While having equipment is ideal for strength training – one would be surprised how far both improvised equipment and zero equipment can be when the commitment to making it work is there.
I’ve thrived on high frequency calisthenics as a no excuse backbone to the rest of my training.
In about two weeks I’ll be at the nine and a half year mark of daily pushups with no missed days.
In about a week I can say the same for six months of daily hindu squats.
On paper these are very common, simple, “vanilla” exercises.
Many say that “you won’t build much strength with them”.
Like all things it’s in how you go about doing it.
Mindset too matters.
Believing in limitation will get you limitation.
Believing in the ability to improve will see you improve.
Something I’ve learned over the years is that the longer you’ve trained for the better you become at activating the muscles/at mind-muscle connection.
My two daily calisthenics and whichever kettlebell things I do most days all feed into each other well.
In a sentence my muscles always fire intensely.
My lats for instance come alive from the kettlebell, but then reactivate from both calisthenics.
And the other day I made another breakthrough.
Mostly having been going through the motions on hindu squats, I thought about how to make them more useful in the low volumes I do.
I realized were you training them with the idea of carryover towards a no touching a knee to the mat wrestling double leg takedown that the best way would be to pause at the bottom, explode up, and row the arms in at the top hard.
I applied these, and suddenly my interest in the movement went from very little to enjoying them again…
With pushups visualizing a very heavy bench press rep can make the pushup more a strength builder than it’s on paper .66bw multiplier would otherwise be.
There’s many things like this.
As I said your training is what you make of it.
A small amount of pushups and hindu squats will do it – the rest of strength training is icing on the cake.
Persistence & Tenacity