Beginner Calisthenics Workout (That is Easy to Follow!)

If your looking for a beginner calisthenics workout to help you kick-start your calisthenics training, then look no further. In this article, I am going to cover an easy to follow, yet extremely effective beginner calisthenics workout that will help any newbie see rapid progression in performance and muscular strength.

Beginner Mistakes To Avoid

Beginners are prone to making some critical errors, and of course, it’s because they lack the necessary knowledge and experience that comes with training for years or even decades.

Thankfully,  I can help to shed light on some of the biggest mistakes that beginners are likely to make, so you can stay clear of them as you continue your calisthenics journey.

It’s crucial that we cover this first before we actually go into the workout, as many of these mistakes have the potential to negate the benefits you can get from a solid workout plan.

Not Keeping A Training Journal

The first mistake that beginners are likely to make is, not keeping a training journal.

Why is it important to keep a training journal? 

To put it simply, no matter what your calisthenics goal is, progression will play the largest part in helping you reach it.

This applies to all common goals, including:

• Building muscle
• Getting stronger
• increase your athletic performance
• Getting better at calisthenics movements

In this context what I mean by progression is the ability to build upon your previous workouts in some way or form, to make sure the workouts are continuing to challenge you as you grow.

Progression can be applied to a workout in several ways, but here are some of the most common:

• Progressing to harder exercises (e.g going from press ups to dips)
• Doing more reps
• Doing more sets
• Reducing rest time

Note: You should definitely be applying the above progressions to your beginner calisthenics workout.

What role does the journal play? 

A training journal performs the very simple task of tracking what you did in your workouts, mainly the exercises, sets, reps etc.

This allows you to know what you did in your previous workout and gives you something solid you can look back upon and build on for the next workout.

Sure, people can progress their workouts without using a journal, but if you want to make sure your making consistent progress on regular basis, and have direct feedback on how your performing, then writing down what you do is optimal.

it’s also highly motivating to see those numbers increase as time goes on, which is perfect for the beginner that wants to know if what he is doing is working.

Not Paying Attention To Diet

Diet plays a huge role in helping your body to perform in workouts.

Everything you eat will contribute to your workouts, in a good way, or a bad way.

For example: 

If your overeating, and gaining fat relatively quickly, then you will notice that calisthenics, in general, is going to get much harder, as you have much more bodyweight to move around.

Conversely, if you’re under eating, and not giving your body enough carbohydrates and protein to help build and maintain muscle, then you will find that either…

• You’re not progressing as fast as you could be
• Your workouts are stagnating
• You’re actually getting weaker

So clearly diet is something that every trainer should be conscious of.

Personally, I am of the opinion that things should be very simple for the beginner, as too much information can be overwhelming.

Therefore I have put together a concise, yet effective, beginners diet cheat sheet for you guys to follow:

• If your overweight and carrying a lot of fat, then diet to lose weight, this will help your calisthenics massively. Focus on reducing the overall amount of food you eat and try to focus on including more vegetables, fruits and lean meats in your diet.
• If you’re on the skinny side then your focus should be to eat so you can gain muscle. Eat slightly more then you’re used to, whilst focusing on eating foods which are dense in protein and carbohydrates.

Not Understanding The Importance Of Consistency

Since beginners don’t have a long training history, they have yet to see the trends that come from regular training.

For all you beginners out there, you need to know how important training consistently is.

Here is a great example of how consistency affects results: 

Let’s say that your workout program has you training 2-3 times a week.

Each week builds on the previous week, if you train for 10 weeks in a row, without having missed a week, you will be able to progress most session, every week for 10 weeks.

If you train one week and miss the next, and you do that for 10 weeks (essentially training 5 weeks out of 10) then at least you get 50% of the results, right? In my experience I have found that training intermittently like that will actually get you much less than logic would estimate, in some cases, you may just be able to maintain what you currently have, or make a small increase, but nothing marginal.

That’s why it so important to make sure that you are consistent with your training. Most of your results will come from when you are able to string together weeks of workouts and continually build on the previous session, instead of making up for lost time.

Beginner Calisthenics Workout

This beginner calisthenics workout is to be performed 2 – 3 times a week (depending on how much time you have available), and the workouts should be spaced out by at least 1-2 days of rest.

Example:

• 2 times a week: Train on Monday and Thursday. OR Tuesday and Friday.
• 3 times a week: Train on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. OR Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

As you can see I have tried to leave as much space in between workouts as possible. This is so we can give an adequate amount of time for the body to recover.

Exercise 1: Push Ups

Important: Read our technique guide here to see how to properly perform a push-up.

• Perform this exercise for 4 sets of as many reps as you can.
• With push-ups, a lot of people try to do them as fast as possible. If your goal is to build muscle size, then doing them with a slower, more controlled tempo will help to get a greater muscle building response.
• If you find that you can do at least 6 reps on all 4 sets of push-ups, then you can progress to harder exercises like dips, close grip push ups, archer push-ups and eventually one-handed push-ups.

Exercise 2: Chin Ups

Watch the video below on the correct way to perform the exercise.

• Perform this exercise for 4 sets of as many reps as you can.
• The most common mistake made with chin ups is not going all the way to the bottom, and just bouncing in the midrange of the movement. If you want to do chin-ups properly, then try and go as low as possible and pull yourself up from there on each rep.
• If you find that you can do at least 6 reps on all 4 sets of chin-ups, then you can progress to harder exercises like pull-ups, towel pull pulls and muscle ups.

Exercise 3: Walking Lunges

Watch the video below on the correct way to perform the exercise.

• Perform this exercise for 4 sets of as many reps as you can.
• Just like push-ups, a lot of people try to do these too fast. Slow down the movement so each rep is controlled, that way you will put more work on the muscles and use less momentum.
• If you find that you can do at least 20 reps on all 4 sets of walking lunges, then you can progress to harder exercises like sprints and pistol squat progressions.