Calisthenics

Calisthenics:

An Overview & Perspective

"A Pushup is just an upside-down bench press"

Calisthenics: from the Greek "beautiful strength". Definition: Exercises, usually rhythmic, performed without apparatus.	Here, I would like to discuss calisthenics as a general discipline and strength and bodybuilding (yes, body-building!) technique.
Machines were invented to improve on Calisthenics!	Jack La Lanne started his career on TV teaching calisthenics. He showed an enormous number of interesting and useful exercises, but usually without identifying the principles and concepts. So what happened to Jack La Lanne's show? Don't really know, except that calisthenics quickly became passe with the advent of machines. Apparently, rather than fight to preserve his method, Jack opted to put his name on gyms housing these machines. Not a bad move business-wise, but disappointing philosophy-wise.
What happened to calisthenics?	In addition to the fact that marketing became dedicated to machines and gadgets, and that everything in our culture has a finite lifespan, many calisthenics suffer from a variety of ergonometric ills. One, pointed out by my mom, is that lots of people simply don't like getting on the floor! I never did. I always hated pushups, but loved bench presses! But now that I can do inclined pushups at any angle, I prefer these to bench presses! Another is that the classic calisthenics, pushups, chinups, and situps are not easily adjustable in terms of the weight that you feel. Another factor is that psychologically, it is more gratifying for many people to move an external object (a weight) than it is their own bodies. Somehow it has come to be perceived that external weights are "better." We are led to believe (by body builders and the like) that weights and machines are better for building muscle. Which is true if you plan to spend 6 hours a day 6 days a week in a gym. We distinguish, however, between fitness and fanaticism. Note also that body builders are among your least healthy populations, anywhere, from a multiple pf perspectives. A detailed article will appear on this soon. As I pointed out in an article on running, despite their own accomplishment, often the worst teachers are athletes, because their goals are quite different from ours, another crucial point glossed over by would-be pundits.
Redundant Machines	A lot of people think that because I apparently knock machines that I don't like them. I love them, at least the good ones. What I knock is the improper perspectives, and the junk being sold to homes. Consider this scenario. You go to a gym, sit in the leg press machine, and hoist up 150 #. You feel great. Now if you weighed 150 #, you just lifted your bodyweight! Which you could have done by simply doing a knee-bend!! Suppose you weigh 150 #, and are benchpressing 100 #. That is the same as if you did a pushup! And I could go on. The much heralded pec deck machine is ultimately a partial pushup! See article on Pec Decks, in TOC.
	There are 5 or so principle calisthenic exercises that address virtually every muscle in your body to a very high degree for the normal person. These are listed in the Table of Contents, and discussed in their own articles. This was interestingly illustrated in Rocky __, when he fought the Russian. Rocky trained in a Siberian snow-bound cabin, while the Russian used high-tech computers. Rocky won. Proves my point. Seriously, though, if you watch what Rocky did, you will see that the portrayal was 99% accurate in comparing Rocky's technique to the Russians. That is, they were essentially the same.
The HoloBarre and Calisthenics	With the HoloBarre, these 5 exercises lose all of their constraints, limitations, and excessive difficulty. The details of these appear under the individual exercises.