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Progressive Calisthenics - The Official Blog for the PCC Community

Archives for October 2013

Building Strength Without Mass

October 29, 2013 By Al Kavadlo 53 Comments

al1 I’ve been getting at least one almost every single day for a while now. In the beginning they were annoying, but after the first few times I actually started to get a kick out of them. I even came to find them flattering. After all, the people who send them are generally well intentioned and often don’t realize they are being rude. Some of them are actually very polite. I’m talking, of course, about emails like this one:

al2_emailIf I had seen the me of today when I was a teen, I probably would have wondered the same thing. After all, the main reason I got into strength training was because I was a scrawny kid who wanted to build some muscle. Fourteen-year-old Al would be very disappointed that after 20+ years of working out I still wasn’t as massive as the Incredible Hulk.

In fact, even though I’m about 30 pounds heavier now than I was at age fourteen (in spite of not growing an inch taller since then), I’m still a fairly small guy. And though my bodyfat percentage sits comfortably in the 8-12% range (I tend to naturally lean out in the summer), at a height of 5’11’’, I’m incredibly small by bodybuilding standards. Good thing I’m not interested in becoming a bodybuilder!
al3 As a kid, however, I desperately wanted to bulk up. Though I managed to beef up to 190 pounds by my early twenties, I eventually came to find that I felt and performed better when I wasn’t carrying so much mass. Though bulky muscle-men seemed ubiquitous to me in my youth, as an adult I soon discovered that to people who weren’t fans of pro wrestling and Arnold movies (which, shockingly, is most people), being overly bulky is a turn-off. It took me a long time to change my perspective, but I’ve since learned to embrace my physique and take advantage of its benefits.

Though there are a few notable exceptions, most advanced bodyweight practitioners tend not to have huge, imposing physiques. Instead, high level calisthenics athletes usually have more of a lean, athletic build. After all, if pound-for-pound strength is the goal, it helps to be relatively light. The higher your muscle to weight ratio, the better off you’re going to be in regard to bodyweight training. Though you definitely need some muscle mass to achieve high levels of strength, it’s more pragmatic to make a little muscle go a long way. At a certain point having too much mass becomes cumbersome. It’s weighs you down more than it helps.

Build Your Foundation

Regardless of whether your aim is to add muscle mass or simply get strong, the first thing you need to do when you begin training calisthenics is build a solid foundation. Though everyone starts at a different place, building to at least 40 bodyweight squats, 30 push-ups, 20 hanging knee raises and 10 pull-ups (those numbers might look familiar) is a prerequisite that should be achievable within a few months (or a few years, depending on where you’re starting).

Women should aim for the same numbers, but with knee push-ups and Australian pull-ups in place of the full ones. This is not an issue of sexism. Biologically, women have a lower propensity for upper-body strength as compared to men. Of course with proper training, women have the potential to develop serious upper-body strength!

al4-adrienne Once you’ve established that baseline of fitness, you’ll have likely built a bit of strength, stamina and muscle along the way. If you aren’t looking to grow your muscles past this point, however, it’s time to start training more advanced exercises and leave the high reps to your warm-ups.

Skill Out

It is often said that strength is a skill, and like any skill, the way that you get better is consistent practice. The goal of a strength workout is not to focus on the quantity of reps, but instead the quality. I recommend sticking with sets of 3-5 reps. However, it is helpful to add additional sets to offset the low rep range and allow for adequate volume. For this reason, I suggest performing 3-5 sets of each movement in a given workout when strength is the primary goal. Remember, you don’t need to do the same amount of volume as you would in a hypertrophy workout. The most you’ll probably ever need to do of a single exercise is 25 reps per workout. We’re not necessarily looking to get a pump, either. In fact, you’ll want to take longer breaks in between sets when you’re doing pure strength work than when the goal is mass-building. I recommend anywhere between 2-5 minutes of rest between sets.

It’s important to understand that strength is as much neurological as it is physical. Whenever you try to get your body to do something that it isn’t used to doing, it has to build a new neurological pathway to make it happen. Even when you ask your body to perform a familiar movement pattern, it will have a hard time if the leverage has been made less favorable than what it’s become accustomed to. Your brain has never had to send that specific message to your muscle before, so it must work very hard in order to arrive there. The message often comes in fuzzy.

Imagine using a machete to chop your way through the thick vines of a jungle. This is how hard your brain must work to get your body to do something for the first time. Now imagine you’ve lived in that jungle for ten years and walked the same few routes over and over, gradually clearing away the brush little by little. Eventually the path would be easy to walk and you’d arrive on the other side much more quickly, and with much less effort.

al-5 The same thing happens in your brain with consistent training. Over time, the pathway becomes clearer and the message arrives faster. The body adapts to whatever stimuli it is consistently exposed to. A body that is regularly called upon to apply force against resistance will get better at doing so.

Lean Machine

Diet may be the single biggest factor that determines whether or not you will increase or decrease in size. If you want to grow, you’ve got to eat a lot. Conversely, if you’re not interested in gaining weight, you shouldn’t be overeating. Though nutrition is a bit more complex than a simple calories-in minus calories-out equation, nobody ever gained significant bulk without the calories to back it up. Conversely, you can’t lose fat without being in a caloric deficit.

Personally, I follow a very simple diet: I eat when I am hungry and stop when I am full. I avoid mindless snacking and stay away from processed foods. I’m not trying to gain mass, but I’m not trying to lose it either. People love to ask me how many grams of protein I consume each day or how I time my carbohydrate intake, but the truth is I don’t concern myself with such trivialities. There is no need for the average person to possess a profound knowledge of nutrition in order to have a lean, strong physique. One need not understand how free radicals and antioxidants work in order to know that eating blueberries is healthy.

al6 Regardless of your ambitions, the most important thing is being consistent with your training. Focus on making regular exercise a part of your lifestyle. Don’t over-analyze the details, especially if you aren’t doing the work physically. Of course if nutritional science is of genuine interest to you, there’s no reason to ignore that yearning.

Just don’t make your life any more complicated than it has to be. When all is said and done, the most important thing is to respect and appreciate the body you have. It’s great to strive for physical perfection, but the journey matters more than the destination.

***

About Al Kavadlo: Al Kavadlo is the lead instructor for Dragon Door’s Progressive Calisthenics Certification. Recognized worldwide for his amazing bodyweight feats of strength as well as his unique coaching style, Al is the author of three books, including Raising The Bar: The Definitive Guide to Pull-up Bar Calisthenics and Pushing The Limits! Total Body Strength With No Equipment. Read lots more about Al on his website:www.AlKavadlo.com.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, Century Test, consistency, diet, muscle mass, skill training, strength, strength training, weight gain, weight loss

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass: Part II

October 22, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 210 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part II

10comm1Part I of this article can be found here.

COMMANDMENT V: Focus on Progress—and Utilize a Training Journal!

Believe it or not, there are some folks who focus on the previous four Commandments—they exhaust their muscles, work hard, use the best exercises and put all their energy into a small number of sets—and still make very little in the way of meaningful gains. This is true even if they train year-to-year. Maybe this is you—I’m sure you know folks like this.

Why does this travesty happen?

Is it genetics? Is it the fact that they train without steroids? Is it because their balls haven’t dropped? Is it the fact that their gym doesn’t sell the latest superbolictastic high-sugar/high toxicity supps, bro?!

None of the above, Jim. To discover the true reason, read the following excerpt from the Convict Conditioning Ultimate Bodyweight Log:

If making progress in training is so simple, why do so few wannabe athletes ever achieve a good level of strength and muscle—let alone a great level?

The answer is that few trainees take advantage of the windows of opportunity their training presents to them. You see, when you work out, your body adapts to cope with the stress, but it only adapts a tiny little bit; this is especially true once you get beyond the beginner stages of training. Improvements are small—maybe you add a rep here; you improve your form there; you increase your recovery time somewhere else. Over months and years, however, these small increases eventually add up to very big increases. This is how seemingly “inhuman” athletes double and triple their strength, add inches of solid muscle, and transform themselves into superior physical beings.

Sadly, since most trainees aren’t paying attention to those tiny changes, they never build on them the way they should. These little weekly changes are actually windows of opportunity. If you could increase your strength by just 1% every week, you could more than double your strength in just two years. But most trainees never get anywhere close to doubling their strength, because they aren’t keeping track of their training accurately. They fail to recognize that 1% adaptation—the rep here, the improved form there. If you miss these little improvements, how can you build on them to make big improvements?

1% is actually a pretty small target to hit. When you rely on memory, instinct or feeling—as so many trainers do—to hit this target, it becomes very fuzzy. (Which is the last thing you want from small target, right?) Writing your progress down in a log makes this small target clear and easy to see. It makes it quantifiable. Athletes who begin writing simple log entries of their workouts find they suddenly know what they need to do to progress every single time they work out. They never miss that tiny 1%.

There you have it. In reality, the previous four Commandments are worthless unless you harness them all to make progress—week to week, month to month, year to year. It doesn’t matter how seemingly insignificant these improvements are. Over the months and years they add up. In a nutshell, the “secret” to drug-free muscle and strength gain is to become acutely aware of the tiny improvements in your performance, and build on them on a regular basis. The best way to make this happen is to keep a training journal.

10comm2Small changes in physical conditioning can add up to big changes over time—but only if you recognize them and build on them.

Anyone who is familiar with my writings knows that I am a huge believer in keeping a training log to determine progress—especially where muscle-building is the goal. It always amazes me that folks will pay hundreds of bucks on worthless supplements, but won’t take a few minutes to keep a log of their training. It’s ironic, coz a simple training log, used correctly, will do more for your physique than any over-the-counter supplement on the planet. I could write a whole article on the benefits of keeping a log…monitoring progress, contemplating feedback, mastering training science, improving workout mindfulness…the list goes on!

I put together the CC training log because a lot of athletes complained to me that most commercial logs weren’t geared towards bodyweight. The log means a lot to me, and I put a ton of advice and cool photos in there. I’m real proud of the journal for many reasons, but I’m honestly not trying to sell you anything here. You don’t have to buy this log to keep a journal…the beauty of calisthenics is that you don’t have to buy anything!

Just get your hands on a cheap notepad, or use your computer. But please, do it. Do it for old Coach!

COMMANDMENT VI: You Grow When You Rest. So Rest!

Again—the issue of rest (“training frequency” for you guys with a better vocabulary than me) immediately follows on from the previous idea of progress.

Let me ask you a simple question. If you really wanted to improve on your last workout—add that rep, tighten up your form—how would you want to approach that workout?

Would you want to be tired, weary, beat-up?

No! That’s nuts! Obviously you’d want to be as well-rested, as fresh as possible, to tear into your workout with as much energy as you could get, to break some records, increase your reps, improve your personal best!

10comm3To build mass, you must keep beating your previous performances—but it’s virtually impossible to be at your best unless you are rested. (Athletics legend Sir Roger Bannister rested for a full five days before breaking the four minute mile record!) Al Kavadlo demonstrates perfect close pushups.

It sounds like a dumb question. Of course you’d want to be as fresh, as rested as possible if you really wanted to give your all and maximize your muscle-growth stimulation, right?

Yet this is exactly the opposite of what most wannabe bodybuilders do. Being brainwashed by the muscle rags—typically by trying to copy the programs of drugged-up steroid junkies, who can get away with training like pussies and working out seven times a day—they desperately try to deplete any mental and hormonal energy they have by training more and more often. Some of these guys are training the body hard four times a week…then they wonder why they aren’t improving!

You don’t need to be Kojak to know why they aren’t improving. You don’t need a PhD in molecular myology to know why they aren’t improving. They are tired. Their muscles haven’t had a chance to rest and heal, let alone recover and increase their size and strength. I admire the willpower of folks who are constantly working out, even when they are spinning their wheels—I’ve done it too. Some of it comes down to the glamor of training; we become so seduced by the idea of the exercises, we forget that we are tearing our muscles down when we train. We have forgotten that one simple, ancient muscle-building fact—your muscles grow when you rest, not when you train.

How much rest you need for optimal performance depends on your age, your constitution, your training experience, your other activities, etc. But I can give you a few general pointers:

  • Working any muscle more than twice a week is usually a mistake if you want to gain size.
  • How often you train doesn’t matter a s***—how often you make progress is what matters.
  • Old school bodybuilders like Steve Reeves and Reg Park became huge by training—hard—only three days per week. To this day, many of the most massive powerlifters only train three days per week. The idea that you need to train every day (or several times per day) to maximize your potential is bullshit.
  • Working a muscle hard once a week—and actually making progress—is better than working it four times per week and going backwards.
  • Never train any muscle hard two days in a row.
  • Bigger muscles typically take longer to recover than smaller muscles.
  • If a muscle group is sore, don’t train it!
  • Muscular training also depletes the hormonal and energy systems. If you feel low, tired or lacking energy, add another day or two of rest into your program—even if your muscles feel good.
  • Always take at least two days off per week, for maximum muscle gain—unless you are performing very low volume workouts. Even then, three or four days off per week is probably better.
  • The ultimate arbiter of a bodybuilding program is progress—in muscle size, but also in performance. If you are working hard but your reps aren’t increasing, add another rest day.

The bottom line: to build extra muscle you must continue to improve your performance by cranking out a greater workload over a small number of sets. To do this, your muscles (and your body) need to be rested. Rest is a bigger piece of the puzzle than most athletes ever realize—as a result, they never even come close to their full potential.

COMMANDMENT VII: Quit Eating “Clean” the Whole Time!

Ah, we’re on to nutrition now, boys and girls. My views on nutrition are so far from the norm that I even get snubbed at a George Zimmerman fundraiser. I can feel panties bunching with hatred and rage even as I write this. It’s a great feeling—so let’s keep going, huh?

Read a copy of any of the muscle or fitness based rags on the newsstands, and you’d think the perfect muscle meal was chicken breast with some broccoli—and hey, don’t forget some supplements thrown in on the side. Washed down with plenty of water.

Crock. Of. S**t.

If you are trying to pack on some muscle, eating junk now and again is not only okay, it’s positively anabolic. In Convict Conditioning 2, I wrote about the prison diet, and described how some very muscular, very strong athletes maintained incredible physiques on diets that—to the mainstream fitness world—would be considered totally inadequate, on many counts. Let me tell you, if those guys could get their hands on a little junk every day, they would bite your arms off for it! They knew it fuelled the fires of growth.

One of the biggest sensations in the modern bodybuilding world is a guy who—these days, anyhow—is known as Kali Muscle. Kali is 5’10” and weighs over 250lbs—with abs. Despite his bodyweight, Kali learned his trade in San Quentin, a prison culture surrounded by calisthenics athletes, and he can still perform impressive bodyweight feats like muscle-ups and the human flag. Kali says that he really began growing when he was in jail and began filling his body with “dirty” high-carb foods like Dunkin’ Stix, Honey Buns, ramen and tuna spread. He says the effect these high calorie “junk” foods had on his skinny body was so profound, that he rejected offers of steroids during his prison years. He didn’t need them.

Kali isn’t crazy. His words are the truth. This idea—that the odd “junk” item is good for your training—is not a new one. Many of the old-time strongmen thrived on food that is considered crap today. The Saxon brothers ate cakes and drank beer as a daily staple of their diet. John Grimek used to drive around with oversized Hershey bars in his glove box, for emergencies.

10comm4I love how folks pay over the odds for quick-acting protein, like “hydrolyzed” whey powder, but they avoid quick-acting carbs like the plague. Fast energy to recover from a depleting workout is way more useful than fast protein, which is probably worse than useless.

And throw some fatty stuff in there too, willya? Quit avoiding real “muscle foods” like red meat, egg yolks, ham, cheese and sausage. I have to laugh when I see skinny guys throwing thousands of bucks of amino acids and whey shakes down their necks, in a hopeless effort to get big. What the supplement companies (and their bitches, the fitness magazines) will never tell you is a basic fact known by every endocrinologist on the planet—testosterone (remember that? The muscle-building hormone?) is synthesized from cholesterol. That’s right…without taking in enough cholesterol from high-fat foods, your body cannot create testosterone, and it cannot build muscle.

Vegans are always moaning that meat is full of pathogens and the like, but—far from killing us off—recent studies show that red meat might be what’s responsible for our species’ abnormally long life-spans. Our hungry ancestors literally adapted to slabs of meat, building super-immunity in the process.

I’m not saying you should act like a fat pig and eat junk all day (although maybe you should if you can’t gain weight). If you want to get big you should eat a balanced, regulated diet. But eating “clean” the whole time will only hurt your gains. Throw in a little “junk” every day if you expect to get swole.

Go have that burger and a Twinkie. A couple hours later, you’ll have the best workout of your life. You might even grow.

COMMANDMENT IIX: Sleep More

Since Convict Conditioning first came out, I’ve been deluged by a lot of questions about prison athletes. It’s a subject folks—especially dudes—really seem interested in. How is it that prison athletes seem to gain and maintain so much dense muscle, when guys on the outside—who are taking supplements and working out in super-equipped gyms—can rarely gain muscle at all?

I could give you lots of reasons. Routine in eating and working is one. The motivation to train hard is one more. Absence of distractions is yet another. But there’s a bigger reason. I have been asked on many occasions if there’s a natural alternative for steroids—and I always answer the same: there is, but you can’t buy it from a drugstore. It’s called sleep. During sleep, your brain essentially orders your body to produce its own performance-enhancing drugs.

Inmates sleep like kings. I’m not saying that s***’s right, but there it is. Behind bars, when it’s time for Lights Out, you go to sleep. The time is always the same in the same institution—regular as clockwork. This is, essentially, how our ancestors lived—the sun goes down (Lights Out) and the brain and nervous system switch off for a well-deserved supercharge. Many convicts get ten hours per night—often with daily naps thrown in for good measure.

On the outside, it’s totally different. Folks can control their own artificial sunlight, using bulbs, lamps, LCD TVs, laptops and phones. They can go out and drink, or party, or watch Netflix all night, if they want. As a result, the sleeping patterns of most people today—especially young people—are chaos. And they wonder why they are plagued with insomnia and sleep problems…their brains don’t have a f***in clue what’s going on! There is no routine at all, and they definitely don’t get enough sleep—the average modern American gets well under seven hours, often much less than that.

10comm5If you want to build mass and blowtorch your bodyfat like Danny Kavadlo, skip the supplements and focus on getting more sleep!

Many training writers lump “rest and sleep” together under the same category. This is a mistake. Sleep is a unique physiological condition. Ten minutes of resting does not equate to ten minutes of sleep…or twenty minutes of sleep…or an hour of sleep. Sleep does everything rest does for the body and brain, but the opposite ain’t true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of programmed rest (see Commandment VI), but no amount of simple rest can give you what sleep is capable of. When you sleep:

  • Your brain produces Growth Hormone (GH)—dangerous, expensive and illegal on the streets, but healthy and free if you take a nap.
  • The brain generates natural melatonin—possibly the most powerful immunity and healing compound known to science. (As well as helping muscles heal, high melatonin levels may even ward off cancer. This stuff is magic!)
  • When you sleep, you brain produces Luteinizing Hormone (LH), which (in dudes) strongly stimulates the interstitial cells of your cojones to produce testosterone—the number-one bodybuilding chemical powerhouse.

And that’s just a taster of what sleep does for a bodybuilder. Sleep is the cornerstone of muscle growth—and if that doesn’t persuade you to try and get more sleep at night (daily naps are great, too), then how about this: extra sleep can make you ripped.

It’s not something most people understand, but your sleep-wake cycles even regulate your eating patterns. Back when our species was evolving, the annual fruiting season occurred during late summer—when the days were at their longest. During this time, our ancestors went crazy trying to gobble up all the carb-heavy fruit they could find, to build thick bodyfat stores to protect us from the harsh, hungry winter round the corner.

These days, most everyone (outside jails) artificially prolongs their daylight time to ridiculous lengths using the bright electric lights in their home, not to mention the flickering boob tube, video games, etc. As a result, their Paleolithic brains still think they’re stuck in late summer—all year round. So they react accordingly, continually pumping out neurotransmitters and hormones programmed to make them guzzle down all the carbs we can find. No wonder folks can’t stick to diets. Their brains are trying to make them eat to survive winter!

Get to bed early, and your internal calendar won’t be tricked into thinking it’s fruiting season—you’ll find you’re suddenly not craving carbs like a maniac. It works.

Sleep also causes your fat cells to express leptin—sometimes called the “lean hormone”. Leptin regulates bodyfat expenditure and sparks up the release of energy from your fatty tissue. Go have a nap before you read the next Commandment, Jack. You might have a six-pack when you wake up.

COMMANDMENT IX: Train the Mind Along With the Body

This is a truism. The role of the mind in training is so fundamental that many books fail to even discuss it. The bodybuilders of the classical era sure understood it however, and they understood it well. Vince Gironda—“Iron Guru” and the real “Trainer of Champions”, including first Mr Olympia, Larry Scott—was once asked what he thought was the ultimate supplement. This was his answer:

…no supplement company has come up with a pill or powder as powerful as the mind. Conversely, the mind can equal and surpass any food supplement…if that is what you want from the mind.

Those weights never did anything for me. They never whispered in my ear. They never said, “curl me. Do this four times, or that for so many weeks.” I can dictate to the weights. I can dictate to my body. OK? Do I need to say any more on that?

The Wild Physique (Column), Musclemag no. 132

10comm6The mind is your number-one weapon in building your body. No supplement ever made you struggle through that final set of pullups.

Isaac Newton taught us that an arrow will fly straight and true forever—unless external forces (like friction, gravity, etc.) drag it to a standstill. I strongly believe that the human mind is like this. It goes in the right direction just fine—until negative influences drag it down. These negative influences are destructive ideas and damaging thought-patterns. As far as bodyweight training goes, there are six major classes of these ideas which screw with our training—or make us quit altogether.

Combating and defeating these six groups of negative ideas—I call them training demons—is at the heart of successful training. The topic is too deep to discuss in a blog post, but those of you who are interested can find more in chapter 21 of Convict Conditioning 2—The Mind: Escaping the True Prison.

If you want me to go further into this topic (you want this gold for free? Damn, son!), let me know in the comments and I’ll try and cover it in a future blog.

COMMANDMENT X: Get Strong!

If you want a quick summary of this article, it’s this: strength is built quickest by training the nervous system. Mass is built quickest by training the muscles. Over the last 9 Commandments, I’ve shown you the best, most powerful strategies you can use to train your muscles.

Does that mean that I’m telling you to permanently steer clear of strength training, if your only goal is to get bigger? No—and here’s why.

The relationship between the nervous system and the muscular system is a bit like the relation between an electrical circuit (the nervous system) and a light bulb (the muscles). The higher you turn the wattage on the circuit, the brighter the bulb will glow. Likewise, the higher you amp up the nervous system (through improved motor unit recruitment and neural facilitation), the harder your muscles will contract and the stronger you are.

A bodybuilder primarily trains his (or her) muscles—they are constantly buying bigger light bulbs. A pure strength athlete primarily trains his (or her) nervous system—they keep their small light bulb, and simply turn up the wattage on the circuit. You can have very powerful bulbs that are only tiny, just as there exist superhumanly strong athletes with relatively small muscles.

Here’s the thing—from a certain point of view, both these athletes want the same thing; more “light”, which, in our analogy, means more work output from the muscles. Athletes who truly want maximum strength also train their muscles—they buy bigger bulbs. You see this in powerlifting, weightlifting and similar strength events; as athletes grow in strength, they also increase in mass, often competing in several higher weight classes through their careers. A strong, big athlete is always stronger than a strong, small one.

From the opposite end, bodybuilders want more “light” (more capacity for muscular work output) because it allows them to use harder exercises and lift more, to direct a greater stimulus to their muscles for greater adaptation—higher and higher levels of mass gains. Everyone understands this—the larger and larger a bodybuilder becomes, the greater the weight they have to lift to retain their gains and keep making progress.

10comm7Al Kavadlo generates full-body tension and builds coordinated strength with an elbow plank. An athlete who trains for strength and size will ironically get bigger than an athlete who only ever trains for size. Get strong!

In other words; if you wish to gain as much muscle as your genetic potential will allow, just training your muscles won’t cut it. You need to train your nervous system too—at least some of the time.

Have you ever noticed that guys who begin bodybuilding make progress and build size for 3-6 moths, then it grinds to a halt? This is why. They have literally run out of strength. How hard you can train your muscles—how much stress you can put them through—partially depends on how strong you are. If that novice then committed 3-6 months to training their nervous systems instead of their muscles and building up their pure strength, they would find they could subsequently return to their bodybuilding-style training, and they’d experience another big spurt of growth.

Classic bodybuilders all understood this relationship between size and strength. Many of them devoted 3-6 months per year working full bore to train their nervous system, to get as insanely strong as they could, unworried about their muscle size during that time. Others performed pure strength work alongside their bodybuilding, either during different sessions or mixed and matched. Successful bodybuilders today do the same—they mix “hypertrophy” (growth) work with “strength” work. They understand that just one won’t work too well without the other.

The take-home message of this? Simple. Muscular training is what builds size, but without added strength your progress only lasts so long. You’ll get better gains if you cycle (or mix in) pure bodyweight strength training—where you train your nervous system—with your bodyweight bodybuilding.

The next question is—how do you train your nervous system for pure strength, using bodyweight techniques?

That would require a completely different article. But you’re in luck, beautiful. The PCC Lead Instructor and world famous calisthenics coach Al Kavadlo has written that article for you. It’s arriving right here, hot and sizzling, in just seven days time!

Don’t say we don’t do nothin’ for ya, huh? Now go out and build some beef, dammit. If you still have questions, hit me up in the comments section, below. I never ignore a genuine question and I will give my all to help you if I can.

*** The models for most of these great photos are the awesome Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! You have my thanks!

***

Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, Convict Conditioning, Convict Conditioning Logbook, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, muscle mass, Paul Wade

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass

October 15, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 150 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part I

cal1

Finally the tide is starting to turn.

Young and old athletes (and wannabe athletes) are switching over to calisthenics in their droves. There is a growing consensus that if you want a coordinated, supple, mobile, functional body, the best way to get it is using your body’s own weight. Rubber bands, plastic gadgets, cables, machines and infomercial ab gimmicks are out. The floor and the horizontal bar are in. We’re going old school, baby!

But what a lot of athletes (and coaches) still don’t realize is that bodyweight is also an awesome tool for packing on slabs of dense muscle mass.

Yes, you can see a lot of incredibly powerful bodyweight athletes with fairly low levels of muscle mass performing ridiculously impressive feats like muscle-ups, the human flag, one-arm handstands and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that bodyweight training doesn’t increase muscle mass—it can (and much more effectively than current bodybuilding methods).

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Lionel Ng is built more like a karate master than a bodybuilder. But he has trained himself to perform impressive feats of total-body strength—like the one-arm elbow lever and the human flag—using calisthenics. (Many thanks to the awesome Basic Training Academy, Singapore for the use of the image.)

What it means is that there are a lot of athletes out there who use bodyweight in a specific way to develop movement strength, and skill, while deliberately maintaining their body mass at lean n’ mean levels to keep them lithe and sleek—after all, if performance is what you’re lookin’ for, the lighter you are, the easier bodyweight techniques will be, right? For these guys, extra pounds of muscle is nothing but drag, inertia. They don’t want it.

However…not everyone wants to be a clean-burnin’, high-voltage, low-weight, gazelle. Some of us want to be bulls. Big, beefy, scary-looking muthas with bulging arms, plate-armor pecs, thick, wide lats and dangerous delts. The good news is that bodyweight training can give this to you—and it can give it to you while keeping you mobile and supple, and protecting your joints.

But if extra inches of muscle are what you yearn for, you can’t train the way the gazelles train—inspiring as they are. If you want to bulk up to your maximum potential, you need to follow a different set of rules, stud. You need to religiously observe your own mass-building Commandments.

What Commandments, you ask..? Read on, future champ.

COMMANDMENT I: Embrace reps!

These days, low reps, high sets and low fatigue are the “in” methodology. Why low reps with low fatigue? Coz it’s great for building skill. If you want to get really good at a movement—be it a handstand or an elbow lever—the key is to train your nervous system. That means performing an exercise perfectly plenty of times, to beat the ideal movement pattern into your “neural map”. The best way to achieve this is to do a few low reps—not hard or long enough to burn out or get too tired—then rest for a bit and try again. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is typically how very lean, low-weight bodyweight guys train to get hugely strong but without adding too much muscle. It’s a phenomenal way to drill efficient motion-pathways into your nervous system, while keeping fresh. Like I say, it’s ideal for training a skill.

But for stacks of jacked up muscle? Sorry, this method just won’t cut it. Muscle isn’t built by training the nervous system. It’s built by training the MUSCLE! And for this, you need reps, kiddo. Lovely, lovely, reps.

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To be big, you must first become weak—pay your dues with some serious reps.

To cut a long story short, you build big muscles by draining the chemical energy in your muscle cells. Over time, your body responds to this threat by accumulating greater and greater stores of chemical energy in the cells. This makes them swell, and voila—bigger muscles. But to trigger this extra storage, you gotta exhaust the chemical energy in those cells. This can only be done by hard, sustained work. Gentle work won’t do it—if the exercise is too low in intensity, the energy will come from fatty acids and other stores, rather than the precious muscle cells. Intermittent work—low reps, rest, repeat—won’t do it either, because the chemical energy in the cells rapidly regenerates when you rest, meaning stores never get dangerously low enough for the body to say “uh-oh—better stockpile bigger banks of this energy!”

The best way to exhaust the energy in your muscles is through tough, grit-yer-teeth, continuous reps. Learn to love ‘em. For huge gains, temporarily drop the single, double, and triple reps. Definitely start looking at reps over five. Six to eight is great. Double figures are even better. Twelve to fifteen is another muscle-building range. I’ve met very strong guys training with low reps for years who couldn’t build a quarter inch on their arms. They switched to performing horizontal pulls for sets of twenty reps, and gained two inches per arm in a single month! These kind of gains aren’t uncommon on Convict Conditioning, due to the insistence that you pay your dues with higher reps. They work!

COMMANDMENT II: Work Hard!

This Commandment directly follows from the last one. Using low reps, keeping fresh, and taking lots of rest between sets is a fairly easy way to train. But pushing through continuous rep after rep on hard exercises is much, much tougher. The higher the reps, the harder it gets.

Your muscles will burn and scream at you to quit. (That “burning” is your chemical energy stores being incinerated for fuel, which is exactly what you want!) Your heart-rate will shoot through the roof; you will tremble, sweat, and feel systemic stress. You may even feel nauseous.

Good! You are doing something right!

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Whatever modern coaches may say, don’t be afraid of pushing yourself.

Like I say, the current trend is towards easy sets, keeping fresh, working on skill. These days you don’t “work out”, you practice. “Working ” and “pushing yourself”….these are filthy terms in gyms today. They are considered old-fashioned, from outta the seventies and eighties. (Remember those decades? When drug-free dudes in the gym actually had some f***ing muscle?) I mean Christ, some coaches take this philosophy so far that you’d think if an athlete went to “failure”, their goddam balls would drop off. Jesus!

Sure, I don’t recommend going to complete failure on bodyweight exercise—at least, most of the time. I’d prefer it if you left a little energy in your body after a set to control your movements, and maybe defend yourself if you have to. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. Damn hard.

Far from destroying you physically, brutal effort—when moderated by plenty of rest and sleep—causes the body to release testosterone, growth hormone, endorphins, and plenty of other goodies Mother Nature always intended to reward Her hunters and warriors with.

So accept the challenge. Balls, wall—together, okay? Don’t ever be afraid to push yourself into new zones of pain and effort if you want to get bigger. I have seen twigs turned into oaks this way, and you can do it too—I believe in you!

COMMANDMENT III: Use Simple, Compound Exercises!

Again, this Commandment is related to the two which have gone before. If you are going to push yourself hard on moderate-to-high reps, the exercises you are doing can’t be complex, high-skill exercises. If handstands and elbow levers cause you to concentrate to balance, you can’t overload using them—your form would collapse (and so would you) before you were pushing yourself hard enough to drain your muscles.

So if you want to work with high-skill exercises, use the low reps/keep fresh/high sets philosophy. But if you want to get swole, you need relatively low skill exercises—this is what I mean by “simple” exercises. “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy”. Doing twenty perfect one-arm pushups is “simple”—it ain’t easy!

Cal5“Simple” means relatively low-skill—it’s not the same as “easy”!

Stick to exercises you can pour a huge amount of muscular effort into, without wasting nervous energy on factors like balance, coordination, gravity, body placement, etc. Dynamic exercises—where you go up and down—are generally far better than static holds, because they typically require less concentration and they drain the muscle cells more rapidly.

The best dynamic exercises are compound exercises, which involve multiple muscle groups at once. Not only are these simpler—the body works as a whole, which is more natural—but you are getting a bigger bang for your buck by working different muscles at the same time. (No weak links for you, Daniel-san.) For example, focus on:

  • Pullups
  • Bodyweight squats, pistols and shrimp squats
  • Pushups
  • Australian pullup variations
  • Dips
  • Bridges
  • Handstand pushups (against a wall—lower skill, more effort)
  • Leg raises

All of these movements can be made increasingly difficult to suit your muscle-building rep range (see Commandment V). There are no excuses for not kicking your own ass, here.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not to say that skill-based techniques—like elbow levers and handstands—don’t have a place in your program. They are valuable exercises and are taught extensively as part of the PCC curriculum. But using them exclusively for muscle gain is definitely a big mistake. Throw in simple, compound moves and watch those muscles sprout like never before!

COMMANDMENT IV: Limit Sets!

This is another pretty controversial suggestion—but, as always, it flows from the previous Commandments perfectly. Why? Well, if you are hitting your body with hard exercises, and pouring that effort into enough reps to completely exhaust the muscles, why would you need to perform lots of sets?

Depleting your muscle cells beyond the point your body is comfortable with is what causes the biological “survival trigger” that tells your body to add more energy (i.e., extra muscle) for next time. That’s all you need to do. Once you have pulled that trigger and told your body to make more muscle…why keep pulling the trigger, again and again? It’s a waste of time and energy—worse in fact, because it damages the muscles further and eats into your recovery time. In the words of infamous exercise ideologist, Mike Mentzer:

“You can take a stick of dynamite and tap it with a pencil all day and it’s not going to go off. But hit it once with a hammer and ‘BANG’—it will go off!”

Many folks disagree with Mentzer’s training philosophy—I don’t agree with all of it—but he certainly nailed it when he said this. The biological switch for muscle growth needs to be triggered with a hammer, not a f***ing pencil. One hard, focused, exhausting set on a compound exercise is worth more than twenty, thirty half-hearted sets.

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If you keep work sets low, you are much more likely to genuinely give your all when you train. Add sets and you subconsciously pace yourself.

I usually advise folks looking for maximum growth to perform two hard sets per exercise, following a proper warm-up. Growth will happen with one set, but two sets feels like a belt-and-braces approach. I sometimes advise more sets for beginners, but this not for growth—it’s to help them get more experience with a movement. It’s practice, basically. Once you know how to perform an exercise properly, two hard sets is all you need.

Many eager trainees ask me if they should perform more sets. The trouble is, adding sets does not encourage hard, high-performance training— just the opposite. Once you are doing five, six sets, one of two things happens; either you give your all and your last sets are pathetic compared to the first couple of sets, or you pace yourself, making all the sets weaker than they would be otherwise. Neither of these situations will promote extra growth. They just hinder recovery and increase the risk of injury.

Avoid “volume creep”. Training hard is very different from training long—in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. Keep workouts short and sharp and reap the rewards, kemosabe!

For Paul “Coach” Wade’s Bodyweight Muscle Commandments 5-10, tune in next week for part 2 of this article.

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The models for most of these photos are the incredible Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! As ever, thanks you guys. The image of the one-arm elbow lever was provided by my buddy Jay Ding over at the Basic Training Academy. Check their site—they are doing some amazing bodyweight training, Singapore style!

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Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: bodyweight, calisthenics, Kavadlo brothers, muscle mass, Paul Wade

How Bodyweight Exercises Use Your Brain To Create Strength

October 8, 2013 By Ryan Hurst 20 Comments

Chap 7 - 10

It’s an exciting time in the world of strength and fitness. We’re seeing a lot of converts from weight training to the types of bodyweight exercise taught in Progressive Calisthenics.

Many of these “converts” find themselves humbled and surprised by the incredible challenge presented by bodyweight exercise, even after spending years developing strength and skill with barbells, dumbbells, and the like. As they continue to practice and improve, they find strength that wasn’t there when they trained with regular weight lifting exercise.

So what is it about progressive calisthenics that is so different and unique from weight training?

One of the big benefits of this type of training is how stimulating it is to the nervous system. The simple act of moving your body through space, as opposed to moving an implement, switches on the connections between your brain and body.

At the risk of sounding trite, it really is a “natural” and innate process to take your body and hang, swing, climb, pull, and jump through the air. Movement since we could walk upright has been meant to get us somewhere, and moving our whole body – not just parts of it – is what we were born to do.

Of couse, I’m preaching to the choir here, but by understanding how the exercise movements in Progressive Calisthenics stimulate the brain, we can learn to leverage that connection for greater strength and skill development.

Movement, Muscle Memory, and the Mind-Body Connection

As noted above, much of the “secret sauce” comes from movement.

When performing progressive calisthenic type exercises, from pushups to pistols, and from rings to monkey bars, the majority of the time we’re moving our head around in space, which we’re not used to doing with barbells and machine exercises.

I teach both children’s and adult classes and I see how a lot of people who come from a weight lifting background have trouble when they first start up at our gym. They get dizzy and disoriented quickly when doing certain movements while the kids don’t seem to have any of the same issues. Maybe it’s because kids get to roll around, swing on the monkey bars and do normal “kid stuff”, while the adults are stuck in their offices most of the day and then work out on machines a few times a week.

This increased head movement lends an incredible amount of sensory information – the visual position changes, vestibular (inner ear) stimulation, and even the sensations on the skin from the air we’re cutting through.

All of these compound to stimulate our brain and the connections between it and every part of our bodies.

OAHS

So-called muscle and body “memory” is actually the result of the repeated body motions strengthening the neural pathways used in those particular skills. With repeated practice, we grease the groove, and bodyweight movements tend to be learned in a faster and more stable manner because of all those sensory inputs. It’s actually easier for the body to “remember” these moves as opposed to the dull and forgettable lifting exercises.

The catchphrase “movements, not muscles” refers to training full body patterns versus isolating body parts to build up certain muscles. In a whole body move such as a one arm pushup, it’s the coordinated engagement of all of your muscles that creates a successful repetition. You’re not working on your chest or triceps alone; your whole body works together to perform the exercise.

This full body connection is key to athletic performance and will improve your ability in your chosen sport.

4 Bodyweight Exercises that Blow Their Weighted Counterparts Out of the Water

There are many examples of bodyweight exercises that better utilize this neurological connection than their weighted counterparts.

Below, I’ll highlight how four such exercises leverage increased stimulation to recruit the entire body in tasks that might otherwise isolate just a few muscle groups.

1. Pull-up vs. Pulldown

A prime example of the difference between a bodyweight movement vs. a weighted movement is the bodyweight pull-up compared to a pulldown. There is the obvious difference of moving your whole body in a pull-up, but there are also a few other key differences that make pull-ups so much better than a pulling on a cable.

First, aside from the infamous kipping pull-ups, it’s much more difficult to cheat on a pull-up. Pulldowns by their very nature encourage cheats like laying back or heaving on the handle when you get fatigued. Similarly, it’s easier to rest a bit using a machine, since you can wiggle and shift a little, whereas in a pull-up, you’ll need to concentrate and dial in your form even more when you are tired. And of course, the whole body “tightness” that you need to perform a good pull-up can’t really be done on any machine.

2. Jumping vs. Any “Cardio” Machine

You’ve likely been in a gym and seen people chugging away on treadmills, stairsteppers, and bikes going nowhere, and you just know deep down there isn’t much that would be more boring for the mind and spirit. That’s why you see so many people on them with earbuds on or staring at the TV!

Jumping exercises are the polar opposite of these machines. Propelling our bodies up for distance or height while landing accurately and safely requires our full attention and concentration. And there’s nothing better for getting the heart rate going than fast and powerful jumping.

Of course, everybody thinks they know how to jump, and in this case, nearly everybody is wrong…

By learning to jump with correct form and developing precise control over our technique, the jump takes on whole new levels of neurological stimulation that go far beyond simple power output.

3. Pistol Squat vs. Any Weighted Squat

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what an awesome exercise the pistol squat is. It builds strength, flexibility, and balance like nothing else. But what sets it apart from weighted squats – of which there are many variations – is the difficulty with cheating and breaking form.

When performing weighted squats, breaks in technique can sneak up on you without you noticing. When the weight gets piled on and you’re cranking out the last reps, it’s fairly easy to lean forward, let your knees buckle, and raise your butt first when standing up. With the pistol, on the other hand, doing any of those things could throw off your balance, so you’re more likely to maintain a safe and stable line. Of course, there are many ways people cheat when it comes to the pistol, but it is harder to do so than with the barbell squat.

As with other exercises mentioned, one of the benefits of the pistol is the lack of a heavy load on the back. Since back issues can be a problem for so many people, heavy barbell squats can be bad idea until the back is properly rehabilitated.

4. Inverted Bodyweight Row vs. Barbell Row

One of the most important advantages of the inverted bodyweight row over the barbell row is safety. To perform the barbell row safely, without risk of injury, you need to have good form and an already strong and stable low back. If you practice barbell rows without an already stable core, you could hurt your back pretty badly. Add in trying to hold good form when you get fatigued and you’ll be skirting the edge of a cliff.

With the inverted bodyweight row, that particular issue doesn’t exist. So if you have any back issues to begin with, bodyweight rows are the way to go. Don’t be fooled, though. The bodyweight row will still work pretty much the entire body, and will probably help you to improve your core stabilization.

Of course, this list could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Stimulate Your Body, Stimulate Your Brain

The exercises listed above are just a few examples of the advantages of training with bodyweight movements over training primarily with weights. There are some general benefits, though, that should be reiterated.

When you move your body through space, rather than staying still and moving weight around your body, you stimulate your brain through providing increased proprioceptive input. What this means is building a sense of where your body is in space.

Proprioception is what allows you to bend your elbow or flex your foot a precise amount or in a precise way, even if your eyes are closed and you can’t see what you’re doing – you still feel it.

Once upon a time, it may not have been as important to specifically address proprioception, but today, we spend most of our time sitting still. As a result we spend less of our time engaged in activities that increase proprioceptive input naturally, such as running, climbing, and just generally moving the body. To combat the perils of prolonged sitting, it’s important to engage the body in coordinated movements that increase the proprioception that would otherwise be neglected.

An additional benefit of most bodyweight exercises, including all of the exercises listed above, is the required full body coordination and tightness.

For instance, when you do a pull-up, if any part of your body is loose, you’ll leak power through the loose parts and wind up fatiguing quicker and not getting the full benefit of the exercise. Continued practice in maintaining this full body tightness and form carries over to a lot of athletic endeavors, because it strengthens the neural pathways that are devoted to the control of those muscles.

Moving yourself around in unusual angles and with harder leverages creates strength and flexibility in the best way possible. You learn to have powerful and graceful control of your body in a lot of different situations.

It’s also important to approach training with a sense of fun and excitement in developing your strength and flexibility. Exploring how your body moves and experimenting with different movements helps you to look at your strength in a whole new way.

As I mentioned earlier, I teach both kids and adults and it’s great to see adults moving with the same freedom and abandon as their kids. I love teaching exploratory bodyweight exercise and even more, I love how it’s gotten folks to enjoy and have fun with their training again.

Here’s some examples you might add to your routine:

Maximizing Your Mental Movement Muscles

Though this mind-body communication is baked right into Progressive Calisthenics, there are a couple of things you can do to be sure you are getting the most out of the work you put in:

  1. Pay attention to your movement in space. This increases proprioception and develops coordination.
  2. Take a note from Al Kavadlo and remember to smile. Have fun with the movements and enjoy exploring new skills and learning as you go along.

One arm elbow lever

The benefits of bodyweight exercise are endless, as anybody involved with the PCC method knows. It’s a good idea, though, to understand the details behind why you’re feeling much better from this type of exercise performance. You can then adjust your technique and your exercises as needed to improve even more.

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In former lives, Ryan Hurst has been a gymnast, a swordsman, and a yoga teacher. Now he teaches an integrated approach to strength and movement skill at http://gmb.io/

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: bodyweight exercises, mental training, mind-muscle connection, one-arm handstand, pistols, pull-ups, Ryan Hurst, skill training

A Look at the 3 Way Kick

October 1, 2013 By Matt Schifferle 8 Comments

matt_shifferle1There is nothing like a strong pair of legs.

You can keep your strong core, wide shoulders and massive arms. My experience has taught me that all of the strength and conditioning in the world is practically worthless without a strong set of legs.

But hold the phone, strong muscles alone won’t build strong legs. True strength for the field, court or mountain requires much more than a lot of horsepower in the engine. In order to fully unleash your lower body strength you must also possess the following:

– Balance and control

Strong muscles without balance and control is like putting a massive engine in a car with bald tires and worn out brakes. Either you’ll never use all of that power or you’ll end up crashing. Control ensures you can use all of the power you have and use it in the most effective way.

– Flexibility

For every muscle you contract there is one that must lengthen. When the muscles are tight and resist lengthening you’re literally fighting your own tension. Becoming even a little more flexible ensures that you’ll have less resistance holding you back in everything you do.

– Strength and stamina in supporting muscles

When it comes to leg strength, we tend to focus on the bigger muscles in the legs like the quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves. These are important for sure, but what about some of the smaller and more subtle muscle groups like the ones in the feet and hips? While not the biggest or most powerful lower body muscles, weakness in these smaller muscles can greatly handicap the bigger muscles.

Calisthenics is a very effective way to condition all three of these characteristics. It’s impossible to even attempt moves like lunges and single leg squats without developing balance, flexibility and strength in the supporting muscles.

That being said, it doesn’t hurt to further develop those weak links in the lower body chain. Doing so can make your weakest link so strong that your entire body can reach new levels of performance.

The following video showcases an exercise which is great at developing your balance, flexibility and strength.

This exercise does wonders at unlocking some of the lower body strength that’s been dormant in your lower body. Just running through this routine a few times before each leg workout will leave your legs and hips feeling brand new within a few weeks. It’s also a great cool down afterward to refocus your mind.

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Matt Schifferle a.k.a The Fit Rebel made a switch to calisthenics training 5 years ago in an effort to rehab his weight lifting injuries. Since then he’s been on a personal quest to discover and teach the immense benefits of advanced body weight training.  You can find some of his unique bodyweight training methods at www.RedDeltaProject.com.

Filed Under: Flexibility, Progressive Calisthenics, Tutorial Tagged With: 3 way kick, calisthenics, Fit Rebel, leg training, lower body strength, Matt Schifferle, power, tutorial, video

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