How to start calisthenics as a beginner (Avoid this mistake!)

When I first started calisthenics, I trained 3 to 5 hours a week very consistently. Like a lot of people starting out with this stuff, I did not get many results. After 5 years of training, I was still stuck around this beginner/intermediate level of strength, and my physique was just okay. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted to achieve as a result of all my hard work.

In the 5 years since then, I’ve been able to train for less than 40 minutes a week, and in that time, make consistent, measurable progress every month. In doing so, I’ve reached actual advanced levels of strength, hitting my lifetime goals, and my physique directly reflects this progress.

For the first 5 years of my training, I made the same mistake that most beginners make when starting out in calisthenics. It’s the thing that holds most people back from ever getting a result that they’re actually happy with, despite putting in the time and effort consistently to show up, train, and do the work. For me, it was only sheer determination, a lot of time, and a fair bit of luck that I actually stumbled across the truth.

I’m going to show you now exactly what that mistake is so that you can avoid making it like I did. Not only will you accelerate your progress by years, but you’ll also avoid potentially never reaching your goals at all, as happens to so many people who start out doing calisthenics.

The Common Approach To Calisthenics

Here’s how most people approach calisthenics when they start out. They see the end goals, the level of strength that we’re trying to build up to eventually. Maybe they give them a go and realise very quickly that those moves are impossible. So, realising that they can’t train those movements, they look for movements that are achievable—lower-level movements within their capability that they can actually use in their training. Then they start training those, and they keep training them. And when those things don’t seem to work, they add in more—more exercises, more sets, more reps, more workouts.

Then, when 3, 6, or 12 months down the track, their body and strength have hardly changed, they start getting frustrated. And rightly so, because working consistently for little to no tangible result is insanity. There’s no point doing that. It’s at this point that many people either quit and never reach their goal, or they continue adding more and more work to their weekly training routine until they get injured and have to stop, never reaching their goal.

The Key Mistake

The problem with that approach is that it obviously doesn’t work. The end goals are too hard for you to train. That makes sense—if they weren’t, you wouldn’t need to be training in the first place. You’d already be jacked, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. There’d be no progress left to make. But here’s the issue with what most people then do: the movements that you then use to train and build up to the goals are too easy to stimulate anywhere near the rate of growth and adaptation that you need your body to make in order to build the strength that you ultimately want.

So, what’s the middle ground then? How do we bridge this gap between impossible goals and exercises that are too easy to get us to those goals? The key mistake that almost everybody makes when doing this is mistaking the need for low absolute difficulty with low relative intensity. And I’ll explain what I mean.

Low Relative Intensity Is A Waste of Time

Realise that low-intensity training will get you nowhere. Work that is anywhere below your maximum strength capacity doesn’t stimulate growth. It’s just not useful for any reason. If you’ve ever felt like you’re treading water with your training, doing a lot of work that doesn’t really feel like it has any purpose, then you’ve already experienced this intuitively. And you are not lazy for feeling unmotivated by this sort of training—in fact, you are dead right. There’s no reason to ever do it.

The reason you don’t have the body or the ability that you want is because you haven’t learned to generate enough maximum force yet. Hence your lack of muscles. And how do you think you could get better at generating maximum force? The reality is quite simple: by trying as hard as possible. So what we need to get a result is training that is as heavy as we can possibly handle at every point in time while still being possible for us to actually perform. That’s what I mean by maximum relative intensity.

So, how the hell do we achieve that? Glad you asked. There are two parts to this, and if you understand these two principles, you’ll never need to waste another rep training in your life. Every single thing you do is going to get you results, and getting jacked and super strong in 40 minutes a week becomes a very achievable reality.

Principle #1: Everything Scales to Zero

The first thing I want you to forget forever is thinking that you need a certain level of strength before you can start training properly toward your strength goals. The thing you need to realise is that all the movements that you want to build can be scaled to zero difficulty. All the big strength goals that you want to achieve—they are all just basic, simple movement patterns loaded to a really high level of absolute difficulty. And in the same vein, all of those movements can be scaled down the other direction and made easier, all the way down to where they require no strength whatsoever to perform.

An easy example of this is the one-arm chin-up. This is just a basic vertical pulling motion, and at the upper end of the spectrum, you have the one-arm chin-up. This is an end goal for me, something I’m still battling to try and achieve properly. It’s hard. It requires an elite level of muscle mass and low body fat to perform. If you build to this movement, you’re sorted—your physique is guaranteed to be nuts by the time you get there.

On the other end of the spectrum, we can scale this exact same movement pattern down to zero. Put your arm over your head now, and then pull your hand down to your chest. That’s the exact same movement pattern as the one-arm chin-up, just made lighter. So now we have two ends of the spectrum. We can find a point in between.

Imagine we take a gymnastics ring, anchor our arm to that, and then we just use our legs to guide us through the movement pattern, putting just a little bit of weight on that hand. So now you can see the one pattern can be scaled all the way down from an end-goal level of strength to something that my mom can do and train comfortably in her home.

Step 1: As Easy As Needed

So, now we’ve established that there’s no reason not to be able to train the end goals that you want to build toward. The first step is to make everything as easy as needed so that you can directly train the actual goals you’re trying to build toward, regardless of your current level of strength.

Principle #2: Low Intensity Is Useless

The second belief I want you to throw away right now is thinking that because you’re weaker, you need to ease into intense training. I’m going to say this once, and I want you to listen very, very carefully: you will not hurt yourself by training intensely. You will hurt yourself by training too much and depriving your body of adequate rest and recovery. In fact, by not training intensely, you actually avoid doing the thing that stimulates your body to build strength and mobility. And in doing so, you leave your body most vulnerable to injury—whether it’s during training or walking around the block.

Intensity is not risky. Too much training is.

So, the second thing I want you to realise is that when you are training, anything that is below your absolute maximum level of force output is a waste of time. Now that you know that you can make everything easier, we can now titrate the difficulty of everything we do, making things harder until we find our strength limit. Then you can just work there.

We can now make things as hard as physically possible without worrying that we’re going to fail the rep because if we do, we can always scale things down and make it easier. What this means is that from the very first inch of your first rep of training, you can actually be challenging your maximum strength. This means you no longer have to waste 90% of your training time on sub-maximal filler work just to finally build up to a point of failure and get productive work time. Instead, you can just fail from the start of your set and simply continue training at this level of maximum intensity until you’ve had enough.

By doing this, we can cut out 90% of our training time without any loss, and actually eliminate a lot of injury-provoking junk work. But more importantly, it means you can actually start doing the training that works. So often we not only do this 90% of work that doesn’t really do much at all, but in doing that, we get distracted and don’t ever do the 10% of max-intensity work that actually gets results.

Step #2: …But No Easier!

By having nothing but the important work left to do, we can put all our attention into that and make sure it happens. So, step two is to train as heavy as you possibly can at all times, at every point, in every rep that you ever do—and do nothing other than that.

How To Start Calisthenics As A Beginner

If you’re just starting calisthenics or you’ve been doing it for a while and find yourself spending hours every week training while getting no tangible results for your effort, listen—I hear you. I’ve been there. It’s very, very common. There’s a reason that it’s frustratingly difficult to sustain—it’s just not necessary.

If you want your body to actually change in response to the work you’re doing, don’t waste your precious time on low-intensity crap. The only way that you will get stronger and transform your body is by aggressively pushing for it with everything you have. It does not take much time, but it takes intensity. It won’t happen by itself.

There’s only two things you’ve got to do.

Step 1: Take the movements that you want to build and scale them down to a point where you can actually train them through a full range of motion.

Step 2: Make it no easier than absolutely necessary. Make things as heavy as you possibly can at all times, then just stop and rest. Let your body recover.

Believe me, if you apply this properly, you’ll quickly find that strength gain is an absurdly simple, time-efficient, and straightforward process.

And as you watch your strength, your muscle mass, and the definition of your body improve like clockwork month to month from just 40 minutes a week of input, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been doing this already for the last 10 years.