Calisthenics vs Weight Training

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. 

Luckily, I got introduced to a completely new training modality during my recovery - that is when I discovered calisthenics thanks to Al and Danny Kavadlo. When I saw those guys do things like a human flag, one arm pull up, handstand push up, etc, I was absolutely blown away. Not only that these moves look more impressive than anything I’ve seen before (short of Cirque du Soleil), but what struck me even more was the realization that there is absolutely no way you can train for these skills and not gain strength and muscle. To me that was a breath of fresh air since I was getting really bored with traditional weight training.

After meeting Al and Danny I was so inspired to do calisthenics, that I completely abandoned weight training for 2 years straight. During that time I devoted my training exclusively to calisthenics with the goal of getting my body as strong as possible. Once I started, I soon realized that I can train my entire body literally from toes to neck doing progressive calisthenics. I started working on my one arm push ups, Archer pull ups, Pistol squats, L sits, bridges, etc. At the end of the second year of training I was in such great shape that I wanted to test myself at a physique show so I entered the Iron Eagle competition in Savannah, GA. My goal was not to place last. To my absolute delight, I placed first in my “tall” group, though I lost to a guy from the “short” group in an overall battle for a Pro card. But I didn’t care at all and was beyond happy with my result. 

Besides jumping into calisthenics with my own training, I also dragged all of my clients into it (luckily they didn’t object). Since then it’s been eight years and I can look back and compare my personal experience as well as the data collected from training hundreds of my clients and share my observations. For the rest of this article I’ll be comparing the effects of both weight training and calisthenics on the following: results in hypertrophy, injury rate, and figuring out which one is more fun.

Hypertrophy (muscle gain).

Historically, and by that I mean since bodybuilding took off in the late 1960s, it's been very apparent that you can gain a lot of muscle using weights. I don't think anyone can argue that and I don't think it's necessary to defend this opinion. To say the same about calisthenics (as of 2024) one would need to present some serious proof. Gymnasts and advanced calisthenics athletes will be my go-to examples, but I can also speak from my personal experience based on my 2 year experiment on myself doing exclusively calisthenics.

To paint a clear picture, let's break it down by body parts:

Back muscles.

I think we can all agree that gymnasts have very impressive back muscles and are probably the best examples of how much you can develop the upper body. Gymnasts and advanced calisthenics athletes have huge lats from all the pull ups they do. Human flag training yields incredible results in that area as well. However, back muscles don't end with lats. Muscles like lower/mid traps and rhomboids get a ton of action from front lever training and result in very apparent muscle gains. I think upper traps don't get as much development from calisthenics, unless you are adding inverted hangs to your training program.

1 week before my physique show

Chest muscles.

If you want to get the most developed chest using calisthenics, assuming you can already do regular push ups, you'd need to proceed with advance push up variations such as archer push ups, followed by lever push ups and eventually getting into ring dips. Ring dip is my favorite bodyweight exercise for chest training. Handstand push ups are an absolute beast of an exercise and will help you build a big upper chest, though of course they will mainly target your shoulders and arms. 

Shoulder muscles.

You can definitely develop big shoulders doing bodyweight exercises and once again gymnasts will be my best example as all of them seem to have melon shoulders. Not all of us mortals can bang out an iron cross, but if you include pulling exercises like front lever, human flag, pull ups and ring training into your routine, you'll inevitably gain muscle in your deltoids. Pushing exercises like handstands, including handstand push ups as well as regular horizontal push up progressions will produce great results. 

Core muscles.

I’d argue that building impressive looking core muscles is easy with calisthenics. Core training was very important for my physique when I was preparing for the show and I was able to get great results simply from doing advance pull ups and push ups. When doing pull ups properly (with your legs slightly in front of you) engages your upper core like nothing else. Meanwhile, if you are doing push ups while maintaining posterior pelvic tilt, you’ll develop your lower abs. Actually, the only core exercise I did prior to the show was hanging leg raises and it took maybe only 3-4% of my training program (no planks, crunches, side planks, etc). 

In general, I think you don’t need to do a lot of core specific exercises to develop a great looking and strong core - instead you should focus on complex movements. However, I know that for many of you this answer won’t be enough so here are my favorite core exercises that are extremely effective: L sits, hanging leg raises, body saw, hollow body.

1 week before my physique show

Arm muscles.

If you are doing calisthenics I believe that you can build your triceps doing advance push ups, handstands and by doing Tiger Presses (see video below). If you want bigger forearms than adding hook grip training on a pull up bar and false grip on rings will help you tremendously. Other hanging exercises like towel hang or using a thick pull up bar will strengthen and help you grow your forearms even more. You can develop impressive biceps from regular and advanced pull up variations, ice cream makers and Australian pull ups.

Leg muscles.

Doing bodyweight lunges and squats can only take you that far and eventually you’ll need to add more advanced exercises like Pistol squats, Shrimp squats, plyometrics, sprints and other exercises that will target individual muscles. To target your mid quads, you can do Sissy squats. For upper quads doing L sits and straight leg raises will have great effect on the area. For lower quads the most effective would be advanced squatting and lunging exercises described earlier. For hamstring you’d want to do sprints, plyometrics, suspended hamstring curls and of course the famous Nordic curls. For inner thighs I’d recommend Copenhagen planks and press ups. Glutes in my opinion will get the best results from plyometrics, sprinting, deep lunging like Bulgarian split squats and various hip bridges like suspended, elevated and regular bridges, and of course hip thrusts at first bilateral and later unilateral. Calves will get a lot of hypertrophy from most of the exercises listed above, but of course to target them even further you’d want to do bilateral and later unilateral calf raises. 

Conclusion.

To sum it up, you can absolutely gain a lot of muscle by doing calisthenics. Gymnasts and advanced calisthenics athletes like myself prove the point. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but me winning at the physique show against guys who lift proves it even further.

I do have to admit that if you are trying to build huge legs, there is absolutely nothing like heavy squats, lunges and deadlifts. If you want tree trunks for legs, you have to lift, that’s just the way it is! I also think that building traps with calisthenics is not very easy. But I think all other body parts can get amazing hypertrophy results from calisthenics.

Speaking from my personal experience, when I switched to calisthenics for 2 years my weight barely changed. It went from ~185 to ~183, but most of it was due to fat loss as it’s much easier to do advanced calisthenics when you are leaner.  

Personally for me, before participating in the show the idea of having as much muscle as huge bodybuilders you see on social media seemed unattainable even before I got into bodyweight training. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that most bodybuilding associations don’t test for steroids or steroid-like substances. Physique show I participated in prohibits the use of growth hormones and I was able to beat my opponents. I can only speak from my personal experience in this regard, but I’m sure there are many calisthenics bodybuilders who would help me prove the point.

Injury Rate.

This part of the comparison is arguably the most important one and in my opinion calisthenics is a clear winner. Yes, you can have a proper technique, you can be patient and careful with increasing the weight, but at the end of the day it is much easier to control your own weight moving through space vs the weight of a loaded barbell. Once again, proper form and technique are extremely important factors, but once in a while other factors like fatigue, stress and even the weather will affect our performance in a negative way. My point is - you can’t always be perfect. 

Speaking from my own anecdotal experience as a fitness practitioner as well as a personal trainer with 14 certifications and coincidentally as many years of experience, I can definitively say that calisthenics are much safer. As a trainer, your number one goal is to not injure your clients, but at the end of the day trainers are humans and humans make mistakes. If you are training without the help of a fitness professional, then it is safe to say that you are even more likely to make a mistake. So I think we can all agree - mistakes will happen at some point during your training as we are not machines. 

Now the key factor here is that when you do make a mistake the consequences in my opinion are much higher when you are lifting. I’m not talking about minor strains, I’m referring to major injuries that take a very long time to recover from and oftentimes require medical help.

Let's compare the top 5 most common injuries and their severity between calisthenics and weight training. Most of these injuries happen from using incorrect technique or training when you should be resting, so if you get 9+ hours of sleep, have a great form and your training program is sound you will most likely avoid these injuries. But once again, we all make mistakes from time to time… 

With all of this said, let's begin our comparison and start with weight training:

• Lower back injuries: muscle strains and in severe cases herniated discs (typically from deadlifts and back squats)

• Shoulder injuries: rotator cuff tears, impingements and bursitis. (typically from bench press, overhead press, snatches)

• Knee injuries: meniscus tears, patellar tendonitis and ligament strains (typically from squats, lunges)

• Chest injuries: pectoral tears and strains (typically from bench press)

• Elbow injuries: most notably tendinitis (typically from excess arm training)

Now let's compare this to most common injuries in calisthenics:

• Elbow injuries: elbow tendonitis (typically from pull ups)

• Shoulder injuries: rotator cuff strains (typically from human flag, dips, push ups)

• Upper back injuries: upper trap strains (typically from pull ups)

• Wrist injuries: wrist strains (typically from handstands, push ups)

• Knee injuries: patellar tendonitis, meniscus strains (typically from jumping off plyo boxes)

From the first glance it’s impossible not to notice how much more severe the injuries from weight lifting are. Plus we’ve all heard some anecdotal horror stories of slipped discs, crippling aggravated sciatica, someone needing surgery for torn labrum in shoulder and many more nasty injuries that are associated with weight lifting. I want to repeat that I personally love weight training and still give it a huge thumbs up, but I have to point out that you don’t hear about similar injuries from doing calisthenics. 

Which one is more fun?

Training programs can be very safe and effective, but at the end of the day if they are boring then people won’t do them at least in the long term.   

One big factor that helps calisthenics is how objectively fun they are. I think I speak for most of us when I say that mastering the handstand, human flag, front lever, muscle up, dragon squat and planche sound incredibly satisfying! Don’t get me wrong, pulling a deadlift that’s 3-4x times your bodyweight, or benching super heavy is extremely impressive too and satisfying so at the end of the day it’s all based on personal preference. 

The way progressions are structured makes a big difference in my opinion. You see, when you are working on your deadlift, bench press or back squat your progress is mostly going to depend on gradually increasing weight and reps. Add an extra rep here, 10lb there, another 5lb next week. It actually never bothered me, but I think a lot of people like me won’t find this approach fun after a while. If you are savvy enough, you'll also be working on sticking points of each movement (bottom of the deadlift, middle of bench press's ROM, etc.). Once again, don't get me wrong, lifting weights is so much fun and each time you reach a PR it's incredibly satisfying, but in my opinion it requires a lot of patience and many of us lack that quality.  

Progressive calisthenics offer an entirely different approach. Besides intensity and volume you are manipulating your leverage and that makes all of the difference. It's like you are playing a video game where you go from one level to another. For example with front lever training you start with tuck lever, followed by advance tuck, frog lever, etc. or with a push up example it's elevated push up, half push up, negative push up and so on. Every progression is different from the one before so with every step towards your goal you are unlocking new exercises which as a result provides a much needed stimulus to keep you motivated and not getting bored with your training routine.

When I first became a personal trainer I learned a lot about proper weightlifting and kettlebell techniques. So by default my own training revolved around those two training modalities. I got pretty strong, gained a substantial amount of muscle but after 2-3 years of that I started to get very bored with it. That's when I got introduced to calisthenics and I was completely blown away by how diverse and fun the exercises were and I immediately fell in love with it. 10 years later and I'm not a bit tired of calisthenics and I think it's because the way progressive calisthenics programs are structured. 

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