Why you should start training Calisthenics now

Zach Chen
5 min readFeb 14, 2019

I turned 30 year old in November 2018. For most people, mentally this is where we start getting comfortable. We tend to distance ourself from the younger version and start to accept certain limits of our abilities. If you are like me, we used to party all night drinking and eating whatever we want but still miraculously manage to be in good shape in our early 20s. But at one point we realized that we started to put on a few extra pounds then we told ourselves sure I can burn those fat off. Sadly it never happened … Then we told ourselves, sh** I ‘m just getting old.

It was back in 2017, I hit a low point of my life. I was overweighted, stressed out from work, not eating healthy , and it was just a mess. I wanted a change, desperately trying to get my sh** together.

It was in a lounge in SFO that I had hours to kill. While aimless watching Youtube, a group of Calisthenics and bodyweight training athletes’ channel such as Chris Heria’s OfficialThenx and Calisthenicmovement came to my attention. I was sucked into it and almost missed my flight. The thing about them is that they all have lean fit physique and great strength. It was so motivational to see them performing all kinds of crazy movements: handstand, muscle-up, planche etc. I had my moment right there and started a two-year journey of body transformation following them:

Left 2017 , Right 2019

--

--

Zach Chen
Zach Chen

Written by Zach Chen

Data Scientist @Spotify, Entrepreneur, Lifestyle experimenter, and Music fan living in New York

Responses (9)