Free · No equipment to start · 30 minutes
Four plans built on five movement ladders. Test where you actually are, train the rung you land on, and move up when you hit the number — not when you get bored.
A calisthenics workout plan is a schedule for bodyweight training: which patterns you train, how often, how many sets, and the exact condition that tells you to make them harder. The movements are the easy part — push, pull, squat, brace, dip. What separates a plan from a workout you found this morning is the progression rule attached to it.
That rule is what this site is built around. Every plan below stands on five movement ladders, and every ladder states the number that earns you the next rung. You never have to wonder whether you have outgrown a variation. The number answers it.
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Military Calisthenics Coach
Every plan on this site, built into a coach that runs the session for you. Military Calisthenics Coach turns the progressions into a daily workout you can do in a park, a garage or a hotel room — timed, tracked and scaled to your level.
01 / Start here
Most people pick a plan by ambition and quit in week three. Pick by evidence instead. Four tests, ten minutes, two minutes of rest between each — and one honest answer about where you start.
Maximum clean reps in one set. Chest to a fist’s height off the floor, hips in line with your shoulders, no resting at the top.
Hang from a bar with straight arms and active shoulders. Stop the clock the moment your grip starts to slide.
Strict, from a full dead hang, chin clearly over the bar. No kipping, no swinging, no half reps at the end.
Sit at the bottom of a squat with your heels flat and chest up. Stop when a heel lifts or your lower back rounds.
| If your numbers say | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 push-ups, or a hang shorter than 15 seconds | Foundation | You need the base before the split is worth anything. |
| 10–24 push-ups, 0–4 pull-ups, 20-second hang | Build | Enough of a base to split the week and add real volume. |
| 25+ push-ups and 5+ strict pull-ups | Ladder | Strength is no longer the limit — skill work is. |
| Solid on all four, but a flight of stairs still wins | Engine | Strength outran conditioning. Close the gap. |
Retest in four weeks. Same order, same day of the week, same rest.
02 / Progression
You cannot add five kilos to your own body. These are the three things you add instead, in the order you should reach for them.
Change the angle or the length of the lever so the same muscles carry more of your bodyweight. This is the biggest jump available and the one to reach for first.
Incline push-up → push-up → decline push-up
Use it when you can clear the top of your rep range with clean form on the current rung.
Keep the movement, add time under tension. A three-second lowering turns a set of ten into a set you feel by rep six, with no change of equipment and no change of variation.
10 fast push-ups → 10 with a 3-second lowering
Use it when you are stranded between two rungs and the next one is still out of reach.
Same sets, same reps, less rest. The session gets harder without a single new exercise — and it gets shorter, which is usually the real constraint.
4 sets with 90s rest → 4 sets with 45s rest
Use it when conditioning is the limit. Avoid it when you are chasing maximum strength — short rest caps the load you can express.
03 / The ladders
Five patterns cover everything the body does without equipment. Each is a ladder: find your rung, own it, step up. The rule on the right is the only permission slip you need.
Move up at 3 sets of 12, clean
Move up at 3 sets of 8, no kipping
Move up at 3 sets of 15, or 8 per leg
Move up at 45 seconds, or 3 sets of 12
Move up at 3 sets of 8, full depth
04 / The plans
Same five ladders in all four — what changes is how the week is cut and which rung you stand on. Start where the test put you, not where your ambition did.
Three full-body sessions a week, every movement scaled to a rung you can actually hold form on. The goal is not fatigue — it is twelve honest reps of something that was eight sloppy ones in week one.
Once one session can no longer hold everything, split it. Each pattern gets trained twice a week with enough volume to actually grow, and the second session of each pair runs a rung harder than the first.
Skills are a practice, not a reward. They go first in the session while you are fresh, in short sets that stop well short of failure — then the strength work follows. Fatigue is the enemy of every skill on this list.
Two strength sessions hold your ground while three circuits move your conditioning. The circuits are intervals, not a race — you work the clock, rest the clock, and finish able to repeat it tomorrow.
05 / The session
Every plan runs on the same skeleton. Change the rung, not the shape — which is why the session never needs rewriting, only relabelling.
50 jumping jacks, 20 arm circles each way, 20 air squats, 10 leg swings per leg. Finish with two 20-second dead hangs — the cheapest shoulder insurance there is.
Four sets on your current push rung, each stopped two reps short of failure, 60 seconds of rest between. The last set should look like the first. If it does not, you picked the wrong rung.
Four sets on your pull rung with 90 seconds of rest. Pull gets the longest rest and the most patience — it is the pattern that decides how the rest of your training looks in six months.
Three sets on your squat rung, alternating with 10 walking lunges per leg. Drive through the heel, keep the chest tall, and add a three-second pause at the bottom before you add reps.
Three rounds on your brace rung. Ribs down, lower back flat, breathing the whole time. A shaking 30-second hollow hold beats a comfortable 90-second plank.
Log the rungs and the reps — one line is enough. Next session is not a guess, it is whatever this line says plus one.
06 / Standards
Checkpoints, not judgements. Clear the beginner column across the board and the Build plan is yours; clear the intermediate column and the skill work starts moving fast.
| Test | Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Push-ups, one set | 10 | 30 | 50+ |
| Strict pull-ups | 1 | 10 | 20+ |
| Dips | 3 | 15 | 25+ |
| Squat pattern | 25 air squats | 10 Bulgarians per leg | 5 pistols per leg |
| Brace hold | 45s plank | 60s hollow hold | 20s L-sit |
| Dead hang | 20s | 60s | 2:00+ |
07 / Failure modes
Almost nobody stalls because the program was wrong. They stall on one of these.
New movements feel like progress and rarely are. Keep the movement, beat the number, then change the rung.
Push-ups need no equipment, so they win by default. Match pull sets to push sets every week, or buy the imbalance back in shoulder pain later.
Rep eight at half depth is not rep eight. Stop the set at the first short rep and log the honest count.
The plan that survives a bad week beats the plan that needs a perfect one. Three kept sessions beat six promised ones.
Max-effort sets tell you where you are, not how to get further. Test on the same day once a month and train the rest of the time.
One leg at a time is the load. Split squats, Bulgarians and box pistols make bodyweight legs hard enough for anyone.
08 / Questions
Yes — muscle responds to tension, effort close to failure, and progressive overload, not to the specific object supplying them. What bodyweight training lacks is a small, easy increment: you cannot add 2 kg to yourself. So the overload comes from leverage, tempo and volume instead, which is exactly what the ladders on this page are for. In practice the upper body grows readily; legs need single-leg work to stay challenging.
That is the normal starting point, and it has its own rungs. Spend four weeks on dead hangs and inverted rows, then move to negative pull-ups: jump or step to the top position and lower yourself for five full seconds. Three sets of three negatives, twice a week, gets most people to a first strict rep inside two months. Skip the resistance band if you can — negatives teach the top of the movement better.
Three full-body sessions with a rest day between each is enough for anyone still building the base, and it is the hardest schedule to fall off. Once those feel routine, the six-day push/pull/legs split gives each pattern twice the weekly volume in shorter sessions. More than six is not better — it just borrows recovery from next week.
For the first four weeks, no. After that, yes — nothing else trains the pull pattern properly, and a body trained only on push work ends up round-shouldered and imbalanced. A doorway bar, a park frame, a set of rings over a beam or a sturdy table for inverted rows all count. It is the only purchase these plans ever ask for.
Mostly no. Stop two reps short on your working sets: you keep the form, you recover in time for the next session, and the research on hypertrophy shows little benefit to grinding out the last rep. Save true failure for a monthly test set, where the number is the whole point.
Endurance and posture shift inside four to six weeks — the first thing most people notice is that the same set stops being hard. Visible strength changes, like adding several strict pull-ups or a first dip, generally land between weeks eight and twelve. Skills such as a free-standing handstand run on a longer clock, usually six months to a year of consistent practice.
Yes, with one rule: protect the hard sessions. Put easy runs on rest days or after a session, and keep hard intervals away from the day before heavy pull work. If you also lift, treat these plans as the accessory rather than the main course and drop one bodyweight session a week.
Now on iPhone
Military Calisthenics Coach
Stop planning and start training. Military Calisthenics Coach takes the plans on this page and turns them into a guided, timed session — it counts the sets, holds the rest clock and scales the reps as you get stronger.