 Welcome back to School of Calisthenics. Today we are looking at why and when you might want to use weighted calisthenics. Bringing some more weight into your training through the form of vests, belts or bands is a really effective way of starting to create some more progressive overload. If you've got to the stage with some of your training where you can do 8, 10, 12 reps, you then face a question, do I just keep doing more or do I want to start building some more baseline strength and that's when it's a really good time to start putting some more weight on which is going to mean you're working harder. It changes the percentage of our intensity that we're working at and that's going to create a new adaptation. There's a number of reasons why you might want to add some weight onto your calisthenics training. The main one for us is being to start to build a bigger base but to make sure you can continually get progressive overload. That basically means that if you can do 10 reps of a pull-up or a muscle-up or even a dip, something simple like that, you might want to add some more load to start to create more adaptation because the brain is going to adapt to the stress you place upon it. If 10, 12 reps is getting easy and you want to build more strength for more difficult calisthenics movements, you're going to need to put some more weight in your training to build that adaptation. Now adding weight to your training isn't the only way to create an adaptation. You've seen from us before that exploring new ranges of motion, changing angles that your body's at is a whole host of things that you can do to make an exercise harder to make it progressively more overloaded. However, if you're working towards something very specific like in a muscle-up during your applied strength training, it can be very useful to get very strong and improve your strength to weight ratio in the specific move that you're trying to work towards. But then also in your capacity strength work, it might be that you want to build up your total volume. Maybe you're trying to put on a little bit of extra muscle mass and you want to use some higher rep ranges and you still need a little bit of progressive overload because those push-ups, for example, are getting a bit too easy. It's a real simple process. If you are comparing it to free weight training and take a bench press, for example, we would work out our intensities of a percentage of our one repetition max. If you're trying to create a hypertrophy adaptation, you might be looking to build some muscle. That might be eight reps at 80% of your one RM, the most amount of weight you can lift for one. This is where it applies into calisthenics. We just need to pick the right amount of load or resistance through the version of a weight vest or a belt, which means we can hit our target repetitions and then get the adaptation that we're looking for off the back of that. So before we get started with the exercises, let's give you a quick demo of an introduction to tools that we're going to use. Now, Dave's packing the weight vest. This one we love because we've actually got the option to be able to take out weights as we need to. So we can adjust it. It's a 20 kilo vest, but these are one kilo. So we can actually drop the weights out if we need to. Loads of flexibility and it's really easy. Once it's on, just to crack into the session. The second one is the weight belt. The advantage of this is we can actually put more weight on it. So if you're an absolute monster and you want to be getting 40 kilos on, this might be a good option, or you then start thinking about combining those two tools. The slight variations in where the weight is placed in terms of distributed on the body might just change how the exercise feels. Both of them are great legitimate ways to train more strength. So you can choose which everyone works. There's also the bands. These work really well for pushing exercises in your pushup variations, but you could use them for pull-ups and dips, but it gets complicated and you might end up just getting yourself caught in a spider's web of rubber, which is never going to be a good thing in the gym. So get rid of those, Dave. All right, let's put them to work. So the first one we're going to have a look at is a weighted vest on the pull-ups. So let's take this in the context of a specific movement like a muscle-up. You can do 10 pull-ups and you're still wondering why you can't do a muscle-up, but it could be an opportunity if you'd start using some additional weight, which is going to help you to get higher above the bar. Think about what happens with building more strength through our full range of movement when we take the weight vest off. The brain on the body has then got some extra strength to play with, which is going to mean that we can get a little bit higher, putting more force down. So Jaco is going to give us a quick demo. So it's real simple. What I really want to stress with the importance of weighted calisthenics is that we still maintain full range of movement and quality. Just because we've got more weight on, it's not an excuse to start compromising technique. We're really working hard through range of movement. The other thing to think about with our weighted calisthenics, if we start working rep ranges one to five, that's typically going to be like a maximum strength adaptation. We might start to look like we're moving quite slow, but the intention has to be to move explosively and fast. Take the bench press example again. A heavy bench press is going to move slowly, even though you're trying to shift it quickly. That's really important from a neural perspective that the brain is learning to create force rapidly. There are the adaptations we're looking for to create force and increase rate of force production more effectively. So today's a little bit of work. Let's talk rest periods. If we're working through a strength-based adaptation, our maximum strength variable, so one to five repetitions, we're going to want to take a slightly longer rest period, probably between three and five minutes. The reason being that we want to make sure we're fully recovered, there's no fatigue in the system because this is not an endurance adaptation. We're trying to get as strong as possible, so we want to be able to put down maximum effort on each repetition and each set. As opposed to an endurance adaptation, we might be working 30 seconds, 60 seconds in between sets. We're making sure that this is getting a little bit more time to recover. You feeling all right? Let's go again, three to five, knock out another set. So there are the types of variables, reps and sets that we might use if we're looking for like maximum strength peak force adaptation when you're working towards something really specific and want to really increase your strength to weight ratio. However, we also might want to build up some more of our capacity, and we talk about this in the capacity part, capacity strength part of the framework, where we could use something like dips. We're again with the weighted vest, but it's a simpler sort of basic exercise where we're going to be looking to get more in the range of like six to 12, more of a hypertrophy rep range, where then we'd be looking at shorter rest periods, 60 to 90 seconds, but this is going to build up some of that global pushing strength that you'll be able to use in lots of areas of your calisthenics training. So say you like Tim, you've got massive triceps, and you can do sort of 10, 12 of those with a 20 kilo weight vest on comfortably, and you need to provide a bit more of that overload. Then we can get the weighted belt, which that around the waist, in addition to the vest could be one option, or you could actually just go with 30 or 40 kilo on the belt around your waist if you're wanting to provide even more of an overload for your dips or any other exercise like that. Through in calisthenics, there's no substitute ever for just basic strength. And with dips, there's a great pushing strength exercise that we need to get in our locker to build up our global strength to be able to progress on whatever it is the movements you're trying to do, it's going to give you a foundation of pushing strength that you'll be able to use. So there we have weighted calisthenics, it might be that you're using the weighted vest, it might be doing dip belt, it doesn't really matter what's important is that you're using some weight as one of the ways you can add overload and make sure it's progressive for your training. Remember, it depends on what you want in terms of the reps and sets you're going to use. Do you want applied strength towards a very specific movement, or you're trying to build up your global capacity strength? We always go talk about how you get what you're trained for. So that's a really important point that Jacko makes about understanding where this is going. Don't just use weight for the sake of it, have an idea about where it's going to go. But if you've been in calisthenics for a couple of years, adding some weight onto your movements to start to get some more progression to help you towards more complicated movements is definitely a way to go. But we're stressing the point about make sure that it's always with perfect technique, don't sacrifice that because it'll come back and bite you in the end. The other option is you want to walk around the gym looking like you've won the WWF with the belt over your shoulder, or just a badass in a weighted vest like that. If you want to up a level, just take your t-shirt off and wear this and you're just cool as doing the gym, maybe. So I hope that's give you some good information that you can go away and use in your training if you're wanting to add a little bit of extra weight to your exercises to help with your progression. So that's it until next time. Class dismissed.