Complete Calisthenics - Ashley Kalym

the book, and although these build huge amounts of strength, I personally
found that when starting to train with Olympic weightlifting and back and front
squats, my legs were far behind the rest of my body. This is only a concern, of
course, if lower-body strength or the specific ability to squat large loads is
important to you.
The second disadvantage is that because of the way the lower body is
constructed, it is hard to design exercises that incorporate decreased leverage
principles. The upper body is home to many exercises that rely on this concept
to increase strength gains, such as the planche, the front and back levers, and
many others. There is no way around this fact, which is why on nearly every
calisthenics video, the person either will look as though he or she doesn’t train
legs, or will not perform any lower-body exercises. This is a pity in my opinion,
because training the lower body can help enormously in muscle building and
strength gains in the rest of the body.
The third drawback is that as weight cannot be added to increase resistance,
except in the case of weighted pull-ups, for example, we have to rely on the
method of decreasing the amount of leverage to make the movement more
difficult. While this is an extremely effective way of making an exercise more
challenging, it is not the same as increasing the load on a barbell by a few
kilograms or pounds every few weeks. For example, if we were doing the
bench press, we could quite accurately keep track of exactly how much
weight we were lifting and how much it was increasing by each week or
month. For calisthenics we cannot do this. We can, of course, keep a record of
the number of repetitions, by how much our range of motion has changed,
and how long we held certain positions, but calisthenic training is a lot less
accurate in terms of recording progress.
The fourth drawback is disputed by some people but nevertheless remains a
popular opinion, which is that performing calisthenics cannot build lots of
muscle. I do not think this is true, simply because of the size of some people I
have seen performing calisthenic movements. A quick look on YouTube will
demonstrate that there are some seriously built individuals doing nothing apart
from bodyweight exercise. It is true that there is probably a limit to the muscle
size that calisthenics can give you, but if you want bodybuilder size then it