Calisthenics revolves around countless different bodyweight exercises, progressions, and skills, strengthening your mind, physique, and functional strength. The beauty is that it can be done any time and anywhere, even in the comfort of your own Clovelle of Woodlands home.
However, for complete newbies, this is often overwhelming and gets them off to a choppy start, resulting in injuries. Here’s how you get started.
Basics
The basics are the primary exercises that help strengthen and condition your overall body, building a solid foundation for the different skills moving forward. The basics consist of push-ups, pull-ups, squats, dips, and planks. It’s important that you are able to do moderately high reps on each before tackling harder skills to prevent injury and actually being able to do them.
Frogstand
The frogstand is basically one of the stepping stones for the handstand. It safely gets you used to being (partially) upside down and introduces you to balancing on your fingers, calluses, and palm comfortably, prepping for a medium part in the actual handstand.
Handstands
Handstands are pretty much always learned, due to their amazing looks and practical use, so why not learn them ASAP? They require less strength than you normally think, and are more focused on form, technique, fear reduction, and adaptability. Once you are comfortable with it, you can practice other fun features, such as the handstand push-up, one-arm handstand, and handstand press.
L-sit
The L-sit is a versatile exercise you can use for other skills. It stretches tight hamstrings and quads, requiring lots of flexibility in the legs and needs a tough core, good shoulder mobility, and strong triceps to even lift off the ground. Nevertheless, it’s easy and fast to learn with proper training and consistency.
Elbow Lever
The elbow lever is an easy and mostly endurance-based beginner exercise that teaches you how to engage your whole body to find and balance much more easily on a small center of gravity. It helps condition untrained wrists and joints, some of the weakest parts of the body.