Balance is Key

No, I am not going to talk about standing on your head on a tight rope with your eyes closed, I am going to talk about balancing your strength training routine.

To know how to balance your routine, you need to know some basic movements: horizontal push, horizontal pull, vertical push, vertical pull, squat, pull and hip extension. All these movements should be balanced. 

For every horizontal push (push-up, leaning dip, etc), you should have a horizontal pull (bodyweight row, front lever, etc). I think that someone should actually have a little more horizontal pulls than pushes, because most things we do in our daily life encourage internal rotation of the shoulder and rounding of the back (just like horizontal pushes.

It is actually less important to have a balance between vertical pushes (handstand push-up, pike push-up, etc) and vertical pulls (pull up variations). Though, it is still somewhat important (also, some people just don't have the thoracic flexibility to do verticals movements). 

I said squat, pull, hip extension, but that is not always the case. A heavy back squat can build a nicely balanced lower body. Sadly, there is no such 'perfect' exercise with calisthenics. Squats with bodyweight only simulate more of a front squat (a quad dominant exercise), and thus will build an imbalanced lower body. That is why I said: a squat, a pull and hip extension. These three should be relatively balanced. 

For a squatting movement I recommend squats (duh). Once you prefect your form move on to thing like lunges... Then eventually move on to pistol squats and jumps. Don't worry, I will write more on this later.

For a pull, is a bit harder with no weights. Dead lifts are perfect, but require a lot of weights. So instead we need a few movements. An easy is stiff (but bent) one leg dead lifts. Another exercise is the back lever, which works on the lower back and a bit of hamstrings (meanwhile giving your upper body a grand workout). Finally, the hardest (and maybe the best) lower body calisthenic exercise: the glute ham raise! This will utterly wreck the hamstrings, fry the glutes and maybe some lower back and calve work! I am yet to preform a true glute ham raise, but it is close to as good dead lifting for the posterior chain! There are some other exercises, but I will get into those on a different post.

Hip extension. The kind-of-awkward exercises. Sadly, this is often neglected because it is awkward (or "too painful"). Glute bridges (also called hip thrusts, but I will stick to glute bridges) is the name of the game. Great glute work and activation (most people have under active glutes which can cause knee, hip or back pain). Once you master the single leg version, you will not be able to progress much more with calisthenics.

Actually, this brings up a good point: weight training is superior to calisthenics when trying to strengthen the legs. This is because the legs just are so strong that bodyweight movements eventually become too easy. 

Keep your routine balanced to keep joints happy and your body aligned. I will get into more detail later with things like: calves, rotator cuff, forearms, neck, etc. I don't want to bore you with all those details yet.