Calisthenics Workout Routines / Plan

Calisthenics Workout Routines

To train effective it´s important to develop a training routine and a plan. The plan should support your personal goals and should structure your calisthenics workout.

There are many programs and offers all over the internet that can be usefull. Pay attention while using this type of routines , pdf weekplans and fitness apps, because these routines are basic plans matching on the average athlet not on your personal requirements.

To get the optimal result, its reccomend to concern with planning training, rest and nutrition. This will give the knowledge to design a own training concept or modify the programms / plans for your personal requirements.

Step 1: Define your personal goals – What is the result?
Before starting to look for the exercises and the sets it´s time to be honest to yourself. What is your personal goal and why you wanna start workout?

Typical goals are:

Get fit in everyday life
Loose some weight or get slim
Get a good phyisque and athletic body
Get in shape or summer holiday
Learn new skills and patterns of movement
More imporatant is the “why”. The reason you want to reach your goal is the best motivation on your way to reach it.Be honest to yourself to find the right way to motivated yourself all the way till you get it. Sometimes answering these questions will rearrange all your plans.

Describing the goal should look like:

I train calisthenics to get athletics and impress my friends with awesome new skills.
I train calisthenics to get a nice beach-body for holiday and get fitter in everyday life for the rest of my life.
Step 2: Recognize personal weaknesses and use advantages
One of the underestimated things is analysis of the personal skills and Disadvantages. These important points show how to improve plans to reacht the specific goal. This is the main reason why prepared plans in apps or via pdf aren´t that personal that it seems.

Personal trainer work a lot with optimize the plans on the skills and disadvantages to their clients. This takes time and in case of a PT cost a lot of money, but it makes results.

Some thougths for the programming of your personal plan.

Small and leigthweigt athlet

Lever exercises (front lever, back lever) and static holds in general will be much easier because of low levers.
Stimulating muscle growth will be dificult.
Big and tall athlet

Static hold will be much heavier to learn, because of the higher levers.
Stimulating muscle grow with basic exercises is very easy.
Step 3: Choose methods – How i will reach the goal?
There are many popular methods (HITT High Intense Invervall Training, split muscle groups, split bend and straight arm exercises) to build a basic structure for a training plan.

Depending on the goal different methods can be useful

Increase of strength endurance

HIIT training with tough exercises f.e. in circuit training session.
Superset training (Sets & Reps).
Increase of the maximum strength

Specific skill training with increasing progressions (less but very effective repetitions).
High time under tension – long and intensive holds of static movements.
Step 4: Choose exercises and division of units

After choosing the method the detailled plans starts. Main target of this part is to choose the right exercises to reach the goal.

Find calisthenics exercise at our exercise database: Calisthenics Exercises

To plan exercises the focus should be directed to intensity, time of rest and combination of exercises. A useful order of exercises is very important.

Some simple rules:
Explosive exercises before static exercises
To train explosive new movement like Muscle Ups they should be done first. Training on maximum strenght before will decrease the performance a lot, while traning explosive power don´t affect the maximum strenght that much.
Useful progressions before avoidance exercises
Many exercises have a transfer potential to other movements, but it´s more effective to train the target exercise or progressions (lower lever or straddle) directly. It´s possible to connect the training of different parts of the target in single exercises. For example to learn handstand push ups the handstand can be trained while pike presses can be used to increase the strength for the push movement.
Structure in progression training
Progression exercises are a great way to learn new moves, but they should be connected intelligent. For example if too much repetitions of a lower progressions are made, there is no power for the highest progression.
First start with the highest progression and move down to lower ones.
Muscle grow while resting
If you want to gain your muscles you should plan exhaustive rest between the units. It´s also reccommend to work on active regeneration with foam rolling, mobility and other things.
Step 5: Write the plan down and record the progress

If you have a plan and concept write it down. Start with recording the results of everyday from the first day on.
It doesn´t matter if you do it with pen/paper or a excel sheet, it´s important to do it.

To keep your motiviation high all the way set milestones in your plan. For example special exercises to master, important progressions and other stuff like this.

Step 6: Continouity and optimizing
It´s important to check if the planned results could be reached and optimize the plan on the way to the final goal.

It´s possible that there are many changes and maybe the main target also changes.

Conclusion
Maybe you expect a fully written down plan with exercises, sets and units. Plans like this you will find a lot in world wide web.

Maybe these hints will help to improve this plans and program your own training.