Exercise progressions and regressions

What are progressions and regressions in calisthenics?

First of all we need to understand what are progressions and regressions in calisthenics and why they are so important.

Did you know that with Caliverse it’s easy to change the difficulty of an exercise? Progressions make an exercise more challenging, whereas regressions make the same exercise easier and both are built into Caliverse so you can perform all workouts no matter your current level.

For example, you are trying to do a pull-up but cannot do a single legit pull-up. Instead you should do something a bit easier but that will progress you towards full pull-up eventually, like, band assisted pull-ups or negative pull-ups. The same applies for progressions – instead of continuously increasing reps you are doing, you progress the exercise. In this example, you would go from pull-ups to close grip pull-ups or clap pull-ups.

Why are we progressing or regressing exercises?

For me, personally, it is something that makes my workouts more fun by constantly giving new goals to achieve. I want to unlock full planche – that is my main target. But on the way, I have many small goals that are being achieved quite often, like, doing a legit pseudo planche push-up.

And besides fun this example gives you the best insight on how progressions and regressions can help you in your trainings. Pick an exercise you want to learn and be able to do and work towards it by regressing it. This will help to build your base strength.

This is the part where I like to compare calisthenics with weightlifting. In calisthenics you are constantly progressing exercises and updating your training plan, in weightlifting all your work is to add some extra few kilograms to the same exercise. So, which one is more entertaining and fun?

How to use them in Caliverse?

Caliverse has a huge library of exercises and they are connected in between so you know progressions and regressions of each exercise.

You can check exercise progressions by just opening an exercise you are interested in and scrolling down. Yep, it’s that simple. Tap on progression to see detailed information about it. This is really useful if you are planning your own workouts and making training plans.

Exercise progressions when viewing exercise

Another great use of this feature is when you are doing workout but feel that the exercise is a bit too tough or easy. There is a button in Caliverse that allows you to dynamically change exercise during workout. You change the exercise and Caliverse will be able to save your progress for the right exercise that you actually did. We are not secretly using your data so it will just help for you to see your history and to know for how long you have worked on a particular progression.

Exercise progressions list when doing workout

Change exercise when doing workout

And lastly, if you are using Caliverse Coaching and have a personal trainer, it is crucial for him to know what progression you are doing for each exercise so he can plan your next trainings better. And this becomes possible only by updating exercise if you are doing a different one.

Plans for future

Our plan is to make your workouts more automated and smarter. And this will be done by progressing an exercise when Caliverse thinks you can handle it. Would be awesome if your trainings could update automatically based on your strength.

And another feature in the future will be for you to give options to substitute an exercise with different progressions or similar exercise if you don’t have required equipment. For example, don’t have pull up bar available but can hang rings on a tree? No problem, we can change pull-up to ring pull-up.

This sounds great, doesn’t it? Be a bit patient for these cool features and do a workout by updating progressions yourself.