The Choice Every Calisthenics Athlete Must Make (99% Choose Wrong)

My name is Anto. I'm a professional calisthenics athlete and coach who's dedicated the last six years of his life to learning and mastering calisthenics. Despite being 6'2 and weighing over 190 lbs, I managed to learn skills like the full PL, one arm front lever, and one arm handstand.

And over [music] the last 2 years as a full-time calisthenics coach, I've been able to teach countless of people advanced calisthenics skills such as the full plch, full plunchch push-ups, front lever, front lever pull-ups, handstand [music] push-ups, 90° handstand push-ups, front lever touch, plch press, one arm handstand, muscle-ups, you name it. I am the founder and creator of Submax, [music] a calisthenics training framework that is built on top of a powerliftingbased methodology. Regardless if you're trying to learn a strengthbased skill, a coordinationbased skill, submax can be applied to any [music] skill in calisthenics.

And in this video, I'm going to break down my entire framework so that you guys can implement it into your own training. Make sure you don't skip any part of this video because each section is going to continue building on top of the previous one. And in order to understand my entire framework, [music] you must understand each aspect thoroughly.

The framework is broken up into four big pieces. The first piece is going to be covering the three pillars of training, outlining the guidelines that your training program must follow in order to make sustainable and linear progress in calisthenics. The second piece of the framework is going to come down to load dosing.

In other words, how do we spread out the intensity across the volume that we're actually doing? I'll get into the various methods that I use as well as mention some other methods that exist out there. And the two remaining big pieces will be split up into strength-based skills and coordinationbased skills.

I want to make sure I define what a strength-based skill is and what a coordinationbased skill is. A coordinationbased skill is a skill where the force output required is rarely the bottleneck. Skills like handstands, muscle-ups, handstand push-ups would be considered coordinationbased movements.

Strength skills on the other hand we can define as movements where the limiting factor is usually your ability to generate enough force to hold the given position. skills like the PLCH, front lever, front lever pull-up, PLCH push-ups, maltes, sat, etc. Coordinationbased skills and strength-based skills must be treated very differently.

And over the course of this video, I'm going to be discussing everything that you'll ever need to know in order to program your calisthenics training to make real progress. Most people have no clue what they're doing when it comes to their calisthenics training, thinking that the more they do, the more results they're going to get. The truth is calisthenics is a strengthbased sport.

It's not like weightlifting where we're trying to induce a hypertrophic response. Thinking that taking sets to failure is going to get you super strong is a very childish way of thinking. Most people never achieve their calisthenics goals because they have the mindset of no pain, no gain.

Thinking the more sets they do, the harder those sets are, the more they're going to get out of it. And this is simply wrong. Have you ever thought about why powerlifters are so strong, yet they get made fun of for going into the gym, doing a few sets, and leaving?

Well, there's a really good reason for that. So, stick around. Make sure you watch the video fully through because if you miss even one section of this video, you will have a very hard time understanding my framework and its application into your own training.

Let's first start off with the three pillars. You guys have probably heard me talk about this on my Instagram, but the three pillars of calisthenics are going to be fatigue management, specificity, and progressive overload. If your training does not adhere to these three principles, you will not progress at your most optimal rate.

Let's first start off with specificity. Specificity refers to your exercise selection and how specific those exercises are. When it comes to mimicking the activations of your end goal, let's say my goal is to learn a PLCH.

I would only utilize three to four exercises maximum to achieve this skill. utilizing exercises like body weightight plch progressions, banded plch progressions, planch leans, plch presses, plch negatives, everything that's dealing with straight arm shoulder flexion. And let's say my goal was to learn the front lever.

Then I would be utilizing exercises that mimic the front lever's activations or movement pattern. And in this case, we would want to do exercises that involve straight arm shoulder extension. Most people are trying to do all these weird accessory exercises thinking that it's going to allow them to achieve their end goal when the exercises they're doing don't even mimic the activations or the central nervous system requirements that their goal commands.

And so with specificity, it's important that you're utilizing specific exercises as it relates to your goals that are also scalable so that you can implement progressive overload. The second pillar is going to be fatigue management. With fatigue management, we're concerned with balancing our frequency, our volume, and our intensity.

If we're training at way too high of a frequency, with way too high of an intensity, we're going to be overtraining. If we're training with too low of a frequency, with too low of an intensity, we're going to be undertraining. Both overtraining and undertraining will lead to plateaus and you'll be leaving gains on the table.

And I'll tell you right now, 99% of you are severely overtraining. Just because your muscles may not feel tired after your calisthenics workout does not mean that your brain isn't. You cannot judge the successfulness of your workout based on how fatigued you feel or how tired you feel.

This is again a very band-aid approach to your training and is very childish. It will only lead you down a path of injuries, plateaus, and frustration, potentially leading you to quit chasing your goals entirely. Your goal with fatigue management is to balance out your weekly volume as well as your weekly intensity.

Weekly volume can be calculated by doing frequency times volume per session. Frequency would be related to the number of times you're training per week. And then volume would be referring to the number of sets that you're performing in a given session.

Intensity. In this video, I will refer to as the difficulty of the set. 100% being all out, max failure, and 0% being you didn't even do the set.

Let's say my max number of pull-ups is 10. Well, if I perform five pull-ups, it means that I perform this set at 50% intensity. It's important that you guys understand all of these topics that I'm going to be discussing because it will only continue building on top of each other.

And the third pillar is going to be progressive overload. With progressive overload, our goal is to basically have an approach to our training that is systematic and honest. Meaning, we can look at our performance week by week and have an accurate representation of if we're progressing or not.

Progressive overload can be implemented through a multitude of different factors. We can change rest times. We can change reps.

We can change the number of sets. We can change the amount of resistance we use. We can change the amount of seconds that we hold for.

There's many different variables that we can tweak in order to stimulate progress. It's all going to depend on your goals. Whether you're trying to get better at a dynamic movement, a static movement, are you trying to get your foot in the door of the next progression, or are you trying to build massive amounts of volume at your current progression, all of these different variables are going to contribute to the context of your situation and thus influence your strategy when it comes to progressively overloading.

With progressive overload, we also want to make sure that we have KPIs we can reference, key performance indicators. So whether that's doing some sort of dynamic exercise, seeing how explosive that is. By using certain exercises to gauge how we feel or how a certain movement pattern is recovering from a previous session, we will be able to structure our training that much more efficiently.

And the last piece of progressive overload is going to be the load dosing strategy that we use. Whether it's step loading, variable loading, or wave loading, it doesn't matter. Again, it's all going to come down to a case-byase basis and will ultimately depend on your current goals.

Now, let's move on to the second part of the framework, which is going to be load dosing. With load dosing, I utilize three different methods. Step loading, variable loading, and wave loading.

Like I mentioned earlier, load dosing refers to the way that we're able to distribute intensity amongst a given number of sets. Step loading is the most easy to understand and the most userfriendly for many beginners who are really not familiar when it comes to programming their calisthenics training. For example, let's say we have five sets and we're building up to a max effort attempt.

Our first set will be done at 50%, our second set will be done at 60%, and we will continue gradually increasing the intensity as we reach the later sets. Step loading is a beautiful simple approach because the early sets act as neurological primers for your top heavy sets. And once we reach the top intensity interval, we usually do multiple repetitions of that set.

So, let's say we build up to 85% intensity. With the step loading approach, we would most likely do two or three sets at that intensity before we do any sort of backoff work. Step loading is the easiest, most straightforward way to build heavy training volume while minimizing fatigue.

Variable loading is a little bit more complex than step loading, but still is usually beginner friendly for most people who are not yet experienced when it comes to programming their strength training. With variable loading, our intensity is changing quite dramatically from set to set. But there is one rule that remains.

Hard sets are always buffered by easy sets. Meaning, we do a hard set followed by an easy set followed by a hard set followed by an easy set. And what this allows us to do is maintain higher levels of output across a longer period of time because we're actually chopping our intensive work into nonsubsequent sets.

So the intermediary sets acts as placeholders or active recovery and prevents neurological fatigue from building up rapidly because we're not doing backto backto backto back intense sets like we do with step loading. And the last load dosing method that I personally use is going to be wave loading. You can almost look at wave loading as the perfect in between of step loading and variable loading.

When wave loading is implemented properly, it is the best low dosing method by far. With wave loading, our main focus is to exploit post activation potentiation, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that we're going to prime our central nervous system and wake it up before we expose it to the most hardest difficult set of the session. And the way that we're able to actually leverage this phenomenon is by building our intensity in waves.

I'll throw up an example on screen just to demonstrate to you guys what I mean because the explanation can be quite hard to understand. With each wave, our goal is to have a higher apex than the previous wave. And each point on the curve simply represents the given intensity for that set.

And so, usually you would do two to three waves and build up to a 90 to 100% intensity set. It is slightly different in variable loading as the number of sets between peaks can differ dramatically. Basically, our goal with each wave is to prime our nervous system, expose it to something difficult, back off, and then expose it to something even more difficult again.

So, it's very similar to variable loading in this way that we're buffering hard sets with easy sets. However, in wave loading, the buffer or the amount of sets between the super intensive sets can change dramatically based on the exercise that you're doing or the amount of volume that you've actually allocated for this given session. Now, let's move on to the meat and bones of this entire framework.

And let's cover the strengthbased skills. And so, the first thing that we need to cover when it comes to strength-based skills is going to be the concept of supercompensation and Goldilocks principle. If you take a look at the graph above, it's a very simple graph that I'm going to use to demonstrate our body's ability to recover.

Before we expose our body to any sort of training stimulus, we can say that it's at a baseline. Once we expose a training stimulus or we go into the gym and we do our training, we're going to enter a weakened state temporarily. It's important that you understand that this weakened state after we train is only temporary.

It is reversible and is simply caused by fatigue from our actual training session that we just did. After enough time, we start to recover and we start to actually super compensate and go above baseline. So now, as we move above baseline, we are actually stronger than the initial training session.

But again, we are only temporarily stronger at this given stage. And so our goal in this supercompensated state is to time another session that's of similar magnitude to the original session so that we can enter a recovery period again and then super compensate even harder. And so the main takeaway from this graph I need you to realize is there's two important pieces of the puzzle.

one during the recovery period at the bottom portion and the second important part being the top portion where we're in the super compensated state. We want to avoid having another training session while we're recovering because we're never going to be able to go above baseline and progress and we're just going to keep bouncing downwards, downwards, downwards, downwards, which is going to be reflective of overtraining. When we're in the supercompensated state, our goal is to have another session that is of similar magnitude to the original session that got us to the supercompensated state in the first place.

And if we time another session at the right time, the graph is going to repeat itself and we're going to keep going above baseline and the cycle will just continue and we will keep going up up up. On screen, I'm going to demonstrate the different applications of this graph and what I just discussed. Let's start off with the red graph.

The red graph is indicative of overtraining. Meaning that we are doing another session of similar magnitude to the original session before we go above baseline or in other words before we finish recovering. And all this does is just plummet us further and further downwards.

The second graph is going to be the yellow graph and this is going to be indicative of a plateau or undertraining. In this example, we actually do go above baseline, but we fail to time another session in the supercompensated state, which then just makes our body go back to baseline and not make any progress since the original session. Basically, the big mistake going on here is we're mistiming the subsequent training session or we're providing too little stimulus in that given training session to give our body any reason to supercompensate again.

And the third graph is what we're shooting for. basically a perfect representation of letting ourselves recover perfectly as well as timing another session of similar magnitude to the original one that gives our body enough reason to start supercompensating again. Just to put this into perspective for you guys, roughly 1% of everyone who trains calisthenics exhibits the green graph and roughly 99% exhibit the yellow or red graph.

That's why so many people are constantly plateauing or overtraining because they are doing way too much or they're just not timing their sessions properly. Now, it's important that you understand this from a conceptual level because now we're going to get to the actual application side of things. When it comes to your actual training sessions, you're going to have three different types of trainings.

You're going to have an intense session, a volume accumulation session, and then an active recovery session. Let's first start off with the intense session. The goal of the intense session is to perform very short and very intensive sets that are going to force permanent central nervous system adaptations.

In other words, these are going to be the sessions that allow us to save progress at a super compensated state. Depending on your personal background and your current training structure, you may be implementing one to two intense sessions a week. And it's important to note that these will be regulated at a super compensated state, meaning that you should not be doing these at any other times during your recovery cycle.

Now, let's move on to the volume accumulation training day. With volume accumulation, our goal is to do long and difficult sets that are going to increase the peak of our supercompensated state and build neuromuscular efficiency. By spending more time in a given movement, we're going to be able to teach our nervous system how to be more efficient when it comes to recruiting the necessary motor units to actually hold that position.

Volume accumulation days will be your most used sessions, and they will be done twice a week at an intensity range of 50 to 80%. Intense sessions were focused on being at 80% or higher. Volume accumulation sessions were focused on staying more submaximal, staying in the ranges between 50 to 80%.

And the last type of training session is going to be our recoverybased session. And this is going to be done right after our intense days to promote recovery that is above the norm. On recovery days, our goal is to do long and easy sets at an intensity interval between 30 to 50%.

Since these sessions are placed right after a super intense day, we are already going to be dipping into our recovery time frame. And so by strategically placing this session right after a super intense one, we can speed up the recovery period so we can start super compensating earlier. This recovery session is going to allow us to have compounding progress and have more frequent PR days.

Just to recap the section really quick, all three training sessions affect the graph in a different way. Intense sessions are going to be used at a super compensated state to save our progress. The volume accumulation day will be used to increase the apex or slope of our supercompensated state so that we can PR harder.

And the recovery session is going to be used to shorten the window that it takes for us to actually start super compensating or in other words shorten the recovery period so that we can move above baseline sooner. Now the other portion of strengthbased skills is going to be greasing the groove. And greasing the groove is going to be quite simple.

You're going to choose two exercises. One is going to be pushbased and one is going to be pull based. You're going to perform both of these exercises three to five times a day at an intensity between 50 to 100%.

The reason this is going to vary so much is because it's going to depend on the exercise that you actually choose. With static based movements like PLCH leans or maltes leans, you should be performing those at a higher intensity. If you're doing a more dynamic movement, you should stick to a lower intensity interval.

And the goal with this frequent submaximal exposure to a movement pattern is to accumulate more weekly volume, spend more time in the position, and give the body more data to learn from. That's why it is critical that you have strong intention and strong visualization when you perform each and every single one of these sets. The way that you conceptualize yourself executing the given set can either make or break the value that you actually get from performing that set.

So make sure that you perform these sets with the utmost focus and you're not just doing the sets for the sake of doing them because you're going to get absolutely zero value out of that. Now let's move on to the last part of my submaximal framework and cover how we can actually learn coordinationbased skills. Learning any coordinationbased skill is going to come down to three big factors.

Frequency, submaximal effort, and specificity. Let's first discuss frequency. Very similar to grease the groove, we want to make sure we have strong intention and visualization when we're training our coordination based skills.

We want to be training them five to seven times a week. The more the marrier. However, you must only perform at 50% of your total volume.

What do I mean by this? If I'm trying to learn the one- arm handstand and I know that if I do 20 sets, I'm going to be burnt out, tired, then I should only be doing 10 sets a day because that's going to be 50% of the maximum amount of volume that I can tolerate. And so by doing this, instead of doing three times a week, 20 sets and feeling completely burned out the day after, I can do seven times a week and do 10 sets a day, but feel absolutely amazing after each and every single day because I'm only working at 50% of my total volume on every single day.

And so in the long run, I'm able to accumulate more volume while stressing the nervous system less. And since I'm doing it more frequently, those neuromuscular improvements are going to continuously compound on top of each other. The second piece is going to be the submaximal effort.

And so, since we are going to be training coordination based skills every single day, we want to make sure that we're keeping the intensity of each of those sets quite low. All sets should be performed at less than 60% intensity. It should be easy and very technical focused.

And our goal is to accumulate as little fatigue as possible so that we can continue to train the skill as frequently as possible. And the last and most important piece of the puzzle again is going to be specificity. We want to train the movement one to one.

So if I want to learn the handstand, I'm training the handstand. I'm not doing crow pose. I'm not doing all these garbage, you know, Tik Tok tutorial [ __ ] I'm training the handstand.

Whether it's doing a back to wall, assisted handstand, chest to wall, I'm training the actual movement. Same thing for one- arm handstand. You're not using a wall.

You're most likely working on shifting drills, attempts, or something directly related to the one- arm handstand. And I cannot stress this enough. The execution of the movement is not enough by itself.

You have to genuinely envision yourself doing the movement. Feel the sensation of you holding the movement. Because by simply just doing it every day, going through the motions, you know, oh, I have to do it today, so I'm going to do it with no real intention, you're going to make such slow progress.

Put your phone away, stop scrolling on TikTok, and genuinely focus on your workout. And one more thing before I wrap up my framework, it's important to understand that implementing my framework into your own training is going to be quite difficult because it's most likely something that you're not used to. You've probably watched countless of YouTube tutorials out there where coaches, mentors are trying to preach to you some secret method.

The truth is there is no secret method. Calisthenics operates on the backbone of science. You cannot defy the laws of strength acquisition.

And the reason my framework works so well, not only for myself, but for hundreds of different people who all come from different backgrounds, are different heights, different weights, have different predispositions, is because it's all based on the basis of powerlifting and strength acquisition. Over the last 6 years, I've been fascinated by the science behind strength training. And as someone who's watched and been through what you guys have been through, watched all of the YouTube tutorials, tried these different methods that always seemed to work for them, but never seemed to work for me, I understand your struggles.

And so that's why I made it my mission over these last 6 years to truly understand what goes on beneath the hood when it comes to progression. Because most people unlock a certain skill and don't even know how they got it. In fact, some of the top athletes that you may look up to most likely won't even be able to teach you because they never had to face the struggles that you're currently facing.

When you start calisthenics at an older age, maybe you're taller, maybe you're heavier, you're abiding by a different rule set than other people. You're playing a different game. And that's something I experienced firsthand.

I was watching these YouTube tutorials. I could tell by the conviction in the way that they were expressing their ideas that they themselves didn't even believe what they were saying. And it's at that moment that I realized that, hey, if I want to reach a high level in this sport, then it's going to be all on me to learn the actual mechanisms that drive progression so that when I do make progress and I learn these advanced skills like the one- arm front lever, full plch, one- arm handstand, that I can then take that and replicate it in other people.

What people don't realize is just because one method worked for one person does not make it statistically significant enough for it to be prescribed to a large amount of people. And so roughly 2 years ago when I decided to start coaching, I made a promise to myself that I would not teach other people the way that I taught myself, but rather I would be open-minded to the fact that other people will require a different system than I do. And so after working with hundreds of individuals and fine-tuning my approach to coaching others, fine-tuning my approach to coaching myself, I came up with this framework and I coined it on Thornon's submaths framework.

It utilizes many concepts from powerlifting but also many concepts from calisthenics and blends it in together perfectly. And so after refining my system and exploring its application in others, I realized that I figured it out. I even got called out by elite level athletes for my testimonials.

And the funniest thing is is I'm just doing it for the love of the game. I love calisthenics. I love the science behind strength.

The last 6 years, that's all my life has been about. That's my biggest passion. And I'm finally happy that I get to share it with all of you guys because I will only continue to push the boundaries in this sport and show people that calisthenics is easier than you think.

It's not reserved for the genetically gifted or the elite. It's accessible to everyone and anyone. I mean, look at me.

I was 250 pounds just a few years ago. I started calisthenics at an older age and I still managed to learn elite level skills. And now I'm teaching other people how to do the same.

And so if you've been struggling to progress in calisthenics, maybe you've been training for a few months, a few years, and you're really trying to unlock these skills that you see on social media, just understand that it's easier than you can ever imagine. You just need to take that leap of faith and bet on yourself. Believe in yourself.

It's only after believing in yourself will you actually take a step back and re-evaluate your entire approach when it comes to your training. Are you training smart or are you just going into each session blindfolded thinking that the more you do, the more results you're going to get? Because we both know that's not a long-term approach.

It can't work. There's no logic behind it. If you cannot sit in front of me and logically explain why your approach is going to get you progress, then you should not be utilizing it.

So, for those of you who this message resonates with and you're ready to take your calisthenics game to the next level, then I highly encourage you to book a call with me using the link below so that we can discuss the next steps to take to help you reach your calisthenics goals. My goal is to not work with everyone. Coaching is not for everyone.

My coaching is reserved for the people who truly want to reach the next level in calisthenics. I don't care to work with people who are half in, half out. That's not what I'm looking for.

the people who are sitting there saying, "I need to think about it. I don't know if this is the right time for me to commit. Stop watching this video.

I don't want to work with you. " That type of mentality is why you're stuck where you are. It's the same reason why I was stuck where I was 6 years ago.

My team is filled with winners. Everyone on my team wins. You guys see my insane testimonials.

You see all of the insane transformations. Do you think that would be possible if I let mediocracy and these poor mindsets into my environment? If you're watching this and calisthenics is your biggest passion and you're ready to go allin, then book a call with me and let's get to work.

If you're on the fence about pursuing calisthenics and you're not sure if this is the right thing for you, you don't really care about achieving your goals or unlocking advanced skills, then have a great rest of your day. I hope you guys enjoyed the video and got some value from it. Please, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comment section below or join my calisthenics Discord community that's open to everyone.

We are almost at 3,000 members. The community is growing rapidly and it's a great place to talk to me and other advanced athletes when it comes to anything calisthenics related. The link to join the community will be in the description below.

Make sure to go check it out. Thank you guys so much for watching. Stay tuned for more future informational videos just like this one.

And if you haven't already, make sure to go follow my Instagram. It's going to be linked in the description below. That is my main platform and where I post the most.

However, I will be posting a lot more on YouTube soon. But if you want to see more behindthe-scenes stuff of my clients and myself, then make sure to drop me a follow because I am very active on there. I love all of you so so much.

And there's one thing that I want to leave you guys with.