edenism

Calisthenic strength sports, whether gymnastics, “street workouts,” or minimalistic training, are known for producing disproportionally aesthetic physiques. That is to say that a 160lb calisthenics athlete is very likely to have a better look than another athlete of the same size and bodyfat. At least, that is its reputation. Gymnasts, Youtube celebrities, and calisthenics popularizers are all commonly pointed to as evidence of this.

There are a couple of explanations I've seen repeated on the internet: 1. Calisthenics athletes are leaner because they have to work with their own bodyweight, and the population at large sees this “shredded” physique as more aesthetic. 2. Calisthenics athletes ignore their legs, and this allows them to achieve more with their upper body at a given weight.

Neither of these explanations addresses what I think is the most interesting part of whole debacle: calisthenics is very good at producing aesthetic physiques purely as a byproduct. The fact that there even is an argument over whether achieving calisthenics athletes have comparable or even better physiques than gym-goers is shocking, since the latter population is specifically trying to improve their physique. This all should indicate to us that in some way improving at calisthenics skills does mimic good bodybuilding practice, although it may be far from optimal, and even a local maximum.

In addition to this point, there are other reasons to dismiss the arguments above: 1. Calisthenics athletes are leaner than other strength athletes, but I don't think this is the whole explanation. Calisthenics athletes tend to look good for their size and bodyfat. Maybe not everyone agrees with this (it's certainly very subjective). 2. For every calisthenics athlete with chicken legs, there is a gym bro with chicken legs, and we both know which one looks better. Also, the idea that the upper body can be developed even further when the lower body is ignore isn't that clear. Men's physique athletes may be wearing board shorts to cover up their small legs, but this doesn't mean that they have hulking upper bodies that blow their bodybuilder peers' out of the water. In fact, if this logic holds, we would expect to not see bodybuilders switch to men's physique.

I think most people would agree that the real reason that calisthenics athletes' physiques are appealing is that they are (in the upper body at least) balanced. This is why, at a given weight and bodyfat, their physique tends to look better than you would expect. But how do they achieve a balanced physique by accident?

Skinning the Cat

Traditionally, strength movements are classified as either compound or isolation. Compound movements hit multiple muscles (giving a good “bang for your buck”) while isolation movements hit a specific muscle. While bodybuilding is famous for its isolation movements, and strength sports are famous for their compound movements, the reality is a little more subtle.

For strength athletes, compound movements are the bread and butter of training, because they allow for training heavy movements, coordinating multiple muscles, etc. Strength athletes also care about hypertrophy, and compound movements give a great return on investment by hitting many muscles.

Compound movements only go so far though. Imagine you take a beginner and only have them do the bench press. Eventually they will max out so that not even more volume will progress them. Now unless they've hit their genetic limit (they haven't), we have to find another way to progress. This is pretty easy. A compound movement like the bench press is a chain of small movements incorporating different muscles in different proportions. When your trainee fails to hit a new maximum, it is because a specific link in that chain is breaking. So let's say that your trainee can bench 140lb but is failing with 145lb, and no amount of practicing the bench press is fixing that. Now let's say they are failing at the top of the lift. The conclusion we can draw is that no amount of benching 140 is making them strong enough at the top of the lift to do 145.

What conclusion can we draw? The reality is probably something like this: the bench press is fatiguing both the chest and the triceps, but the triceps are no longer being hit enough during bench press to continue to grow. If you try to add more bench press, then your trainee will eventually accumulate too much total fatigue before getting sufficient triceps stimulus.

As an extreme example, imaging doing pullups to grow your biceps; you will be very, very fatigued before you get much stimulus. It may work for a month, but you will not be able to overload your biceps this way for a year because the total fatigue will be too high as you increase volume. And even worse, your lats will be the failing point, which means your biceps training will be limited by when your lats give up. We have the same situation in the previous example; the chest is limiting the triceps training.

So what is our solution? Give the trainee isolation exercises for the triceps to continue to grow them so that they can bench 145.

It is well known that muscles grow much more when they are close to fatigue than when they are far from fatigue. This gives us the golden rule of compound exercises; if you do a compound exercise for long enough, one muscle will grow from it much more than the others.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have bodybuilders, who use a large number of isolation exercises. While there are a few reasons for this, the biggest one is that developing a balanced physique requires hitting the muscles of the upper body from different angles.

For example, the triceps has three heads and is involved, albeit in slightly different ways, in virtually any compound upper body movement. Even pullups involve the triceps. From this we can gather that developing the triceps will require hitting it from multiple angles.

But if this is what is required for a balanced upper body, how do calisthenics athletes achieve it, seemingly by accident, while doing virtually no isolation movements?

The secret is that calisthenics athletes perform hyper-compound movements, and many of them. In order to perform an iron cross, front lever raise, handstand pushup, skin-the-cat, etc., a calisthenics athlete needs to develop strength through nearly the entire range of motion of the shoulder, both for pushing and pulling. This means that, as a consequence, they hit huge swaths of upper body musculature, although most of it is hit submaximally.

The result is that calisthenics have stumbled upon an easy rule of thumb for developing a balanced upper body: become strong in every articulation of the shoulder.

Now to be clear, I don't think that becoming a calisthenics athlete is anywhere near an optimal way to develop a balanced physique. But there is a lesson to be learned in the way they succeed unintentionally at what so many others fail at despite their great effort.

So how would a physique athlete use this information? One way might be to use hyper-compound movements such as front lever raises to identify weaknesses in the upper body, rather than relying on visual judgement alone. Another way might be to use hyper-compound movements in the same way that they currently use compound movements; as a good-bang-for-your-buck way to hit a lot of muscles from a large range of motion before moving to isolation exercises as a means of overloading the muscles.

Current approaches fall roughly into two categories: limit the volume of compound movements in order to allow for a larger set of isolation movements performed from different angles; or, perform more compound movements, and switch out the isolation movements for variants every mesocycle. We could possibly improve upon these by instead performing a larger volume of hyper-compound movements in lieu of traditional compound movements and then overloading each muscle with a single isolation movement. Then we can rotate out the isolation movements every mesocycle.

This approach might be especially useful for the average gym-goer. Their dilemma is something like this; either strive for a balanced physique now at the expense of total mass, or build as much mass as possible now and sculpt it later. By hitting upper body musculature through a wide range of shoulder articulations, we can almost guarantee that anything severely underdeveloped will be brought up.

I will start using this approach, so I will probably post more about the nitty gritty details of programming with it.