Written by Garett Reid | NSCA, CSCS, CISSN, M.S.E.S.S
Fact checked by Sam Coleman, Co-Founder
FACT CHECKED
Calisthenics body or a gym body; what do you want? More importantly, what are the differences!? Weightlifting and calisthenics are both excellent forms of training. However, when compared in isolation, these training methods are quite different. As such, these differences can cause a person to develop a different body when relying on only one or the other. This leaves a question: what's the difference between a calisthenic body and a gym body?
Calisthenics VS Weightlifting: An In-Depth Comparison
Before we speak about the body's adaptations to calisthenics and weight lifting, we must first define these training styles and what your training would look like.
How To Build A Calisthenics Body
Calisthenics is a method of resistance training that solely relies on body weight exercises such as dips, chin-ups, and push-ups; there are no barbells or dumbbells here. To increase or decrease weight, a lifter would need to manipulate the movement pattern or train to perform a more complicated movement.
There is some controversy about using external loads. Some proponents of pure calisthenics may state that a person cannot use any type of external load. For example, using a dip belt with plates to make a chin-up more challenging.
On the other hand, some calisthenic practitioners are okay with using an external load as long as it’s used to increase the body's weight. In other words, rather than performing a bench press with weight, a calisthenics practitioner may place a weight plate on their back to make the push-up more difficult.
Using an external load can make quite a difference in your training experience, so we'll touch on that later.
How To Build A Gym Body
To build a "gym body", you'll be sticking with traditional resistance training. This can include any free weight or machine. This includes:
Such a wide array of implements gives you the ability to perform a litany of exercises. This includes your big compound exercises such as squats, bench presses, and rows. In addition, you can perform as many isolations as you want, including skull crushers, lateral raises, and bicep curls. Technically, it could also include calisthenics as well.
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Pros And Cons of Calisthenics & Gym
To fully understand how these training methods can affect your body, we should examine how they compare in terms of training. This section will compare some general variables and specific issues with their use.
Exercise Selection
There are two truths in the world of bodybuilding.
- You can create an excellent physique by focusing on just a few fundamental lifts.
- Having a greater variety of exercises is needed to see optimal muscle growth.
We could write a program using just four or five exercises, which you could use to gain a significant amount of muscle mass. This is all some are looking for and would be sufficient for many people.
However, if you're looking to optimize your muscle growth, you need to have a variety of exercises to choose from. This obviously gives the gym the upper hand. You have:
- Bench press
- Back squat
- Deadlift
- Arnold press
- Hammer curls
- T-bar Rows
- And on and on and on…
While calisthenics doesn't offer nearly as many exercises, they do have some great ones, especially for the upper body. We're talking about chin-ups, dips, and push-ups. However, the selection is significantly smaller, limiting you in how you train your muscles. This includes the lack of isolation exercises.
Ability To Load And Use Progressive Overload
When building muscle mass, you need to place more stress on the muscle. The most important fundamental in bodybuilding is progressive overload, which simply states that to see continual muscle growth, you must continually place a greater load on the body.
Working alongside this is the number one driver of muscle growth: volume. Many different variables also play a part in increasing muscle mass, but studies have shown time and time again that volume is king. This is your primary goal.
The easiest way to do this is to increase the weight. This is much easier to do in the gym as you have more weight than you'll ever need. In fact, your ability to load is virtually unlimited, and you will always have enough.
When it comes to calisthenics, you won't be able to just add weight, but you still have a couple of options. The easiest way is to increase the number of reps or sets to increase overall volume. However, as you become stronger, many exercises will become too easy and won’t provide the proper intensity to promote muscle growth.
Another way to implement progressive overload in calisthenics, and perhaps the primary goal, is to use more challenging progressions of exercises. For example, you can alter the grip with push-ups to place a more significant percent of body weight on one arm.
As mentioned above, calisthenics trainees could opt to use external loads. This does improve their ability to load the muscles, but it will still be less when compared with the gym. However, it mitigates the necessity of performing more challenging exercises.
Full Body Training And Symmetry In Muscle Development
A significant issue with calisthenics training is that you will be unable to train each body part to the same degree. This is because you must use the same load, your body weight, to train both your upper body and lower body. It’s like using your bench press weight to deadlift.
Further, some muscles, such as your medial delts, are simply more challenging to hit. As a result, this can lead to asymmetry, with some body parts being more developed than others.
However, when in the gym, there’s no reason this should be an issue unless you just choose to not to train a body part; don’t forget leg day! In fact, symmetry in muscle development is an important judging variable in bodybuilding.
Calisthenics Body VS Gym Body: By Muscle Groups
We now have a better idea of what these two types of training entail. That's great, but let's see how they may affect your body.
In general, using the gym will always have the potential for more muscle growth and overall development. Therefore, we’ll look at different body parts and focus more on how muscle development will look like with calisthenics and how it will compare to a gym body.
Back
This muscle group gets extra love in calisthenics due to the emphasis on pull-ups and chin-ups. However, other than these two movements, there aren't many other exercises, specifically rows.
You can perform inverted rows, but these will become relatively easy, even with your feet elevated. At the same time, you will be missing out on one of the best back-builders there is, the deadlift (or rack pulls, if you please)!
This means that with calisthenics, you'll be able to grow a nice, wide back with great lat development. However, due to inferior trap activation, your back thickness will likely be lower than that of the gym body.
In comparison, the potential for back growth is significantly greater with gym workouts. You have the deadlift, bent-over rows, T-bar rows, Kroc rows; the list goes on. You also have farmer carries, reverse flys, face pulls; again, the list goes on. And let's not forget you can load until your heart's content.
Back in the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger listed 4 exercises he believes are necessary for a big, thick back:
- Deadlifts
- Bent-Over Row
- T-Bar Row
- One-Arm Row
Chest
When building the chest, calisthenics again has a lot of potential. This is largely due to the variety of push-ups and dips that one can perform. This is especially true if you fall into the calisthenics group that allows external loads.
Multiple studies have shown that the muscle activation, and even sequence, are virtually the same for the bench press and push-up. This means that your muscles react more or less the same to each exercise if the load can be equalized.
At the same time, a person can perform a decline push-up (feet up, face down) to target the upper chest. You could also perform an incline push-up (feet down, face up) to target the lower chest. Other variations of push-ups and their benefits include:
- Close grip for inner chest
- Ultra-wide grip to simulate chest flys (to an extent)
- Single-arm push-ups to increase the load or simulate unilateral training.
In addition to push-ups, there are dips, both parallel bars and front variations. There has always been an ongoing debate on what is better for chest development, the bench press or dips. A large group of coaches claim the dip is due to the increased range of motion and force direction.
It's also important to note that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who perhaps had the greatest chest ever, claims he got it from performing Gironda dips, a style of dip in which a lifter leans over slightly and lets their elbows flare.
As the pecs' primary function is horizontal adduction (like the chest fly), these flared elbows emphasize this movement. We also have studies that show that using a wider grip during dips, which ultimately causes the elbows to flare, results in greater pec activation. You could also perform ring dips to increase activity, which results in high activation levels.
The point is that if you perform calisthenics with an external load, your chest development can be on par with that in the gym if you load appropriately.
Arms And Shoulders
Calisthenics can build an impressive set of arms. In fact, there's reason to believe that chin-ups are one of the best biceps exercises, assuming you can load them. Further, dips and push-ups will build some awesome triceps.
However, you'll always miss out on room to grow since you can't isolate the arms with calisthenics or use a lot of variety. This means that the potential to build massive guns is definitely higher with a gym body.
For example, when training your shoulders, including some lateral raises is crucial for hitting your medial delts. In the gym, you have several variations of lateral raises, so this isn’t an issue. Unfortunately, these are basically impossible to perform with calisthenics, giving the gym body greater potential for larger, capped shoulders.
Legs
Above, we spoke a bit about how leg training is limited in calisthenics. Since all you have is your body weight, loading the legs high enough to elicit muscle growth can be challenging. Now, calisthenic proponents will claim you can perform more challenging single-leg squats to make up for this. This is true, but a single-leg squat isn't as difficult as you think after a little training.
When people have problems performing movements such as pistol or skater squats, this tends to be due to mobility and stability issues rather than lack of strength. More importantly, the load is significantly lower than you can perform in the gym. So we’re not saying they’re easy, just that they’re not challenging enough to build massive legs.
As a result, it's not uncommon to see pure calisthenic athletes with smaller leg development than their gym counterparts. Now, some people don’t want tree trunks and you may like a more athletic look; that's up to you. Regardless, this is likely the area on the body with the most distinct difference.
Core
There has been a belief brewing in the fitness industry that deadlifts and squats will cause a blocky waistline. This has led some to believe calisthenics will build a thinner, tighter waistline.
We looked into this to try and discover the origins of the belief as well as studies to back it up. Well, we didn’t find anything. In fact, we even found quite a bit of anecdotal evidence suggesting the opposite.
One factor that could play a role in this belief is that many calisthenics lifters have well developed lats. This can cause that nice V-shape look which can enhance the appearance of a small waist.
Now, if there is a group that might have greater core development, it’ll be the gym body. While a calisthenic core will be strong, most of their exercises use isometrics, such as variations of flags. Isometrics can be a very useful tool and can help build tremendous strength, however, they are sub-optimal for muscle growth.
On the other hand, a gym body will be able to use exercises that use a full range of motion. Combine that with a larger variety of exercises and loading ability and you’ll see why the gym body will probably have a more developed core.
Overall Mass And Development
As you can guess, in general, the gym body will have more muscle mass as well as overall development. This comes down to the two things we’ve already discussed:
- More variety of exercises.
- Ability to load
Having a variety of exercises helps developing muscle in a few ways. The first is that you can isolate muscles more effectively. For example, you isolate the biceps with curls or triceps with overhead extensions.
Secondly, you can hit a muscle from various angles and with different grips. This is crucial as we now know that a muscle does not experience uniform growth when only using one exercise. Rather, the area of the muscle that experiences the most stress will see more growth. Therefore, to build a fuller muscle, you want to hit the muscle from different angles with a variety of exercises. For example, using hammer curls, reverse curls and bayesian curls to train the biceps.
In addition, you can choose to perform exercises that lengthen the muscle, such as triceps exercises in overhead extensions. Research has shown that this, too, may result in greater muscle growth.
And let’s not forget your ability to load. Again. It’s that important. Not only does this provide the obvious advantage, it also allows you to perform special methods of training such as eccentric overload training to maximize growth.
Gym Body Vs Calisthenics Body: Final Analysis
Both styles of training will build an awesome physique and both demand effort, intensity and time. Neither is better and some will prefer one over the other. With that said, here's the general description of how these bodies will look.
A calisthenics body will be leaner and have a much more athletic look. It will definitely look great, but it will lack excessive muscle mass. It’ll likely have a highly developed set of lats paired with a leaner set of legs. Further, due to the lack of trap and shoulder development, a calisthenics body probably won’t have that “jacked” look, at least to an exaggerated extent.
The gym body will simply look larger and more full. Its muscles will be larger and more pronounced, and it will have a thicker body all around. The biggest difference will likely be seen in the development of its legs. Further, the gym body will likely have that jacked look but also look more symmetrical due to the greater development.
So, which one do you want? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Garett Reid
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