Calisthenics is the art of building your muscle using your bodyweight. It’s all about creating enough resistance for your muscles that allows them to grow. In essence, calisthenics workouts consist of classic bodyweight exercises such as pull-ups, push-ups, squats, and others.

But there’s a great deal of freedom when it comes to bodyweight workouts. You can always do a slight twist to almost any calisthenics exercise which will help you target a completely different muscle than originally intended.

And because you’re not using weights to build muscle, your approach towards calisthenics should always be to push yourself. This means harder variations of exercises, more reps, and higher training volume. So you’ll need to train often, but can you do calisthenics everyday? That’s what we’ll answer here in this article.

Can You Do Calisthenics Every Day?

The frequency of your training will depend on several factors:

• Your strength level
• Training experience
• Age
• Your diet
• Whether you get enough sleep or not

Doing calisthenics every day brings a lot of stress on your muscles, joints, and tendons. After all, it can still be an exhausting workout, provided that you progress the right way and challenge yourself.

But no matter if you are a beginner or an advanced calisthenics expert, doing calisthenics every day is not the best way to go. Your body still needs rest, and most of the exercises in calisthenics target multiple muscles at the same time. So doing the same workouts every day throughout the week is not great and you’re risking injuries.

Ultimately, you should listen to your body and not overdo it. Calisthenics can be just as challenging as weight workouts provided you do it correctly and in a way that it challenges your muscles. If you’re a beginner, it’s better to do calisthenics only 3 days a week initially.

But if you feel more comfortable, you can cycle your workouts and do calisthenics every day. With a good training schedule that targets different muscles on separate dies, a proper diet, good sleep, and some recovery routines such as stretching, you can minimize the downtime and do it every day.

Remember, consistency is the mother of all gains, regardless of your type of workout!

How Can You Do Calisthenics Every Day?

The most important thing to consider in order to do calisthenics every day is to give your muscles enough recovery time.

But first, we need to state that for beginners, doing it every day is not a great tactic. Because calisthenics can be very challenging and will make your muscles sore, so if you’re a beginner, you’ll FEEL that you shouldn’t do it every day because you’ll need rest.

If you want to do calisthenics every day, you’ll need to take care of a couple of other things first:

• A good, balanced diet with enough vitamins and minerals (magnesium is VERY important for good recovery)
• Getting enough sleep (7-8 hours is the optimal rest time)
• Decent strength level

These are the fundamentals that will make it easier for you. The other key thing here is that you cycle your calisthenics workouts so that you target different muscle groups every day. Here’s how a good calisthenics cycle might look like:

DAY 1: Upper Body
DAY 2: Lower Body
DAY 3: Abs
DAY 4: Upper Body
DAY 5: Lower Body
DAY 6: Abs

And so on.

Another thing you might want to consider if you do calisthenics every day are the sets and reps you do, and rest time in between sets. You might want to take it a bit easier and take a bit more time to rest.

You should never force yourself into doing calisthenics every day, though. If your body doesn’t seem ready to perform a workout and if you’re still sore from the day before, then you should take this day off and rest. Rest is equally as important for building muscle with calisthenics as training, and ultimately, you should do what feels right for you, or else you’re risking injuries.

Can You Overtrain with Calisthenics?

If you do the right exercises and really challenge your muscles with calisthenics, you can definitely overtrain. Building muscle is all about putting them under tension for long enough so they get exhausted.

And if you do calisthenics every day, you can overtrain if your body’s not prepared. This can cause injuries, joint and bone pain, and in the worst-case scenarios, muscle tears.

So even if calisthenics doesn’t seem as challenging as the gym, you’re still risking serious hazards if you overdo it. So always listen to your body and do what it tells you.

Do I Need to do Calisthenics Every Day?

You don’t need to do calisthenics every day to achieve great results. All you need is consistency, progressive overload, and training to failure.

So if you don’t challenge your muscles when you do your workouts and train them to failure, doing calisthenics isn’t going to help you too much. It’s better to only do it 3 times a week, and do them properly. This means:

• Training your muscles to failure
• Progressively overloading training with every workout

But how do you progressively overload?

You can do it by increasing your reps, doing more challenging variations of exercises, reducing your rest time, increasing the sets, and ultimately, adding something like a weight vest when you feel a bit more advanced.

Progressive overload is still the king when it comes to building muscle, even with calisthenics. So when you start out, that might be done by simply increasing reps. Then, you will want to do more challenging variations of exercises (for example, push-ups have several variations that increase the difficulty – such as handstand push-ups, or decline push-ups).

And when you feel comfortable with those movements, you can add a weight vest to the workout.

In any case, the point is that you should always train to burn out your muscles instead of increasing the frequency of your calisthenics workouts. So doing calisthenics properly with progressive overload is more important than doing it every day.

Is 100 Push Ups a Day Bad?

So you might have already seen challenges where someone does 100 push-ups for a day for a month and then presents the results after one month. You might have been impressed by the results, but doing 100 push-ups a day is not great in the long-term. Here’s why.

• Even when you do 100 push-ups every day, your body will need rest. If you’re starting out from zero, your muscles will eventually feel sore and you won’t be able to continue.
• Doing only 100 push-ups a day is missing out on progressive overload. For the first few days, these 100 push-ups will feel challenging, but once you get comfortable, 100 push-ups will do nothing for you. You will need to increase the challenge.
• Push-ups are a repetitive movement, so when you do this every day, you might hurt your joints and tendons.
• Overall, doing just push-ups every day will only work out parts of your body (mostly your chest and shoulders), so you won’t train other parts of your body such as abs, legs, and back.
• It is not a good long-term strategy if you’re serious about calisthenics.

So these are the reasons why doing 100 push-ups a day for a month is not a great way to go about this. Instead, you’ll want to make your workouts a bit more varied, and tailored to your training level specifically.

So, How Often Should I Train Calisthenics?

There is simply no cookie-cutter answer for everyone out there in the world. Normally doing calisthenics anywhere from 3-5 times per week can be a great idea.

But it all depends on a few things:

1. Your training level
2. Whether you do other workouts
3. Your diet and rest times

If you only do calisthenics, you can do it every day or 5-6 times per week with the cycle routine we’ve mentioned above.

But if you like to do other activities such as running, cycling, or sports, then you can alternate calisthenics with those activities. You can do calisthenics 2-3 times per week and do those sports activities other days in the week.

Final Thoughts

Doing calisthenics every day is possible, provided that you take care of your diet and do the right training routine. You’ll need to cycle the muscle groups you work or else you’re risking tiredness, soreness, and joint pain.

In the end, only you know what’s comfortable for you. If you feel too tired and sore if you do calisthenics every day, then you should reduce the frequency. But if you feel comfortable doing it, then absolutely go for it.