Complete Calisthenics - Ashley Kalym

Preface
The journey I have taken to the point of writing this book has been long and
varied. I started my bodyweight exercise journey when I was very young:
with the persuasion of my parents, I was enrolled into junior rugby and began
to get a taste of physical training. Being too young to work with weights, we
trained with push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, lunges, and a lot of running around to get
our bodies into shape. This was not just because we were too young; the club I
played for really didn’t have the money or the facilities to let us train with weights,
so for a long time I knew of no other method of training. After several years of this,
I was old enough to begin training using weights and weighted exercise. I then did
the traditional thing of bicep curling, chest exercises, doing lat pull-downs instead
of pull-ups, and using the leg-extension machine instead of actually squatting. I
gained some muscle during this period, but one component that was missing from
my physical development was real strength. Even after using weights for a
number of years, I wasn’t actually strong, and the lesson that really brought that
home was to come in a few years’ time.
After leaving university I had a few jobs, and then decided that the time was right
to try and enter the British Royal Marine Commandos. It was a massively daunting
task, and as soon as I read through the paperwork and the brochure I was
somewhat surprised to find training in the military was all about using body weight
to build a strong, fatigue-resistant physique. So, while in training I found myself
doing the same exercises that I had done when I had been much younger;
namely, push-ups, pull-ups, running, and other simple bodyweight movements. I
entered the military in early 2009 and found my physical preparation with
bodyweight exercise had been well worthwhile. After about eight months I
decided that the military life and lots of time away from home wasn’t for me, so I
decided to come back to civilian life. I had learnt so much while I was in training,
mostly about myself and where my limits lay, and I was also hugely impressed
with how fit and strong I had become by performing simple bodyweight exercises.
It was in one of those moments that I decided I wanted to see how strong I could