What is street lifting?
Street lifting is a strength sport that combines street workout and powerlifting. In which athletes compete to lift as much weight as possible in 2 exercises – pull ups and dips. Some competitions also include muscle-ups and back squats. Athletes have three attempts to reach their maximum weight and are ranked in body weight and age categories. The winner is determined by who has the highest total score.
Street lifting or weighted calisthenics?
Street lifting is often mistaken with weighted calisthenics. But, street lifting is a competition and weighted calisthenics is a style of training with bodyweight movements with extra weights. Weighted calisthenics isn’t limited to only those two movements, you can add weights to every calisthenics move, even to the static exercises like planche or dragon flag.
Benefits of street lifting
Street lifting or weighted calisthenics in general is much better than regular bodyweight training in many ways. Here are a few of them
- build more strength and muscle mass
- easier progress
- easier to track your progress
To build strength or muscle mass you have to be in a specific range of reps. For strength, it’s 1-5 and 6-12 for muscles. If you’re doing more than 15 reps you’re not getting stronger instead, you’re training for endurance.
In bodyweight-only calisthenics, once you can do the specific number of reps, it is hard to progress because in order to increase the difficulty you have to change exercise. That results in different muscle groups involved and a non-uniformly increase in difficulty which may make people hardly see their progress.
After adding weights to your training you can make repetitions in each set to be the best optimal range of reps for your training goal.
When to start street lifting?
Street lifting should only be done by advanced calisthenics athletes that already have a good foundation in pull ups and dips. A rough prerequisite guide would be to be able to do at least 15 pull ups and 25 dips – all with perfect form.
Programming
If you’re just starting with street lifting, I recommend starting with a simple 5×5 plan, where you do 5 sets of 5 reps with additional weight. To know what weight you can do 5×5 with just start slowly and each training adds a few more kg. For example, on day 1 you do 5×5 with 5kg, next training 5×5 with 10kg. If that was already pretty hard, next time add only 3 more and start from there. Once you know your maximal weight, each training you can add more reps.
example
55555 → 65555 → 66555
When you can do 5 sets of 7 reps add more weight and again start from 5×5 and progress the same way
check out this video to see how such competition looks like
Scheduled competitions 2022
If you’re intrested in competing here are scheduled competitions for 2022 from international streetlifint federation
Conclusion
If you’re training calisthenics and your ultimate goal is to build strength and muscles, the best way is to start weighted calisthenics and maybe even compete in street lifting.
