Street-tested workouts

A g r o w i n g a r m y o f a t h l e t e s a r e p r o v i n g t h a t y o u d o n ’ t n e e d f a n c y g y m s o r h e a v y b a r b e l l s t o g e t l e a n , s t r o n g a n d m u s c u l a r . M e e t t h e e l i t e b o d y w e i g h t w a r r i o r s c o m b i n i n g o u t r a g e o u s a e r i a l a c r o b a t i c s w i t h b r u t e s t r e n g t h i n t h e s p o r t o f c a l i s t h e n i c s .

B Y N I C K L E V Y

Until he takes hold of the bar, that is. He begins by pulling his chin up to the top of the steel frame before effortlessly gliding up and over it, straightening his arms above the bar. Slowly, he rotates his body back underneath it until he’s lying dead horizontal, as if floating on a bed of air, before folding his body into a right angle. Then he spins his legs through his arms to hang flat, face-down, high above the concrete floor. This series of gravity-defying moves — muscle-up into front lever pullup into onearm L-sit into reverse lever — is performed with all the elegance, precision and control of an Olympic gymnast.

Not that you’ll spot the Los Angeles native turning out for Team USA at the Rio games this summer. Luera, you see, is no gymnast, but a practitioner of the fastest-growing sport in the world today. Calisthenics — also known as street workout, owing to the urban arenas from which it emerged and where continues to thrive — is a jaw-dropping mash-up of the aerial acrobatics of gymnastics, the flair of breakdancing and the playfulness of parkour. In Australia it has taken off with outdoors groups such as Bondi Beach Bar Brutes in Sydney, which as the name suggests, promotes street workout and calisthenics techniques using little more than a pullup bar.

“ T H E T H I N G I S , G Y M N A S T I C S I S V E R Y , V E R Y S T R I C T , ” says Luera,33, who — with his California drawl — both looks and sounds like a character from Grand Theft Auto. “The younger generation wants to do tricks, they want to get strong, but they don’t necessarily want a coach or someone that’s drilling them to keep their toes pointed.” He has the utmost respect for the guys in lycra doing stride swings on their pommel horses, he says, but it’s the rules and regulations that he finds stifling. “In calisthenics, you don’t have to do every gymnastic movement — iron cross, swallow, this and that… Just go out there and invent something. Show us what you’re going to bring to the table. Your personality. You.”

This emphasis on creativity over discipline is just one reason behind the growth calisthenics has experienced in the past few years. While the precise number of people forsaking the gym in favour of street workout is hard to quantify — there’s not a lot of paperwork when it comes to use of the pullup bar at your local park — the rise of calisthenics is an indisputable fact. In the American College Of Sports Medicine’s annual survey of 3,000 fitness professionals, bodyweight training is cited as the number one exercise trend for 2016.

There’s no doubt that calisthenics is establishing itself both as an effective way to build muscle and as a competitive sport in its own right, and calling it “street workout” makes it sound ultra-modern. But its origins are ancient. Before the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, a small group of around 300 Spartan warriors (yes, those ones), realising that they were being spied on by Persian scouts, performed their own version of street workout. Or as they knew it, kalos sthenos — beautiful strength. It was basically the Ancient Greek equivalent of doing biceps curls before an arm-wrestling contest. So sure, bodyweight training is a modern trend, in much the same way philosophy, Euclidean mathematics and yoghurt are.

However, in the two and a half thousand years between Leonidas and Luera, calisthenics suffered from an image crisis. In the 1960s and 70s especially, it was what coldhearted, steel-bodied Soviet soldiers did to stay in shape, and the reason for the ubiquity of star jumps in school PE sessions. By no means creative; in no way fun.

It has no such problems with perception today. While Luera and his fellow bodyweight warriors are the driving force behind the rise of modern calisthenics, its rebirth began with one man, and one video.

T O D A Y A S L A N S T E E L , 3 1 , I S O N E O F T H E T O P S T R E E T workout athletes in the world, a professional course tester for Ninja Warrior, founder of calisthenics crew Bar Mob and, along with Luera, a senior figure in the World Calisthenics Organisation (WCO). He first saw the “Hannibal For King” video while he was still getting to grips with bodyweight training. “I was just starting to get pullups, working on my muscle-ups, then I saw what Hannibal could do and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ.’ It seemed impossible.”

The influential four-minute video shows Hannibal Langham — shirtless and hyper-cut — performing a

Aslan Steel (left) and Luera smash a hanging leg raise.

sequence of skills that would set the bar for calisthenics in the 21st century. At the time, in 2008, few people had heard of Langham, aside from his fellow residents at the homeless shelter and the families at the playground he used as his gym. Then a friend uploaded the clip to YouTube. Ten million views later, “Hannibal For King” is recognised as the modern origin of street workout.

That’s not where the internet influence ends. Moves like handstands, planches and human flags are highly photogenic, as are the shredded physiques of the men performing them. Forget sunsets, kittens and avocado on toast — this is what Instagram was made for. “YouTube, Facebook, Instagram have all exploded calisthenics,” says Luera. “You’ve got guys like me and Aslan and Hannibal constantly fighting for better, stronger moves, and we’re putting out all that content on social media. People are seeing that and being drawn in. It’s a very big part of why we’re growing so much.” We challenge you to watch a video of Luera slowly lowering himself from a straightarm planche into a reverse lever without breaking a sweat and not immediately go looking for a set of parallel bars.

And there lies possibly the greatest appeal of calisthenics, another tried-and-tested hand-me-down from ancient Greece: its democratic nature. No matter who you are, what your background, education, financial situation, age or gender, you can start bodyweight training. “As long as you’ve got a pullup bar at your local park, or even just a tree branch, that’s all you’re ever going to need for calisthenics,” says Steel. “You don’t need a gym membership, you don’t need expensive, fancy equipment. Anyone can do it. And it starts with just one pullup.”

I T ’ S N O C O I N C I D E N C E T H A T S O M E O F S T R E E T W O R K O U T ’ S biggest names have more in common than their love of a well-deployed V-sit. Hannibal Langham was a sometime bike mechanic, most-of-the-time cannabis dealer who couldn’t afford rent, let alone a gym membership. Terroll Lewis, founder of the highly respected London-based crew Block Workout, served an 11-month prison sentence thanks to his involvement with a notorious gang. When he got out he attempted to join Fitness First, but was turned away because he didn’t have a bank account from which to set up a direct debit. Thwarted, like Langham before him, he took his workouts to the monkey bars at his local playground.

It’s a familiar story for Luera. “When I was younger, I got in a bit of trouble and went to prison a couple of times,” he says. What sort of trouble? “I was on drugs. My birth parents both died when I was young. My mum overdosed. My dad gave me up for adoption and soon after I went to the foster home, he got shot in a bad drugs transaction.” Luera was three years old.

He soon entered the adoptive care of his great-aunt and uncle, who he now talks of affectionately as his “real parents”. He nevertheless found it difficult to stay out of trouble, hence his familiarity with the correctional facilities of southern California. Eventually, determined to turn his life around, Luera took a bartending job

A bad childhood and jail time were no barriers to Luera becoming a street workout champ.

Mastering the back lever takes supreme strength and balance.

The vertical ring hold requires maximum power — and lots of tatts.

with a local catering company. It paid the bills and kept him out of trouble, but he was miserable.

T H E R E A L B L O W W O U L D C O M E I N 2 0 1 2 W I T H T H E D E A T H of his great-aunt. He fights back tears as he talks about losing the one constant he’d had in his life. “I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d just dwell on how she wasn’t here anymore. I started going to the gym to get tired, to distract myself, to make sure I wouldn’t try to kill myself in the middle of the night thinking about how she’s gone.”

It was at the gym that he first saw someone doing a muscleup, raising his torso up and over the pullup bar. Luera was inspired and began a regime of bodyweight training. “Before I found calisthenics, I had no passion,” says Luera. “I was just working, dreading my job. This gave me passion.”

Sport has long been recognised for the transformative effect it can have on someone’s regular health, wellbeing and happiness. But there is arguably no sport with a more consistent or more powerful track record for positively overhauling lives than street workout.

Less than four years since he unceremoniously hoisted himself up into his first muscle-up, Luera is now the two-time middleweight champion of Battle Of The Bars — one of the most prestigious calisthenics competitions in the world.

T H E C O M P E T I T I V E S I D E O F S T R E E T W O R K O U T I S I N I T S infancy, but many involved in the sport hope it will soon attract the TV cameras and elevate calisthenics into the mainstream. The format is simple: over the course of three three-minute rounds, competitors take it in turns to throw down a sequence of moves which their opponent must then match and improve on. The other guy does a handstand pushup midway through his routine? You do a single-arm handstand pushup. He bounces on his palms; you’d better bounce then lower yourself into a planche. Judges (usually well-respected athletes in their own right) choose the winner based on familiar criteria: difficulty, creativity, control, execution and crowd interaction. Think Step Up, if Channing Tatum could do a 360° spin at the top of a muscle-up.

When not wiping the floor with all comers, Luera and Steel run WCO-certified workshops around the world to introduce bodyweight training and its various progressions to new audiences. The message is simple: don’t pay for the body you want, get creative instead.

“In calisthenics, you get caught up with gaining more strength to do the next move, or to get a longer hold, and the amazing by-product is you get ripped,” says Steel. “And the shape is a natural shape, a balanced, wellproportioned shape, and you can tell it’s useful. Those muscles are used for something.”

True. They’re used for balancing horizontally over a giant anvil, for nailing 360° spins over the top of 2m-high bars, for using the power and potential of the human body in ways that no trained athlete has ever even considered. It’s more than safe to say those Spartan warriors had no idea what they’d started. ■

Your no-gym strength plan

B E G I N N E R Sets 10 Reps 5 Rest 2min I N T E R M E D I A T E Sets 5 Reps 10 Rest 90sec A D V A N C E D Sets 10 Reps 10 Rest 60sec ■ Choose your exercises wisely, and you don’t need weights to build streng th. Do each of these sessions once a week, leaving at least 48 hours between them, using the recommended rep ranges below.

W O R K O U T 1 P U S H

Archer pushup Star t in a pushup position but with one arm straight out to the side. Lower yourself to the floor, then press back up. Do half your reps on one side, then switch.

Negative muscle-up You’ll need a pullup bar for this workout. Jump — or get a friend to help — so you’re above the top of it, then lower yourself into the bottom position of a dip, then through a reverse pullup. Jump back to the star t.

Bodyweight skullcrusher

You’ll need a table, chair or other sur face of similar height for this. Put your hands together on it and, keeping your body as straight as possible, lower yourself until your head’s below your hands.

Crucifix pushup Lie face-down on the floor with your hands spread wide to your sides. Getting up onto your finger tips if you can (palms if you can’t), lower your chest to the floor and then press back up, feeling the stretch in your chest.

W O R K O U T 1 P U L L

Head banger With your palms facing away from you, pull up to a bar until your chin’s above it. Extend your arms until they ’re straight, keeping your head high, then pull back to the bar and finally drop down. Caution: do not tr y this on a home pullup bar.

Inver ted row

Lie under a waist-height bar (or table) with your feet on the floor and your body in a straight line. Pull up until your chest touches the bar, pause, then lower yourself under control.