Imagine this: it’s your first day going to the gym. You’re ready to get some gains and become strong. When you walk in, you see a guy hanging sideways from a bar with a weight attached to him. It’s like he’s defying gravity! “How is this possible?,” you ask. It’s through the power of calisthenics. Calisthenics is the use of your body weight to exercise. With the power of calisthenics and the power of your mental fortitude, you could also defy gravity, like that gym guy. Over recent years, calisthenics has become more popular and even surpasses weightlifting because of how impressive it is.
Calisthenics is way better than weightlifting because it gives you a variety of benefits while weightlifting solely gives you strength. The well-known benefits of calisthenics are improvements in athletic capability and mobility, core strength, balance and coordination, fat burn, and muscle gain. Roselle Espina, a writer who specializes in fitness, states: “on the other hand, keeping balance is essential in calisthenics too. You have to learn to balance yourself as you lift up your body weight through your muscles…Improved posture is another end result of calisthenics. As you enhance your strength, balance and flexibility, there goes also having proper posture.” Weightlifting doesn’t provide any of these benefits, besides core strength with a specific exercise. Why do weightlifting when you could do calisthenics and improve in all five of these aspects at the same time? It is way more efficient and more fun to do since you use your body weight to do things like pull-ups. According to Alex Robles, a physician and physical trainer who graduated from Cornell Medical College, calisthenics are all “compound exercises.” A push-up, for example, “will train your chest, shoulders, triceps, core, and serratus anterior if done correctly. By training multiple muscle groups at once (rather than isolating them individually), you will burn more calories, build more muscle, and lose more fat than if you did regular isolation-based training.” With all of these factors, you could be heading towards a lean body. Calisthenics is also way more accessible and affordable than weightlifting. Plates alone could cost hundreds of dollars, while calisthenic exercises are available free of charge in your own room.
Time and time again, calisthenics has helped athletes in professional sports or even small hobbies like breakdancing. They mostly do things like squats, pushups, and planks which increase their core and physical strength for events.
Not to mention, calisthenics is challenging like weightlifting is. Another key factor that makes calisthenics better is that your strength and ability carries over to weightlifting. This means that someone who is experienced in calisthenics will be able to lift similar amounts to regular lifters. However, this would be the opposite for people who only lifted. Normal lifters’ abilities will not carry over to calisthenics. This is because lifters will not have the same core strength and athletic ability that a calisthenics athlete would. They would most likely struggle with managing their body weight to do pull-ups, handstand pushups, and all of those other flashy calisthenics moves.
Weightlifting has been proven to make you stronger or give you more muscle. Despite this fact, calisthenics will still reign over weightlifting because lifting is an isolation-based training. This means that your muscle groups have to be isolated and trained one by one. This will make it much more of a hassle than calisthenics, which train multiple muscle groups of your body at one time, preventing an uneven leg-to-arm proportion.
Going even further, weightlifting is not as safe as calisthenics. Weights pose a much greater risk of injury than calisthenics does. According to Tony Lu, a lifter and a trainer at Gympulsive, “pretty much all calisthenics exercises are going to engage the core and stabilizing muscles more than the weightlifting counterparts would…Athletes often have to be in total control over the body weight whilst they’re placed in unstable positions. Training with calisthenics could potentially help to increase the ability to stabilize our bodies in times like this and improve athleticism that way.” Although calisthenics isn’t able to build as much acute strength as weightlifting is, the pros still simply outweigh that of weightlifting. Not only is it beneficial and accessible, it is just cool because of how impressive and unbelievable it looks.
What are you waiting for? It’s time to get to work on calisthenics. Calisthenics improves your athletic ability, core strength, and balance. They are also easy, accessible, and fun for anyone who’s looking to start gaining muscle. Calisthenics provides way more cool opportunities than weightlifting ever will. Therefore, calisthenics is better than weightlifting. This type of workout is a must-try.
