One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to get in shape is overstressing a single metric for measuring success along their journey.

In other words, they get so wrapped up in progressing one measurable variable that they compromise the results they strive to attain.

Goodhart's law states that progress ceases to be a viable measure of success once it becomes a target. In other words, making the weight on the scale your goal makes your weight a less reliable measure for success in losing body fat once your goal is to “lose weight.” Making a goal to do a single-arm push-up or lift a certain weight ceases to be a reliable measure of your strength once you make that your primary goal.

It’s not that such metrics are bad; it’s just that they are no longer the most reliable way to measure progress for several reasons:

What would happen if you did one set of a particularly difficult exercise every day for a month?

Would you overtrain? Would you build strength? Or would you just get so sick and tired of the exercise that you never wanna do it again?

That’s exactly what I said out to discover a little over a month ago when I decided to do a set of handstands and back bridges every day. Here’s what I discovered.

#1 I became much more comfortable with doing the exercises.

The biggest change over the past month is exactly what I started the experiment to accomplish, which was to become much more comfortable with doing handstands and bridges.

I always felt awkward and uncoordinated while practicing them and so I didn’t practice that much which only further made me feel awkward. But practicing them more frequently ensured that I became more comfortable and even got to enjoy doing them.

Since I can remember, there’s long been a standing debate about which type of cardio is best for losing and managing body fat.

On the one hand, some claim that slow and steady is best due to it’s high calorie burn and relative stress on the body due to its moderate intensity.

The other camp claims that high intensity and short duration is best. High intensity saves time because it doesn’t require as much duration, and it can also lead to other performance and health benefits, like an increase in VO to max beyond what you would get with the low to moderate-intensity cardio.

Both forms of cardio have pros and cons. Low intensity can be easier on the joints but harder on the schedule due to its time-consuming nature. High intensity can improve performance and strengthen the cardio system, but it can also be more exhausting and hard on the body.

If you ask the average person what the most important calisthenics exercises, you’re likely to receive an answer along the lines of push-ups and pull-ups. Or maybe it would involve dips and core work. You probably wouldn’t hear much talk about training the lower body, especially anything addressing the hips and hamstrings. Even serious calisthenics athletes often turn to weight machines or free weights to work those muscles or even neglect them with direct training entirely.

However, if you ask me what the most important calisthenics exercises are, it would be bridgework. Hands-down, that is the most beneficial and impactful training anyone can do for their health and fitness.

The reason is simple: bridges offer a unique host of benefits that directly counter many of the negative consequences we experience from modern sedentary living. They engage and strengthen all of the muscles along the entire backside of the body, including the glutes, hamstrings, calves, and spinal erectors. Moreover, they stretch and mobilize the muscles along the front, including the chest, shoulders, and hip flexors.

One of my mentors, Coach Dan John, once taught me that “repetition is the mother of implementation.” It’s a lesson we all would be wise to understand and adopt, especially when getting in shape or reaching your fitness goals.

As a coach myself, I have to be honest with you. There’s nothing I can give you that’s ever going to make much difference to your body. Seriously, the potential influence of anything you do will always be rather small. Even the most extreme habits that push your mind, body, and lifestyle to the limit will hardly move the needle toward the results you want.

Which is why the power of repetition is so important. Being able to perform even a small activity repeatedly will make even trivial habits a much bigger influence on your goals. Eating protein at each meal or doing twenty push-ups may not seem like much, but repeating those habits almost every day of the week will compound their effect into a substantial outcome over time.

There are many inherent advantages to calisthenics training. There’s the simplicity, independence, and learning cool techniques you can show off at parties.

But a unique benefit is the inviting call to make training fun and more playful than feeling like a robotic drone in conventional strength training.

There’s just something about moving your body through space that invokes memories of messing around on the playground or schoolyard. Calisthenics can be such a great way to break out of the monotonous grind of conventional strength training, and here are 3 great ways to do that.

#1 Use total rep/time sets.

I use this strategy to break up my routine if it’s getting stale. Essentially, you decide on the total amount of reps you want to do, and then you do as many sets as you like to accomplish that.

For example, you may have fifty total pull-ups to do, so you can start doing five at a time and then change to three or even two. The number of reps in each set isn’t important, just doing the total amount of work.

Energy Makes Everything Possible

The more energy you have, the easier it is to build muscle, lose weight, and improve performance. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Low energy makes even small achievements easier to accomplish. Thankfully, some of the best ways to improve your energy level are simple and natural.

#1 Consistent Sleep Habits

Sleep is the biggest influence on your energy level. In some ways, I would even consider it a higher priority on your health than diet and exercise! Poor sleep habits will always compromise your health and fitness regardless of how disciplined your nutrition and training habits are.

Like diet and exercise, you don't need "optimal" habits, just consistent ones. Try to get the same amount of sleep each night while going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time.

Rest is an essential part of any fitness program. Training is hard on the body, and calisthenics is no exception, although many people find they aren’t as beat up and tired from bodyweight training, which means they don’t need as much recovery.

It’s a myth that you need to recover from exercise and training. You honestly don’t. Fundamentally, you need to recover from stress and fatigue, a variable consequence of physical training. The more stress you experience, the more recovery you need, and vice versa.

But some people find they can recover faster if they practice some light activity on their days off. This makes sense since being more sedentary can often make the body feel more stiff and tight compared to if it was still moving a bit.

The key word here is “light” activity. I’ve witnessed far too many times when someone engages in some light activity, and they keep adding more volume and intensity until they add a whole nother workout to their program.

Bulking and cutting are common in weight-lifting circles, but what about bodyweight training? Sure, you want to build some muscle, but adding excess body weight due to a bulk seems counterproductive to calisthenics training. So, is it good to still bulk and cut if you primarily do calisthenics?

I usually discourage people from getting caught in an endless cyclical trap between bulking and cutting. Not because adding excess weight can hurt calisthenics performance, but because I’ve long found it doesn’t bode well for most people’s physical development either. Here are several reasons:

#1 Bulking requires cutting, and often vice versa.

A bulk and cut cycle is often a self-perpetuating, high-cost, low-return cycle. It’s like the cardio trap, where you eat a lot because you do a lot of cardio, but then you feel the need to do so much because you eat so much.

"Careful, you don't want your body to get used to your workout or you’ll stop making progress.”

It's an understandable belief; if your body gets used to your workout or exercise, you'll stop seeing results. Some experts even claim you'll lose results because the workout won't be as hard on your body, and you'll regress.

But the fact is, you don't need to worry about having your body get used to your workout or the exercises you do. You WANT your body to get used to what you're doing as much as possible and as quickly as possible.

The reason is simple; you can only progress once you become more comfortable with your exercises. You can only get stronger once you become more comfortable lifting with the resistance you're currently working with. You will only improve your performance once you practice your skills more easily.

One of the biggest reasons people fail to achieve their workout goals is they need to work harder. Yes, you need to work hard to achieve results. However, while hard work is essential to progress, too much can quickly compromise your long-term potential.

You only have so much time and energy each day. You may often have fewer resources than you would like due to work, family, and other interests, so you have to work with what you have. And that’s where the age-old advice of “living within your means” is sound advice for a healthy lifestyle.

I know spending as much time and energy as possible to “optimize” your results can be tempting. I used to believe I needed to spend every second and ounce of energy in the gym, or else I was leaving potential results on the table. That approach was why I was always tired, injured, and burned out.

Leaving a little in the tank at the end of each day does the same thing for your health as saving a little each month rather than spending your entire paycheck. It builds a buffer that allows you to weather life's stressors better.

Hello, my name is Matt Schifferle, and I have come to you today to confess my sins.

Things started innocently enough. I wanted to build a stronger core and have some definition for summer. But before I knew it, my core routine was an entire workout, taking over my whole training program. I always had a sore lower back and was constantly facing burnout.

Thankfully, I’m now in recovery with a simple approach to core training that’s far more efficient and effective. My mission is to help others learn from my mistakes and avoid these four sins of core training.

Sin #1 Avoiding direct core training.

“I don’t need to train my abs because they work with everything I do already.”

Yep, that was back when I thought the deadlift was sufficient for training the abs. I also claimed I didn’t need to train legs because I was a bike racer.

“I hate doing push-ups”.

It’s one of the most common laments I hear when working with new clients. As efficient and effective as the mighty push-up can be, it’s also one of the most avoided exercises in the calisthenics toolbox.

Maybe you had a bad experience with them back in gym class, or perhaps they were used as punishment for running late to practice. Whatever your history with them, these tips will help you make friends with one of the most beneficial bodyweight exercises ever.

#1 Use progressive or regressive techniques to match your fitness level.

Most people attempt to do push-ups the same way via the classic military-style “drop-and-give-me-twenty” version of the exercise. There’s nothing wrong with the classic push-up technique, but it’s not the proper technique for most people. Progressive calisthenics is all about adjusting your technique to accommodate your fitness level.

Father time is life's greatest teacher, but he sometimes seems to play favorites with younger generations regarding physical fitness. However, age doesn’t have to be your ultimate advisory if you want to build or maintain youthful vitality. You just need to follow a few key principles to train smarter rather than harder.

#1 Have a training objective with each workout.

Leave the no-pain-no-gain mentality to the young and foolish. When you’re younger, you can chase after blood-sweat-and-tears workouts all day and bounce back smiling, but not so much as you get older.

But fret not my friend, because effective training doesn’t depend on how much abuse your body can withstand. It depends on how well you train rather than how hard you push yourself.

Calisthenics is a pretty simple discipline; you’re moving your body through space and against the resistance of gravity. You’ve been doing just that since you were able to walk. But what is basic in concept can also be deep and complicated in practice especially if you get trapped in the countless calisthenics internet rabbit holes.

To make your training more practical, I’ve created this list of the most important Dos and Don’t everyone should understand about calisthenics training.

Don’t do endless push-ups & sit-ups. Bodyweight training often lends itself to “rep-chasing,” where you endlessly pursue more volume. Adding some extra sets and reps is fine when starting out, but before too long you’re slogging through one exhaustive workout after another with diminishing returns.

How many reps do you have to do for a workout or exercise to be effective? This is a relatively common question I receive as a calisthenics coach. Questions like these are great, but they do very little to help you build the muscle you want. There are better ways to assess the effectiveness of your workout program than trying to figure out how much work you should do.

This is because all static answers will provide little value in helping you understand how to go about reaching your goals. No matter what answer you come up with, it will steer you wrong sooner or later. It doesn’t matter if I tell you to do 50, 100, or even 1,000 push-ups daily. Any set number I recommend will probably be the wrong one for you sooner or later. Assessing the effectiveness of your training on how much work you do is like having your car's GPS tell you to drive straight ahead, and that's the only instructions your gps ever tells you. Driving straight ahead may be the correct route at the moment, but sooner or later you’ll need to follow some additional instructions ot get where you want to go.

Calisthenics is a relatively simple discipline. It doesn’t require a lot of equipment, and you can effectively work your entire body with only a handful of exercises. It’s the perfect form of training for those who want a simple and efficient way to condition themselves for health and fitness.

Unfortunately, some calisthenics practitioners take simplification too far. A common example of this is building a workout program around only two basic exercises like push-ups and pull-ups.

One of the biggest myths in calisthenics is that the path to building muscle is to always strive to do repetitions. That you’re sure to build more muscle and strength if you can somehow manage to always do more push-ups or pull-ups. More reps don’t always equate to more gains.

Before you think I've gone crazier than usual, hear me out. When your attention gets put toward the goal of chasing metrics, you may follow a path you don't want if your goal is to build bigger and stronger muscles. Doing a lot of pull-ups is impressive, but it’s not always the best path to building strength.

If your goal is to make your muscles bigger and stronger then you’ll want to make sure we're doing a progressively more challenging technique. You want to challenge the work capacity of the muscle itself in your workouts.

It's time to tackle one of the biggest lower body challenges in the world of calisthenics. This is the challenge of keeping your glutes and your hips engaged when in a deep squat or lunge position.

A lot of your lower body potential, to build both strength and muscle while keeping your joints safe depends on how well you use these muscles and keep them engaged throughout an entire range of motion. This is especially the case when doing deep bodyweight leg exercises.

Calisthenics can be a very potent discipline for building muscle mass. The inherent simplicity and efficiency of bodyweight training makes it easier to stick with a consistent program. Basic progressive techniques also make it easy to push your muscles to a very high intensity. However, one potential downside many falsely assign to calisthenics is the lack of isolation exercises. It’s true that most calisthenic training involves basic compound exercises, like push-ups and squats, but single-joint exercises like bicep curls and chest flys are also easy to include in your training. All you need is a simple set of suspension straps and the following three training strategies.