why calisthenics?

How bodyweight training can build your best physique.

Have you ever heard that you cannot build a strong physique or grow muscle mass if you train using only your bodyweight? Why is it then that the gymnasts can have such muscular, powerful and proportionate bodies when they almost only train with their bodyweight?

The truth is that your body doesn’t get stronger, more powerful or doesn’t look fitter because of the tools you use. The only thing your body recognizes is resistance, and it doesn’t matter whether that resistance is caused by dumbbells, pulleys or your own body weight. It is possible to reach almost any of your fitness goals using little to no equipment at all, as long as you put adequate stress on your body.

There is an almost infinite number of exercises and variations you can use to apply the right resistance to the right muscles, whether your goal is endurance, muscle size, fat loss, strength etc…

In fact, focusing on bodyweight training might be the best way to reach all of these goals at the same time, especially with a method like ours.

At Enso Calisthenics, we train strength, endurance and mobility. While it may seem like we do not care much about looks, there is something interesting to understand here. Some of us care a lot, some of us care less, but as long as we focus on strength, endurance, and mobility, we all end up with a great looking physique as a result of this training, just like gymnasts. This means that whether your goal is purely aesthetic or not at all, you will look great anyway!

Training with our bodyweight means that we always put pressure on our whole body at the same time, engaging our core and every muscle of our body, as well as our nervous system. This is a very effective way to burn fat and also a great metabolism booster that will make your body burn fat faster for several hours after a session. In the same way, training strength will increase your metabolism for several hours after a session, which we also call the after-burn effect.

Strength endurance exercises will force you to burn more calories during the exercise.

Both strength training and strength endurance training will increase muscle mass as the demand for strength increases in your training.

The other great advantage of training like a gymnast and that can hardly be found anywhere else is how proportionately your body transforms. If you follow a balanced method like ours, you very seldom isolate muscles and therefore the risk of imbalance, both physiologically and aesthetically, disappears. Your body becomes lean and perfectly proportionate, without you putting much thought into it as you would with regular training regimens.

In conclusion, it can be said that calisthenics training is the most straight-forward way to build an athletic physique since it is the most natural form of training and every single part of your body improves at the same time, thus guaranteeing you grow muscle or get lean with optimal body proportions.