortable with your exercises. You can only get stronger once you become more comfortable lifting with the resistance you're currently working with. You will only improve your performance once you practice your skills more easily.