The fever of calisthenics and Street Workout

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It is quite likely that your city council has installed some strangely shaped bars and you see young boys and girls doing tricks and strange movements on said modules. It contrasts a lot to see these kids always training outdoors with life glued to a screen that has been imposed in the 21st century society. This sedentary lifestyle has harmful effects on our health, since we adopt bad postures for hours that end up causing injuries and chronic pain that significantly reduce the quality of life. Well then, what are these guys and girls doing? Very simple: Calisthenics and Street Workout.

Despite being closely related, Calisthenics and Street Workout are not exactly the same. Calisthenics is simply performing exercises using our body weight, while Street Workout adds a street element and the use of urban furniture to exercise by incorporating many Calisthenics exercises. That is, if you do Street Workout you do calisthenics but if you do Caslitenia you don’t have to be doing Street Workout.

It was in depressed areas of the United States where the Street Workout movement arose as an alternative to keep fit and have a healthy lifestyle spending little money and creating a community along the way, keeping young people away from bad habits and worse consequences. It has become very popular in Eastern European countries, where there has always been a lot of talent in sports gymnastics and Street Workout is a facelift that attracts many young heirs of Soviet sports culture.

It arrived in Spain about a decade ago and with the good weather that we enjoy, its explosion was inevitable, especially in recent years where the spectacular nature of the sport and the possibility of sharing audiovisual material on social networks has created this fever of calisthenics and street workout. that we want it to “worse” as much as possible and be very durable.

On the other hand, calisthenics has much older origins, since there are references to prescribers of this sport in France from the 18th century with works such as Clias. A., (1928) Callisthenie ou gymnastique des jeunes filles, Paris, France; although we already know that in the time of Ancient Greece the Spartan army of Alejandro Mango (yes, the one from the battle of Thermopylae known from the 300 film) already used calisthenics to exercise. If they were already this strong in 300 B.C., there is no excuse for us. In the 1960s, the Canadian army modernized the discipline with the launch of its famous 5BX (5 Basic Exercises) that became popular worldwide, being translated into more than twenty languages and is still popular today.

As a result of this explosion of Street Workout practitioners and taking into account that calisthenics have a tendency to organize themselves into training groups, federations such as the Spanish Federation of Street Workout and Calisthenics and the Spanish Organization of Street Workout and Calisthenics of this discipline that are organized to create leagues and championships at the national level and whose objective is to professionalize the sport as soon as possible to raise the level of athletes and compete internationally. Thanks to social networks and sponsors, there are already recognized figures in the world such as Sergio Ordóñez or Javi Ales.

The modalities of competition in Street Workout are the following:

• Freestyle: where the athlete has a defined time to perform the most difficult and spectacular maneuvers combining basic, static and dynamic maneuvers that will be scored by a jury.
• Workout Style: a variant of the previous category in which the athlete must do a “choreography” in which their maneuvers are mixed with the music and not only their difficulty and spectacularity are valued, but also their fusion with the musical rhythm.
• Resistance: it seeks to do a routine of calisthenics exercises, normally basic, in the shortest time and with the best possible technique.
• Tension: consists of maintaining an isometric position such as planks or levers for as long as possible.
• Strength: Although some people do not consider it “pure” when using weights to part of the body, in these competitions it is sought to perform the required exercise with the greatest weight possible.

In Spain, at the national level, the Spanish National Championship stands out, which the Spanish Federation has been organizing since 2015 and at the international level, it has positioned itself with the Battle of the Bars in 2015 and 2017 framed within an entire Arnold Classic Europe.

Why has Street Workout become so popular?

There are many reasons why the Street Workout has come to stay but they could be summarized in the following.

• Material: hardly any material is needed to start training Street Workout, not to say that when you start you don’t need anything. By going to your nearest park you can start with pull-ups, funds and other basics, and there are even many routines that you can do at home with absolutely no material.
• Spectacularity: it must be recognized that many of the Street Workout maneuvers are spectacular. Just like other urban sports like skateboarding or parkour, they are very impressive and attractive to everyone who sees them.
• Universality: Although it is more popular among young people, the street workout is accessible to people of any gender and age.
• Aesthetics: in calisthenics or street workout, the percentage of fat is very important when it comes to progress, since the more “useless” weight we have to move, the less access to advanced movements we will have. This is why calisthenics usually have a very good body composition and very aesthetic physiques.
• Calorie Burn: Street Workout routines are usually quite dynamic and burn very high calories.
• Transfer: the movement patterns of calisthenics or street workout transfer very well to other disciplines such as Crossfit or weight lifting.
• Variety: standard gym routines usually have a limited number of exercises, however calisthenics invites you to “unlock” new exercises by making each routine different.
• Physical benefits: when you perform calisthenics you will obtain improvements in many physical abilities: strength, resistance, flexibility, proprioception, balance… that will affect your physical condition and health.

However, being objective there are also some disadvantages of Street Workout compared to other disciplines and the most common criticisms are the following:

• Beginners: At the beginning, although you can always start practicing, the initial range of exercises for a person who is not in shape is frankly limited.
• Measurement: measuring the progress of some exercises in calisthenics or street workout is complicated since often the difficulty or beauty of the exercises is subjective.
• Injuries: dynamic exercises, as they require a lot of power, have a higher percentage of injuries per thousand hours than other disciplines that involve exogenous weights.
• Injuries: dynamic exercises, as they require a lot of power, have a higher percentage of injuries per thousand hours than other disciplines that involve exogenous weights.
• Leg: Many calisthenics will hate me for this but, although you can train legs intensely, it would be blind to deny that most calisthenics don’t even train legs and those who do, it is with a much lower intensity. Our legs are used to carrying our weight by now and doing bodyweight squats doesn’t create nearly the same stimulus to our quads as doing pull-ups to our upper back.

conclusions

With their pros and cons, both disciplines are becoming more and more popular among our youth and we love that it is so. Find your nearest park and the calisthenics of the area will be happy to introduce you to this discipline since the community is one of the pillars of Streetworkout, let’s not forget that its origin is in the poor neighborhoods of New York where Street Workout was the tool to escape addictions and bad company among the neighborhood’s Afro-American community.

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