Calisthenics may sound like a fancy form of fitness, but it’s really as basic as it gets. The term refers to exercises that you do using just your bodyweight, meaning you don’t need any additional weights, bands, or machines. Examples include air squats, step-ups, push-ups, and dips.
There are a lot of great things about calisthenics. They’re beginner-friendly, easy to do at home or while traveling, and highly functional—meaning, they strongly correlate to movements in daily life. But do they also qualify as strength training?
Anyone whose legs have quaked after step-ups, or whose chest has felt personally attacked by push-ups, would argue: yes. On the other hand, calisthenics don’t use the tools most people typically associate with strength training, like dumbbells, kettlebells, barbells, and weight machines, so…do they even count? And are they legit enough to be the only resistance work you do?
We spoke with fitness experts to understand whether calisthenics tick the box for strength training or if you really do need to add outside load to grow your muscles bigger and stronger.
So does calisthenics qualify as strength training?
First, let’s get clear on what we mean by strength training. Basically, it’s any movement where you’re contracting your muscles against a load, Susie Reiner, PhD, CSCS, an assistant professor in the exercise science department at Seton Hall University, tells SELF. A load could be external—like dumbbells for a bench press, a resistance band for glute bridges, or a leg press machine. Or it could be the weight of your body (with or without the added resistance of gravity), as is the case with calisthenics.
By that definition, calisthenics can certainly fit the bill for strength training. In fact, the answer to this question is a “hard yes,” Ben Yamuder, CSCS, an exercise physiologist at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, tells SELF.
There’s a catch, though: Your muscles adapt pretty quickly to the demands you place on them, and if you want them to keep growing bigger and stronger, you have to continually challenge them by upping the intensity of your workouts. This is the principle of progressive overload. “You can absolutely progressively overload with bodyweight exercises,” Yamuder says. For example, you can make bodyweight exercises more challenging by adding reps, performing reps at a slower pace (which increases the amount of time your muscles are under tension), or tweaking an exercise to be more difficult (for instance, doing a single-leg versus double-leg squat, or performing a push-up with your feet elevated instead of on level ground).
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