A few years ago I was Ironman training, swimming lanes alongside genuinely elite swimmers, people who’d won races all over the world. There was one drill our coach loved: swim 25m, then hit the wall and knock out 3 dips before pushing off again.

The swim part was embarrassing for me. They’d fly down the lane and leave me for dead.

The dips were a different story. I’d catch up. I’d overtake. Some of them could barely get through 3 reps. When I asked one of the coaches about pull-ups once, he admitted he was struggling with dead hangs, just hanging from the bar.

Let that sit for a second. World class athletes, elite in their sport, who could out swim me without breaking a sweat, and couldn’t control their own bodyweight against gravity.

It’s not just swimmers. I’ve trained with guys who could bench press well over double their own bodyweight and couldn’t do a single pull-up. Not because they were unfit. Because they’d built enormous strength in one specific pattern while their basic bodyweight movement had quietly fallen apart in the background.

The Debate Everyone’s Having Is the Wrong One

Ask a room of people what’s the best training style, calisthenics, weights, or running, and you’ll get a fight. Everyone’s got their camp. Everyone’s got a friend who swears by one and looks down on the others.

But that debate assumes these things are competing with each other. They’re not. They’re not even on the same level. One of them is the foundation everything else gets built on top of, and most people, including very good athletes, skip it or let it slide once they specialise.

That’s calisthenics. Not the online, superhuman one arm handstand version, the basic version. The ability to move, support, and control your own bodyweight. Pull yourself up. Push yourself up. Sit into a proper squat. Hang from a bar without your grip giving out in ten seconds.

Why Does This Keep Happening to Good Athletes

Water supports the vast majority of a swimmer’s bodyweight. Their muscles and nervous system have spent years getting brilliant at propulsion through water, and have simply never been asked to control full bodyweight against gravity in the way a pull-up or a dip demands. It’s not a lack of fitness. It’s a gap that specialisation quietly creates and never has to be dealt with, because their sport never asks the question.

Same story with the bench press. A barbell moves along a fixed path. You can get very strong pressing it without ever developing the full body control, grip strength, and relative strength that a pull-up demands. The bar hides the gap. Gravity and your own bodyweight don’t.

This is the danger of specialising before you’ve built a base, or letting your basic movement quietly erode once you have. You can become genuinely elite in a narrow pattern while losing the ability to do something as fundamental as pull your own bodyweight off the ground.

And it’s not rare. A large share of adults today can’t do a single strict pull-up, estimates from various surveys and fitness assessments put it anywhere from the majority to a large majority of the population. Plenty of people also can’t comfortably sit into a full bodyweight squat, despite it being a completely normal resting position in large parts of the world. Walk through much of Asia and you’ll see people squatting to wait for a bus, eat lunch, or have a conversation. In the West, we’ve largely lost it. It’s not a flexibility gift some people are born with, it’s a pattern most of us stopped practicing.

Being able to move your own bodyweight isn’t a fitness bonus. It’s closer to a baseline part of being a functioning human, in the same category as being able to jog down the street or carry your own shopping.

The Fix Isn’t Do Calisthenics Instead

This isn’t an argument that calisthenics beats weights or running. Go back to the original question, which training style is best, and the honest answer is still that the best one is whichever you’ll actually stick to. Adherence beats modality, every time.

This is a different, earlier question: what should you be competent in before you specialise into any of them?

Militaries have understood this for decades. Pull-ups, push-ups, and bodyweight standards run through basic training across almost every branch and country, regardless of what a soldier goes on to specialise in afterward. Not because bodyweight strength is the most advanced form of fitness, but because it’s the floor everything else stands on.

So the standard I’d set, and the one I train people toward before they specialise into anything, looks something like this:

• A controlled bodyweight squat, full depth, good form, hold for 60s.
• 10+ strict pull-ups
• 30+ strict push-ups
• The ability to hang from a bar for 60s and control your own bodyweight for, not just survive it

These aren’t arbitrary, think of them less as scientifically fixed thresholds and more as a serious, honest bar. If you can comfortably clear these, you’ve got a real foundation. If you can’t yet, that’s fine, it’s just information, not judgment. It just means that’s where the work should start, whatever you eventually go on to specialise in, running, swimming, lifting, martial arts, cycling, or advanced calisthenics itself.

The Actual Argument

Stop asking which discipline is best. Start asking whether you can actually move your own body well. Build that first. Then specialise into whatever you’ll enjoy enough to stick with, because in the end, that’s still what decides your results.

The elite swimmers in my Ironman group were some of the best in the world at what they trained for. They just hadn’t trained for this. Don’t let the same gap creep in behind whatever you’re chasing.