In the novice phase, athletes experience rapid gains and should focus on simple, compound bodyweight exercises that build general strength, coordination, and motor patterns without unnecessary complexity. Early novices only need foundational movement patterns like push, pull, squat, and hinge, while later novices can start incorporating light skill-specific and hypertrophy-focused exercises. The SIP framework emphasizes practicality in this phase, with individuality and specificity becoming more relevant as athletes move toward the post-novice stage.
The SIP Framework—standing for Specificity, Individuality, and Practicality—is a guiding system for making smart training decisions in calisthenics programming. It helps navigate the overwhelming number of exercise choices by focusing on adaptations relevant to your goals (specificity), your personal needs and limitations (individuality), and real-world constraints like time or equipment (practicality). This framework ensures your exercise selection is effective, tailored, and sustainable over time.
Different calisthenics skills produce different levels of fatigue depending on factors like muscle length, contraction type, and movement complexity. Understanding how fatiguing each skill is can help you manage training frequency, volume, and recovery more effectively. This article outlines a fatigue classification system for common calisthenics skills to support smarter exercise selection and program design.
In calisthenics training, not all exercises serve the same purpose—some help us practice a specific skill, others address weak links, and some focus on muscular development. This article introduces a simple 3-level hierarchy—main, supplementary, and accessory exercises—to organize your training more effectively. By structuring your workouts this way, you can train smarter, progress faster, and stay focused on your goals.
This classification system helps organize exercises based on mechanics, making it easier to program and monitor training. Exercises are primarily divided into compound and isolation movements, with further subcategories based on joint action, body region, and contraction type. Additional descriptors, like static vs. dynamic, unilateral vs. bilateral, and range focus, offer precision in understanding exercise demands and tailoring them to specific training goals.
