I've been wanting to do calisthenics for a while now because all those cool tricks are just so impressive. I've been training at the gym for 3 years now.
Do you need to add weight for a solid calisthenics workout in order to achieve those insane swaggy moves? Or can you progress with just body weight?
Do I quit my gym or do those calisthenics gods also work out at the gym with typical exercises?

I started out with calisthenics and still do some of it in my routines along with weight training. It all depends on your goals, you can get very very strong with just body weight exercises.

This post was edited by chevys10 on Apr 4 2017 07:34pm

If you still want to do legs and lift weights keep your gym membership. If you just wanna do calisthenics and have access to some sort of outdoor gym (and the weather allows it) just go there and skip the gym.

You won't need extra weight, body weight is sufficient.

most of them just sit at the park and take turns working out all day long.
for them its a lifestyle, they are there 2-10 hours a day at their local park chillin.

keep your gym membo, keep working out, add calisthenics to your workouts slowly until you feel you can start getting into the more advanced or skillful exercises/tricks

Some of them lift, some of them don't lift. Body weight only guys can get strong as heck ... stronger than most professional athletes. It's a personal choice. If your FOCUS is on callisthenics, you may want to dump the gym, but I don't see why you can't augment one with the other unless you're obsessed with doing one over the other.

Consider reading Daniel Kunitz's Lift. It goes through the history of lifting, but it gives ample coverage to callisthenics. It's where he points at the culture of different physical pursuits that you may glimpse your true passion

well you need to read books to see why each one differs in benefits

There is too much to be said but the general idea is....Calisthenics gives you overall strength when it comes to EVERYTHING. like a lebron james. You're just legit in every field. You are balanced. You can maintain decent cardio and flexibility.(well you should) Your muscles arent too strong in a certain area. Cause why do you even need to bench 700lbs when you can still bench 400lbs and wreck people?

Lol.

Think about it this way....... You will not see the worlds strongest men swinging around like gymnasts. You just won't see mr olympia doing athletic shit.

Gymnasts will slowly max out their muscle and their workouts will maintain their body. It will be that roman god body that can fight in war. Which is cardio and strength when it comes to actual war.

Before I turned into a nerd no life long distance runner....i used to train at a popular MMA gym and some of the best fighters are all gymnasts. They adapt to EVERYTHING rapidly and still keep their strength.

So just pick what you want to do.

The majority of guys just want to look sexy like girls. There is just not enough time to do anything beyond that.

You can get away with like 20-30 minutes of lifting 6 days a week and still look good lol.

What do you want to do?

This post was edited by expressaa on Apr 5 2017 04:57pm