Fortifying Yourself for Your Future Kingdom: Calisthenics
[if you’ve been keeping up with this series — you can skip this portion]
My new word for the year is fortification.
a defensive wall or other reinforcement built to strengthen a place against attack. “the building and maintenance of fortifications”
Lately, I’ve been viewing my life like building a kingdom. it’s archaic and far from modern but I believe it provides me strength when I look at my life.
A kingdom starts with a strong individual, that grows into a group of strong people and eventually develops into a society of people operating under a defined agreement. Right now as a 26-year-old, I’m starting at the beginning stage of fortification, myself.
The pillars for fortification are health, wealth, and family/community. In this post, I will primarily talk about Health — precisely my body. Before that let me dump all the categories that fall under Health.
Health to me involves my
- nutrition — eating balanced, liking what I eat, and helping my body grow
- protecting myself from sickness, disease, and ailments
- developing my body physically to combat aging, prevent injury, and defend myself from others
- maintaining my appearance through grooming and self-care
In this post, I will cover how I am developing my body physically, let’s get into it.
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My journey into consciously improving my physical health started when I was in middle school. I wanted to get stronger for football by lifting weights but my father did not want me to touch weights. I didn’t agree with him but I listened to what he had to say. His reasoning was that lifting weights too early can cause muscle deformities and imbalances. All these are true and can happen to adults and not just kids.
So now that weights were out of the window, I needed another way to strengthen my body for sports. I looked up things on the internet and found a bunch of random workouts but no real information. I went back to my dad seeking answers since he was the one that told me not to use weights. He told me to look up Herschel Walker, an NFL running back who didn’t touch weights at all. I looked him up and was completely baffled. I dropped a video below so you can see how legendary this man is.
With Herschel Walker as my inspiration for my workout regime, I started my workout journey by doing push-ups. I bought a perfect push-up machine from Goodwill for $5 then followed the accompanied routine on it. It was 30 days of push-ups with 2 days of breaks most weeks. After I completed the 30-day challenge I didn’t feel too much of a difference in strength nor did my body change in size.
One day at school my social studies teacher made a bet with me about a history question. If I lost I would have to do 40 push-ups. I lost and it was time for me to crank out the push-ups. To the amazement of the class, I did the 40 quickly without breaking a sweat or getting winded. The perfect push-up challenge had worked. Later on, in that same year, I would break my 40 push-up streak by doing 72 straight before starting to break form. I was 13 years old and shocked the kids and the other adults around me. These moments in time reshaped my thoughts about working out and reaffirmed what my father taught me.
This wouldn’t stop me from using weights later in high school or college but my experience with calisthenics became the foundation of all of my workout routines. From middle school through high school I continued to explore calisthenics learning tons of variations to simple exercises like push-ups, sit-ups, and squats.
I was smaller in height and weight than the majority of my peers yet I performed better or at the same level as most of them. Calisthenics turned me into an anomaly. How was a 5’6 135lb kid outperforming other athletes that were 6’0 180lb or twice my size in mass? It was purely through calisthenics and when I added weights to the mix it made me even better.
In my young adult phase of life and college whenever I didn’t have access to a gym or wasn’t on a sports team I would return to my foundation. Simply doing compound exercises and running whether it was jogging a mile or doing hill sprints. This has helped me maintain a nice body regardless if I have YMCA or Planet Fitness membership.
If you are beginning your fitness journey it is imperative that you learn how to use your body weight first before you jump into free weights. Using your body weight helps you understand how to control your body and your muscles. The idea is to stabilize your muscles through controlled time under tension. The exercises you want to master are push-ups, crunches (sit-ups can be bad for your back if done incorrectly), squats, dips, pull-ups or chin-ups, and sprints. With bodyweight exercises, it’s about high volume something that you don’t always do with weights. Doing 100 push-ups is much different from doing 100 dumbbell curls. Because it’s your body, high volume is less likely to cause injury compared to a high volume of weight lifting.
We’ve covered the backstory to calisthenics, this is the foundation for the next aspect of this series where I talk more about the benefits of running.
I’m Eric the founder of Galacticcc — our mission is to connect businesses + creators to products and information when they need it the most. I teach business, marketing, design, and video/film classes. Please be patient as we narrow down our offers to who we best can serve.
