The 9 Basic Exercises to start your Calisthenics training

Pistol squats are a golden standard of legs and buttocks training. Although this is a very complex exercise, it can be facilitated both for beginners and for advanced athletes. You should proceed gradually with pistol squats after you have mastered the ordinary squats. 

We’re going to start with your regular bodyweight squats first. Don’t worry about the pistol squats when you’re first starting out. You’ll get an excellent amount of leg muscle stimulation with this basic exercise. 

Push-up is a fundamental movement in calisthenics (also in fitness in general), but still, not everyone can do it properly. As a beginner in calisthenics, pushing against your bodyweight could still feel like a ton of bricks laid on top of you. You can make the regular push-up easier by elevating yourself. Start with the wall push-up. It’s similar to the motion of a regular push-up with much less weight on you. Finally, you’ll get to do proper form and bust a number of sets!

To make the exercise harder, you can move to a lower plane. You can move to a table, then a bench, to a stool, until you can do it on the floor.

The back bridge or the “wheel pose” in yoga is an excellent exercise for the development of the gluteus muscles, hamstrings, spine extensors, and trapezoids. Moreover, such workouts provide stretching of all front muscles, including the breast, abdominals, and quadriceps of the thigh. If you can’t cope with a standard version, you can start with a simplified one – where your head and upper back touches the floor but you gradually increase the height. 

You can also start with another easy variation by standing 2-3 feet against the wall. Raise your arms then try to reach the wall backward. Gradually bend lower until you can finally reach the floor.

To train your triceps, bench dips are the entry point for the harder variations. With this exercise, you’ll train your pecs, lats, and deltoids, too. You can easily adjust the difficulty of the exercise by moving your legs more forward. You can also place your feet on a chair to really put stress on your triceps. Once you’ve mastered this move, you’ll be doing regular dips in no time.

Hanging frog raises, AKA bent knee hanging leg raises is stable to develop a strong core while also building you a strong grip. The movement involves a hip flexion and core stabilization which means that you’ll have much transferability to other activities that require you a stable core (which is almost everything that you do). 

There are three things to keep in mind when doing the exercise. First is given: don’t rely on momentum to get your knees close to your chest. Second is resisting the urge to sway back at the downward motion of the movement. Everything should be nice and controlled. And last is that you have to tilt your pelvis forward when doing the exercise. This makes you use your core more. More core engagement, more gains!

Just remember that doing tons of ab exercise won’t build you a 6 pack. Remember that a 6 pack is made in the kitchen.

Like the back bridge, L-sit demonstrates an ideal balance of strength and mobility of the body. This exercise involves pectorals, shoulders, quadriceps, hips, and triceps, providing back and thigh stretching.

Sit on the floor with your legs straight. Put your hands flat outside of your hips. Then concentrate your body weight on your palms, tear your legs off the floor and parallel to it. Your body should resemble the letter L. You should be pushing down to the floor hard to get your body up. Shoulders should be depressed and arms locked straight.

If you are a beginner, start with the position where the knees are pressed to the chest. Gradually increasing the stretch of your legs.

One common weakness of the movement is when quadriceps start to cramp hard. This is caused by a lack of strength in that area. You can resolve this with sitting leg lifts.

Leg lifts are done seated pike position. Hands-on the side. You can put your hands more forward to make the exercise more difficult. Concentrate on lifting your legs by contracting your quadriceps. Hold at the top then down. That’s one rep. This exercise will strengthen your weak point to get the L sit down.

If you are advanced and strong enough, you can elevate straight legs higher, so that your body resembles letter V.

Handstand provides intensive upper body training, mainly your shoulders. It also teaches to keep the balance. Unusual position causes your muscles to adapt more, providing a good effect on your shoulders mobility. The first try can seem frightening, so it is recommended to use the wall for finding balance at first. 

Here are a few tips to get your handstand training down

The lower back is an often neglected body part to train because the exercises are not that popular. This does not mean that they aren’t effective for developing your lower back. The bent-knee lower body lift will help you strengthen and build the neglected body part and it’s so simple to do. Since you’ve probably haven’t tried this exercise before, after a number of reps, you’ll surely feel the burn.

Pull-up is a basic exercise that gave its origin to calisthenics. It is theoretically simple but surprisingly difficult exercise. All you need is a crossbar, high enough to perform pull-ups while hanging. You can even do it on a sturdy tree branch or support beams. 

For this exercise, you have to purchase resistance bands. The band will assist you to carry some of your weight as you do the pull-ups. Choose the band level that suits you. The bands can go hard (offers less assistance) to soft (more assistance).

If you are not still ready to full pull-up, you can start with Australian variation. It is a perfect way to strengthen the necessary muscles involved. If the standard pull-ups are too simple for you, try one arm pull-ups to feel the challenge.

Once you master these exercises, you can move on to static workouts, known as isometric. They are much more complicated as you’ll have to control the whole body. You’ll be fascinated by such positions as “flag”, or some variations of plank. You can watch a video of calisthenics athletes on Youtube or read this article to know what the human body is really capable of.