How often should I do calisthenics?

Every person training calisthenics asks himself this question – “How often should I do calisthenics”. The answer will be different for everyone. In this article, you will learn how to choose the training frequency appropriate for you.

Table of Contents

Training frequency

In a study about the effects of training frequency on muscle hypertrophy, researchers found that training each muscle 2 or 3 times a week resulted in greater muscle growth than training it once a week. Since training volume, exercises and rest time were the same, it’s very likely that the difference in training frequency is indeed what caused that extra muscle growth. To maximize muscle growth, training a minimum of 2 times a week is needed.

There is no evidence that training more than 3 times a week is better for hypertrophy. Instead, there is a study comparing training 2 vs 4 times a week that found that the group training 2 times a week had better results. So the optimal training frequency would be 2 or 3 times a week per muscle.

Training experience

The first and most important thing to consider when you ask yourself “How often should I do calisthenics?” is your training experience. If you’re new to working out, training every day probably won’t work for you. At the very beginning of your calisthenics journey, you don’t want to set yourself a too high goal that you cant achieve. You don’t want to injure yourself or burn out by pushing your body past its limit before you find a comfortable rhythm. Try starting with 2 training sessions a week. As you feel like you can handle more, increase the number of sessions over time. It’s better to start slowly than set a too high goal then fail and quit.

If you’ve trained in the past and you’re disciplined enough, you can train more often than 2 times a week, even up to 4 or 5. Strength training more than 4 times a week is really tiring and less efficient over time when you overtrain and can’t recover. Unless you’re doing split, which for calisthenics athletes i don’t recommend. But that’s a long topic for another article.

Example workout plan

You can modify this example fbw training plan for yourself. For example if you dont train legs, as many calisthenics guys do, just get rid of them (week 2). You can choose your own exercises, number of reps and how often you will train.

Training A	Training B	Training C
Push x4	Pull x4	Legs x4
Pull x4	Push x4	Legs x3
Push x3	Pull x3	Push x4
Pull x4	Push x4	Pull x4
Legs x3	Legs x3	Push x3
Legs x2	Legs x2	Pull x3