Explosiveness, Strength, weight lifting

The Real Difference Between Calisthenics and Weight Lifting

Many people believe that the real difference between bodyweight exercise and weight lifting is only in the difference between using bodyweight and external weight for resistance. This is not true.

Both ways of training will make you “stronger” but what does that mean in the context of sports like football, boxing, MMA, track and field or even powerlifting? Well, as many of you have already deduced, strength is contextual. This means that, being able to do 100 push-ups may not translate to pushing an offensive lineman the way that benching 400 pounds does. So what the difference in training these disparate resistance methods comes down to is, what are you training for?

The deciding factor as to whether calisthenics or weightlifting is better comes down to the degree to which the sport you are training for relies heavily on fixed movement patterns.

Calisthenics is better than weight lifting for certain activities such as:

  • Wrestling: What people don’t understand about wrestling is that it is a sport that requires a great degree of flexibility and strength that doesn’t rely on fixed patterns. With a good calisthenics program, you will have a lot of volume where there are a variety of exercises targeting one body-part. For example: just for strengthening the upper back you can do type writer pull-ups, archer pull-ups, muscle-ups as well as reverse the grips or widening the grips on the aforementioned exercises. Whereas, with weight training, you just have the lat pull-down, where the range of motion is pretty fixed.
  • Gymnastics: This activity requires strength while performing with the least restriction in movement patterns of almost any activity. As a result, weight training just isn’t going to cut it if you want to get results.
  • Juijitsu and MMA: Whether calisthenics is a good fit for you as a mixed martial artist is really dependent on your style of fighting. But in  general I believe that calisthenics is probably best for this sport due it’s lack of a lot of fixed movement patterns.

Weightlifting is better than Calisthenics for certain activities such as:

  • Judo: This sport is more of a fixed pattern endeavor when compared to sports like BJJ or wrestling. Weight lifting may be more applicable than calisthenics here. But, that depends on the individual.
  • Football: Football is far more of a fixed pattern endeavor but this is highly dependent on the individual and the positions that the individual plays.

Until next time …

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2 thoughts on “The Real Difference Between Calisthenics and Weight Lifting”

    1. I don’t feel that there is a best martial art for striking. How good of a fighter you are is more dependent on the individual practitioner than the practice. Moreover, people tend to gravitate toward certain martial arts like kickboxing or whatever, but there are inherent weaknesses in all martial arts. If a person becomes sold on the idea that his martial art is the best than he may become blind to the fact that his martial art has flaws just like any other art.

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