Get Strong: The Ultimate 16-Week Transformation Program For gaining Muscle And Strength―Using The Power Of Progressive Calisthenics Paperback – June 1, 2018

You need floor space, a pullup bar, a stool, and a wall. If you have these four things you can follow the programme perfectly. If not, you can follow it with some modifications, which the authors help you to figure out in the supplementary exercises section. In my case I have plaster walls that won't handle me banging and rubbing my feet up and down on them, so I've decided to replace the wall work with dips, since I happen to have a set of homemade parallel bars. Some people are afraid of relying on bodyweight only exercises to get strong and good looking, but they need not be. While you can't load as much weight on yourself as you can with very heavy barbell exercises, you can achieve the same effect as lifting twice your bodyweight by using only one half of your body for the lifts instead of both. So, unless you're lifting at least twice your bodyweight at the gym or planning to, bodyweight only exercises work perfectly well, and I'll add without the dangers attached to free weight training. The other reason bodyweight exercises are as good or better than barbell work is that you can simply up the number of repetitions of an exercise to increase not only your endurance but also your absolute strength to a considerable extent! Thus, someone who is able to do two sets of 25 feet elevated pushups can do at least one rep of a bench press significantly over their own bodyweight.Something that impresses me with the selection of movements, and by the end of the programme you are doing 11 distinct movements divided into an upper body and lower body dominant set of workouts, is that they are not the absolutely hardest exercises possible. For instance, the one arm pushup does not factor into the programme although it is treated in the supplementary section as an extra. Also, the full pistol squat does not form part of the programme, nor the ridiculous one arm chinup, which is something the strongest people in the world can only, maybe, do one or two reps of on a good day! So, instead of working up to insanely hard feats of strength, the "Get Strong" programme focusses only on the exercises that will make you get and stay strong, not wear you out! This is a distinction I did not understand nor appreciate until I started on this programme. I thought the point of callisthenic weight lifting was to get to the most difficult, heaviest exercises as soon as possible and to stick with them. I was wrong. Volume is very important for developing and maintaining strength and if you can only do a few reps of something before burnout, like the one arm pushup, then it can never be the core of your workout plan! So, I was shocked when good old me, who can do 5 sets of 5 reps of one arm pushups, and even some one arm one leg pushups, was unable to do a full two sets of 15 legs elevated normal pushups!!! This shows me that relying on the heaviest moves possible is not developing maximum strength nor conditioning. Another great and important factor in the programme is that it does not take very long to complete a workout! While it is great fun to work hard through the various fascinating exercises and enjoy your beating heart rests in between sets, the whole thing just does not take long, maybe 20-30 minutes all told, and most of that is resting so you can do the next set properly! The exercises are of varying levels of difficulty with the easier ones of course done with more reps and the harder ones done with less, so there is a balance of conditioning with absolute strength training. Also the angles of the similar exercises vary meaning again that this well designed programme targets a vast variety of different muscles and movement patterns. One "secret" if you will of the programme is to do both straight up and down and "archer" versions of movements; archer moves are where you move your whole body over top of one limb of your body, then go back and move it all over top of the other limb. Thus we have archer pushups, archer pullups and archer squats. Because callisthenics is perfectly balanced as you're using your own self for all the movements, you develop a very symmetrical, muscled body. I'm shocked at how "Conan the Barbarian" I look when looking into the mirror these days! I have bulging biceps, pectorals and a muscular, trim trunk, let alone all the gains I have made in functional strength and endurance! I am at the beginning of phase 4 now but with one exercise still in the phase 3 level - yes, I'm personalizing it a bit since I was able to jump into the programme at phase 3 due to previous strength training experience including using moves from the Kavadlo brothers' other excellent books. As part of the callisthenics tradition, this stuff is tried, tested and true, and now tweaked further for our benefit, based on literally thousands of years of experience going back to the ancient Greek gymnasia and even beyond. This volume is thus the end product of thousands of years of study and practice. I love looking impressive, enjoying the sport of the workouts, and feeling my new found strength and power! While of course you have to put hard work into this to make it work, the work is definitely fun in my opinion, and you can feel its strength as you're doing it. This is just great stuff, and I can't wait to see where it takes me with my athletic goals too!

Great Plan

This is a very useful book for anyone who wants to start training with body-weight. This is a great book that shows you a very specific program that allows you to build strength (and some muscle) using body-weight exercises. It is broken down into 4 phases, each a month long, which take you from novice through advanced exercises. At the end of each phase is a test to determine if you can move forward. Most decent athletes will be able to test into month 2 or 3, however, so it is really a 2-3 month program. Each phase introduces new exercises that progressively challange each muscle group.A few draw backs that prevented me from giving it a 5 despite its usefulness:1) the second half of this book is mostly filler, consisting of essays the authors have written that are available online. Many of these essays have to do with getting motivated. Not very useful unless you are the type of person who reads fitness books without actually doing the programs2) Although the photography is aesthetically pleasing, it doesn't always help in understanding how to do a movement. For example, in the photograph for Archer push-ups, both Kavaldo brothers are in the bottom position. It would be nice to see photos which show a progression through the movements (such as Pavel Tsatsuline offered in The Naked Warrior, which is also published through Dragondoor.) Along those lines, more text explaining the moves would be useful. They often have a sentence in a column called "trainer talk" which gives a hint about how to do a movement properly. I would have appreciated more detailed and well thought out explanations. Due to the paucity of explanations for a few moves, I end up googling them and hoping the random people on youtube are demonstrating them properly.Overall, if you are a novice to bodyweight exercises, and plan to actually dedicate a few months to a bodyweight program, this book is worth the $9.99 they are charging on Kindle. It isn't perfect, but I haven't encountered anything more useful.