Grind Style Calisthenics
Text Copyright © 2019 Matthew J. Schifferle
All Rights Reserved
ISBN- 9781080754236
The information provided in this book is designed to provide helpful information on the subjects discussed. This book is not meant to be used, nor should it be used, to diagnose or treat any medical condition. For diagnosis or treatment of any medical problem, consult your own physician. The publisher and author are not responsible for any specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision and are not liable for any damages or negative consequences from any treatment, action, application or preparation, to any person reading or following the information in this book. References are provided for informational purposes only and do not constitute endorsement of any websites or other sources. Readers should be aware that the websites listed in this book may change.
Cover photo and design by Chris Clemens at Thinkprilgrim.com
Dedicated to Paul Wade, Al & Danny Kavadlo, John Bruney, and John Du Cane.
Thank you for generously sharing your wisdom, knowledge and experience to inspire us all.
Table of Contents
How a 20-Year Long Quest Lead Me to the Promised Land of Grind Style Calisthenics
Chapter 1 The Transforming Laws of Muscle Tension
Chapter 2 The Three Biggest Threats to Your Muscle Tension and how to Overcome Them
Chapter 3 The Grind Style Workout Routine for Complete Muscle Stimulation
Chapter 4 The Six Tension Chains for Complete Physical Development
Chapter 5 Grind Style Leg Training
Chapter 6 Grind Style Back & Biceps
Chapter 7 Grind-Style Chest & Triceps
Chapter 8 Grind Style Abs
Chapter 9 Grind Style Glutes & Hamstrings
Chapter 10 Grind Style Hips & Obliques
Chapter 11 Grind Style Workout Templates
Chapter 12 The DIY Grind-Straps Calisthenics Gym
Chapter 13 Common GSC Questions & Answers
How a 20-Year Long Quest Lead Me to the Promised Land of Grind Style Calisthenics
Grind Style Calisthenics may very well be the simplest and easiest way for you to build strength and muscle.
Period.
I know that's a tall claim to make, and I didn't write it out of any false hype or salesmanship. I wrote it because Grind Style Calisthenics (GSC) may be the best way to eliminate the guess work from building an impressive physique through bodyweight training. After reading this book, you will no longer be distracted by trends that tempt you to program hop from one routine to the next; nor will you waste hours of your time hoping to achieve results through blind luck. Every chapter contains information that will empower you with the clarity and confidence to know exactly what to do, in every workout, to get the results you want.
What makes the Grind Style Calisthenics program so effective?
GSC is not another workout program or progressive calisthenics system. There are already enough of those in the world as it is. Instead, GSC is a collection of simple, yet very powerful, tools that will teach you how to progressively control your own body. The more neuromuscular control you develop, the more you’ll unleash your inhibited potential and make every rep, set, and workout more effective for building muscle and strength.
Who the heck am I?
My name is Matt Schifferle, and I’ve been studying the art and science of physical training for over 20 years. I’ve practiced a wide variety of disciplines, from martial arts to kettlebells and I’ve never been lacking in the discipline and motivation department. Yet, despite my best efforts, progress used to be an elusive and random occurrence. It didn’t matter how much I learned or how hard I worked; making progress was always hit or miss.
After years of trying to sift through all of the conflicting fitness information, and trying to work myself to death, I came to the profound realization; that neither hard work nor endless education were the path to success.
This simple realization inspired me to search for the ultimate answers in fitness. My quest has lead me down many rabbit holes, and I still continue to share my enlightening discoveries through my YouTube Videos and Podcast at the RedDeltaProject.com
One of my most empowering discoveries was that training success, towards any goal, boils down to the creation, and manipulation, of muscle tension. Everything from lowering your handicap in golf, to running a marathon depends entirely on how well you can use your own muscles. Of course, this same lesson also applies to developing strength and building muscle as well.
It’s taken me over 20 years to learn and prepare the information in the next several chapters and it’s my sincere hope that this book will help you accomplish amazing things for the next 20 years and beyond.
Be fit live free,
Matt Schifferle
Chapter 1
The Body Transforming Laws of Muscle Tension
Muscle tension is the active ingredient in your workouts and it’s responsible for the results you want. So if you want to get bigger and stronger, or get rid of joint pain, your ability to produce and control muscle tension is the path to those results. Since it's so important, let's get right down to what tension is, what it is not, and the natural laws that give you the power to control it.
Tension Law #1
It’s all in your head
Muscle tension is the product of your neuromuscular system. That very term neuromuscular highlights the origin of tension and how you control it. When your muscles contract, they are responding to an electrical signal they are receiving from your nervous system. The origin of that signal is your brain.
It's crucially important to understand the origin of muscle tension because it gives you the power to control your tension at the source. Without this essential awareness, your ability to produce, and control, muscle tension is left up to chance and hit-or-miss workouts.
You can feel this process in action right now. As you're reading this sentence take a moment and flex a muscle, any muscle in your body. You don't even have to contract it very hard, just tense it up and hold that tension for a few moments.
Take a second and feel that muscle contracting. Note the sensation and savor it like a connoisseur. Now let it relax and release the tension. I know it's a simple exercise but observe that there was nothing external (other than these instructions) that made your muscle contract. There wasn't a fancy weight machine or heavy piece of equipment, that made your muscle turn on. You weren't practicing a sport or exercise technique either. You make the conscious choice to put tension into that muscle and hold it there for a few seconds. I also didn't tell you which muscle to contract; that part was up to you. It was a completely conscious choice on your part to help you understand that all of the instructions in this book are dealing with the deliberate pro-active use of creating and producing muscle tension.
The bottom line is that you cannot make any muscular gains without first working toward a stronger visualization of your training first.
Tension law #2
Producing muscle tension is a learned skill
It took me a long time to understand this lesson after years of sub-par workouts. I always wondered, why would a set of squats make my quads burn one workout, but then I would hardly feel those same muscles working during the next workout? Sometimes, an exercise could feel very different from one set to the next or even change over a few reps.
It was always a mystery until a fellow trainer gave me a simple exercise to help me with some chronic knee pain I was experiencing. As it turned out, I had poor tension control in my hamstrings, and he gave me a simple isometric technique to make my hamstrings stronger.
At first, it didn't f
eel like the exercise was doing anything at all. Even so, it was a simple exercise, and I could do it any time I was standing so I got in the habit of practicing it throughout the day. It took about three weeks of daily practice before I started to notice a slight tingling in my hamstrings. After another few weeks that tingling had grown into a full on burn. After a couple of months, I started to notice I was using my hamstrings more when I would stand up out of a chair or climb a flight of stairs. As my tension control improved the stress on my knees disappeared.
Since then, I've noticed several other of my muscle groups that have suffered poor tension control. My biceps, lats, hips, abs, and shoulders also had a poor mind-muscle connection. I've been making steady progress, but I always start with a slow trickle of tension in the muscle that eventually grows as I keep practicing. What's more, I know I can continually improve my tension control. I started working on my hamstrings three years ago, and I'm still making progress. Just like any skill, tension control is always something you can improve on and should strive to do so.
The biggest challenge with tension control is that we all tend to use our muscles in a habitual, near-subliminal fashion. People usually don't think about how they use their muscles in everyday activities like walking, standing, or going about their daily chores. They operate their muscles primarily on autopilot, which makes it particularly challenging to reverse old habits and make progress.
Teaching improved tension control has been one of the biggest challenges I've faced as a personal trainer. How can I possibly teach someone how to improve something they aren't even aware of and can’t even feel? That's why I've compiled my best tension control exercises in this book. They will help you learn how to improve your tension control as quickly as possible.
Tension law #3
Your muscles are being conditioned 24/7
Your mind controls your muscle tension and, your brain is one heck of a habit-forming machine. In fact, you've been conditioning your tension control habits ever since you were a toddler and have continued to do so to this day.
It's a myth that exercise is the only time you're training your body. The truth is, your body is continuously training every second of every day. So when you proactively control your muscle tension and perform an exercise, you're not turning on some switch marked "condition body." You're always conditioning your body; it's just that your workouts are when you're purposely controlling the direction of that conditioning.
I find this idea both liberating and scary at the same time. On the one hand, it's good to know you don't have to move mountains in your workout to make your body change. You're already changing, all you need to do is guide where you want your physical changes to go. However, it's also somewhat nerve-wracking to know that everything you do is telling your body how it should perform and behave. You never get a day off as your neuromuscular system is undergoing constant renovation, and it doesn't take much for things to start headed down the wrong path.
Nevertheless, I find understanding this lesson is very motivating because even the smallest tension control habits can make a big difference over time. You're always one workout, set or rep away from steering your physical fate in a more positive direction.
Tension law #4
There are only three variables in controlling muscle tension
There are a million different ways you can perform physical activity. From yoga to Yo-yo and powerlifting to power walking, you can apply muscle tension in an infinite number of ways. You can lose yourself down an endless rabbit hole trying to contemplate all of the different ways you can use your body.
So I'm going to make things simple for you. I'm assuming you're reading this book because you primarily want to a) make your muscles stronger and b) make your muscles bigger. If you want anything other than that, this is not the book for you. Granted, GSC can help improve athletic performance, decrease joint pain, improve posture, and help you burn fat but if those are your primary objectives I recommend starting with my first two books, Fitness Independence and Smart Bodyweight Training.
But, if the strength and size thing is your objective, then there are only three things you need to concern yourself with from the standpoint of physical training. The first of which is that all-important tension control because it's impossible to stimulate a muscle to get bigger and stronger if you struggle to engage it in the first place. Naturally, this is why so much of the GSC workout strategy focuses on tension control and muscle activation.
The second variable is the amount of tension you can put into a muscle which often correlated with weight. While weight is a big influence on the resistance against a muscle, there are several other factors to consider. The technique you use and your environment can also influence how much tension you can put into a muscle. You can even change the amount of tension in a muscle, even if the weight you're lifting is the same, due to focus and concentration. So it's more accurate to claim that a weight you lift influences the amount of tension in a muscle rather than directly correlates to it.
The third variable is the amount of time your muscles are holding the tension. Usually, this is measured by how many reps you can perform or how long you can do an exercise. However, don't forget the speed and range of motion of a rep can influence how many reps you do relative to time. Doing three deep, slow push-ups may produce the same time under tension as doing 15 short and fast reps.
So if your goals are to build muscle and strength, then you have a straightforward set of criteria you're trying to satisfy with each workout.
#1 Become more skillfully proficient in putting tension into a given muscle or muscle group
#2 Establish a standard amount of tension in the muscle or muscle group.
#3 Push the work capacity of your muscles through progressing how long those muscles can hold that amount of tension.
Those are the three objectives of powerful muscle and strength building workouts. The entire objective of GSC is to help you accomplish all three as effectively as possible.
As an added side note, you can now assess the value of any exercise variable as it relates to those three objectives. If you ever run into a question about a program, technique, or product, all you need to do is ask yourself how it can help you improve either tension control, tension quantity or tension duration. If you're unsure if or how it can help you improve either of those three things, then chances are it won't help you build muscle and strength.
Tension Law #5
The muscle tension hierarchy
Lastly, it's super important to understand what I call the muscle tension hierarchy. This series of steps is what each GSC workout is based on, and it's the key to paving the path of least resistance to the results you want.
The hierarchy states that you can only produce tension towards a particular objective once you have proficiently improved the lower levels of the hierarchy. It’s presented here in a pyramid to represent the basic principle of building a strong foundation to produce a higher result.
This progressive approach is evident all throughout nature. From trees to mountains, you can even see this idea in effect by building a sand pile the next time you're on a beach. If you want to build a higher pile, you also need to build a broader and more stable foundation. If you continue to dump buckets of sand onto a pile, the mound will broaden its base as the mound of sand grows higher.
The same idea holds with the muscle tension hierarchy. The wider and stronger you build your foundation, the higher you can progress your muscle and strength.
Let’s explore the different levels of the Muscle Tension Hierarchy in more detail.
Level 1 Tension control
I’ve already written about this at length, so I won’t go over everything again. It’s just worth re-mentioning that all progress is built upon your skillful proficiency to produce and control the muscle tension throughout your body at will.
Level 2 Stability
The next level is to use your tension control to create stability throughout
your body. GSC uses basic calisthenics exercises that require full body control at all times. There are no benches, pads, and some exercises don't even use the floor. The lack of support means you'll need to create a safe and stable environment through the tension in your muscles.
Level 3 Strength
The second to last level is strength, which concerns how much tension you can place in your muscle. Keep in mind that this is not as simple as just how much weight you can lift. Several factors, including technique and environment, also influence the amount of tension in your muscles.
Level 4 Hypertrophy
At the very top of the hierarchy, you have the final layer of building muscle or hypertrophy. This is largely due to the total work capacity of the muscle, or its ability to hold a certain amount of tension for a period of time. Keep in mind that muscles can increase in size, but that's about all. They cannot change their shape, length, or any other terms used to describe an aesthetic change. They get bigger or smaller, and that's it.
Now that you've reached the top of the Muscle Tension Hierarchy, you can walk back down and see how each layer builds upon the foundation of the one below it. The size and work capacity of your muscles is built on your foundation of strength. Your foundation of strength is built upon your stability and your stability is built upon your foundation of tension control.
This explanation is the basic understanding of the muscle tension hierarchy and the foundation behind the GSC method. Everything you'll be learning from here on out is to help you build up each of the foundational layers in this hierarchy to make it easier for you to build muscle and strength. Moreover, to further understand how to do that, let's take a look at some of the biggest obstacles standing in your way of accomplishing those goals.
Chapter 2
The Three Biggest Threats to Your Muscle Tension and How to Overcome Them
Grind Style Calisthenics Page 1