Productivity in Calisthenics

“I gotta hit the gym.” Growing up, 15-year-old me eventually noticed that looks started to matter. As a teenager, I never was much of a sports person. But driven by the goal of a better physique, I signed up for a gym membership. As a teenager, my favourite muscle group to train was arms (which now have been overtaken by shoulders and back).

Starting out, compound movements — exercises that targeted the most muscle groups — were not part of my routine.

Neither was consistency.

And my nutrition needed a lot of work. A lot.

I continued at this rate for around 2 years until the pandemic hit when my workouts were on hiatus for over a year. Taking stock, I observed a problem. That the gains were not as much as I’d expected (hint hint: inconsistency, poor diet, lack of compound movements). Which, later I learned, is shared by many beginner and novice lifters alike.

As I’ve spent a couple of years in the gym I was determined to figure out why. Also, this was while I was developing my philosophy on productivity and forging necessary skills (deep work routines, deliberate practice in writing). Fittingly, I decided to test out the principles of productivity in personal fitness.

Here are those principles applied in calisthenics:

Focus on the basics.

Once the pandemic restrictions/lockdown loosened, the park became my gym, where I’d train upper-body calisthenics. My focus lay on the basic horizontal and vertical pull/push movements: dips, pull ups, push ups, and inverted rows.

This principle is borrowed from the consolidation-over-novelty in my productivity system. Instead of learning skills that are too advanced or switching up my routine too frequently, I aimed to build up a good foundation. Of course, it was way less “fun” than working on my arms with different exercises.

But often, it’s the boring, mundane stuff — also known as the basics — that carries the most value.

A lot of people skipped the basics. I sure did.

Once I embraced them, I saw the fastest growth than ever before, both muscle and strength-wise.

Basic inverted hang

After weeks of repping out the basic movements, my growth became visible both in physique and strength. How could I tell for sure? I documented my progress.

After every workout, I wrote down what I did — the exercises, the sets and reps, and even the rest time. Having a reference, improvement is more straightforward (than a lack thereof). All I needed to do was more reps or sets in the following session.

Most people just wing it. Relying on intuition to pick the exercise for the day, how much to do, etc.

This makes progress a vague idea. What you want is concrete proof of your improvement.

So, noted each workout in a journal. In parallel, I’d document my deep work routine — how long each deep work session was, how long the breaks were, how intense my focus was.

After months, I found out the optimal rest time: half the duration of each focused session. 1 and a half hours would mean a 45-minute break.

Without documenting, I wouldn’t have arrived at this formula, that now works wonders. Writing of rest, I learned its importance only later in my calisthenics journey.

The mandatory breaks between each deep work block mirror rest time between each set.

I used to dismiss the value of just sitting still before the next set.

Less rest, less time, more efficient workouts, I thought. Little did I know that inadequate rest (be it between sets or sleep) spoils the quality of your workouts. Now, 2 minutes is the minimum I take between each compound exercise set.

When it comes to rest, a more-than-enough is more beneficial to the body and mind than not-enough.

To rest more and well is also another way to leave your ego at the door — or at the gate of the calisthenics park. So, when planning my workouts, I started taking rest into account.

Planning is priming.

From my documentation of previous deep work sessions emerged a pattern: a session without a clear, specific goal tends to be lower in focus intensity, leading to more breaks in focus.

If you write down your workout as mentioned earlier, it’s easy for you to plan. Add more reps/sets or change the volume as necessary. Then, your brain is not filled with decisions to make on the spot — how much weight, how many reps, etc.

If you plan ahead, it helps you get focused during the following workout.

Exercises to do (left). What I actually did during the workout (right). Your plan doesn’t have to be pretty!

Maintaining focus is a skill.

An uncommon one especially in today’s distracted digital age.

It’s not the end of the world if I check my phone during the workouts — tending to notifications during rest. However, the whole point of Deep Work is to sustain focus on one single task at a time. Plus, deliberate practice requires intense focus while the repetition is being carried out and during evaluating feedback.

So, why would I want to, as Cal Newport puts it, fragment my attention?

Multi-tasking is not a skill I cherish.

Each workout is a repetition.

With every workout clocked in, you accumulate one repetition and more room for improvement, with which a better repetition, a better workout, in terms of quality and quantity, can be achieved.

This is deliberate practice.

Repetition and feedback, and more repetition. The difference between the before and after of your workout is feedback.

If you’ve been seeing a massive drop in energy level after each workout, it probably means that you’re doing too much.

My goal was to have the workouts intense enough so that they bring results, but not too much that they drastically affect other pillars of my life.

Deliberate practice makes perfect.

For what though? For performance. For an end goal.

Skill-based calisthenics requires me to build the necessary strength and muscle through both compound and isolation exercises. For example, learning the L-sit necessitates easier progressions and isolated core work (hanging knee/leg raises).

I’m not training these exercises without a goal in mind. The principles of Application and Project-Based Learning are what deliberate practice amounts to. Each skill is a project to which the pre-requisite exercises and accessory work are applied.

The principles of productivity can be applied to anything that requires time and effort. Apart from the more talked-about benefits like discipline and consistency, these productivity habits and mindsets can be built by enlisting yourself in a calisthenics regimen:

Consolidate the basics
Document your progress
Prioritize rest
Plan for focus
Focus is key
Treat each workout as a rep
Have workout goals

Happy working out (productively)!