As you’ve likely learned from Alex Jang’s numerous blog posts on this subject, the world of calisthenics revolves around bodyweight exercises. Whether you’re repping out push ups, sit ups, or burpees, your main focus is to master your own weight with perfect form and high mobility.
Because of this, calisthenics brings one great appeal. There’s no need to buy expensive equipment or invest in a gym membership! After all, the ground is free, and if you’d like to get some pulling action into your workouts, you just need a quick visit to your local park.
That said, the ground has its limits when it comes to the difficulty of your dynamic exercises and the intensity of your isometric holds. The world of calisthenics has recognized this, so they’ve adopted a few crucial pieces of equipment you might want to pick up if you’d like to explore bodyweight exercise past its basics.
The Weight Vest
The easiest life hack to increase the intensity of your calisthenics workouts is putting on a weight vest. Because calisthenics centers around bodyweight exercises, it’s pretty obvious that the more you weigh, the harder each exercise will be. Weight vests are great because you can vary the amount of weight you put on, and they can be used with pretty much any calisthenics exercise.
Parallettes
Parallettes are mini parallel bars. Some athletes prefer gripping these as opposed to keeping their hands flat on the floor while holding handstands, L-sits, planches, and similar isometrics. While performing these holds on the ground requires stable wrists and strong fingers, performing the same holds on parallettes will require dynamic wrists and target your grip strength. For example, while performing a handstand on the ground, to prevent yourself from falling forward you need to press your fingertips into the floor, but with parallettes, you need to push forward or back with your wrists.
Rings
These are the secret behind the title of this blog post! Rings target muscles you never knew you had. Just try holding yourself above the rings with your arms fully extended like the guy in the picture and you’ll find yourself shaking like you’ve just done a hundred push-ups and you’re going for one more. Rings are inherently unstable, so to perform any exercise using them will require you to squeeze your body and activate your numerous small stabilizer muscles that are rarely hit by other movements. The constant tension generated by ring exercises will do wonders for your involved musculature.
Chin-Ups on Rings
The most basic ring exercise is of course the chin-up. As the prerequisite for learning this move, you should definitely be able to at least five perfect chin-ups on a straight bar in a row. Now, ring chin-ups are quite easy if you do them incorrectly, so you won’t build much muscle with these unless you maintain perfect form throughout every rep. Remember, perfect form and full range of motion are key to achieving progress. Anything less than that and your reps are nothing better than white lies.
So how do you do a perfect ring chin-up? Step one is to focus on starting from the correct position. Mimic the guy in the first picture: keep your arms and back fully straightened, shrug your shoulders, and turn your wrists into a neutral grip. After that, you’ll need to pull into the top position as shown in the second picture. On the way up, you’ll need to focus on three things: pull by flexing your back and biceps, maintain a tight grip while rotating your wrists into chin-up position, and squeeze your forearms to get your chest as close to the rings as possible. To maximize the activation of your muscles, hold the top position for at least three seconds, then take three more seconds on the way down, maintaining tension throughout your body the entire time. Make sure you extend fully into the starting position before beginning your next rep!
Ring Dips
Ring dips are harder than they look, and they look pretty damn hard, but they’re also the second basic ring exercise you need to master before moving on to intermediate or advanced movements. As a prerequisite for attempting this move, you should be able to do at least 15 straight bar dips and 20 parallel bar dips comfortably. Also, make sure you can hold the top position as shown in the first picture!
To perform a perfect ring dip, just mimic the guy in these two pictures again. Throughout the entire movement, your entire chest and core will need to be extremely tense in order to maintain stability and not fall off the rings. At the bottom of the dip, you’ll need a 90 degree bend in your elbows and a neutral grip with your forearms perpendicular to the ground. You’ll need to lean forward as you go down to achieve this position; this will put the majority of the load on your triceps, which is the main focus of the dip. As for the top position, push down with all your might; you’ll want to be as tall as possible. Most importantly, lock your elbows and rotate your wrists outward; this will ensure full contraction of your triceps. Master the ring dip and you’ll achieve your swole goals in no time!
There are trillions of other exercises you can do on rings. Pretty much every move you can perform on the ground, a pull-up bar, or parallel bars can be done on rings as an advanced progression. You’ve got your ring muscle-ups, handstands, planche variations, lever variations, and so on. But for a beginner like you or me, who has just picked up their first pair of gymnastic rings from Amazon, chin-ups and dips are fundamentals to master, an essential milestone to reach before you even go so far as to attempt the advanced calisthenics moves you’ll need to flex on the kids at your local park.
Hi friend, very informative blog. Unfortunately, I am weak.
Kevin, I started taking strength and performance last year to get swole and increase my strength because prior to weightlifting I was pretty weak. The exercises involving weights which I usually do include squats, bench presses, cleans, power cleans, hang cleans, dumb bell curls etc. I usually prefer these exercises over calisthenics ,haha, because I struggle to carry my own weight. Hence the most I usually do for calisthenics are modified pull ups and push ups. After reading your blog, I feel more excited about doing calisthenics because now I know there is more to calisthenics beside push ups and pull ups. I’m willing to give the handstand on parallettes a try because handstands are something I want to learn and I think it’s really cool to be upside down. I am also in need of a more effective core work out! Once I get better at chin-ups with the bar, I might try the rings to enhance the results. Thanks for the suggestions!
No problem, this is great to hear! Even if you struggle to handle your full body weight, there are tons of variations of each exercise, and there are always easier progressions to work up from. Calisthenics can be for anyone 😀