I was 14 when my dad decided I was too young to lift weights, but I wanted to train, as he did. 

So he made me the weight instead.

He found an old piece of scaffolding, cut it down to size and wedged it between two door frames in our flat that sat at 90 degrees to each other. Then he painstakingly stretched one of my bike inner tubes over it so it had grip and wasn’t just rough metal on your hands. It wasn’t pretty. It was perfect.

He set me a challenge. 10 sets of 10. 100 pull ups. I became obsessed with it.

I never managed it as a kid. But that scaffolding bar wedged in a doorframe was the start of something that has never really left me. Some form of calisthenics has been part of my training ever since.

So What Actually Is Military Calisthenics?

Calisthenics is bodyweight training. Pull ups, push ups, dips, squats, lunges, planks. Movements that use your own body as the resistance. Most people have done some version of it at some point in their life, usually in a school PE lesson they didn’t want to be in.

Military calisthenics takes that foundation and turns it into something else entirely. It’s structured, it’s high volume, it’s intense and it’s built around circuits that push your strength and endurance at the same time. The military don’t train to look good, they train to be capable, to keep going when it’s hard, to perform under pressure with nothing but their body and their mindset. That’s the difference.

No machines. No cables. No excuses.

The Day I Realised How Far I Had to Go

A few years back I trained with Building the Elite. I’d asked them to put me through the training of a special forces candidate, which felt like a great idea at the time and an absolutely terrible one about three hours in.

They had me lifting weights, rucking for hours, running, throwing kettlebells around. It was brutal. But what I noticed was that calisthenics sat right at the core of everything. It was the thread running through all of it.

I’ve always made pull ups and push ups a big part of my training. Always. But I had never done so many in my life as I did in those sessions. The volume was on a different level entirely.

And it wasn’t just pull ups and push ups. They had me doing broad jumps, vertical jumps, explosive movement I hadn’t trained in years. The targets they work towards for special forces candidates are 25 pull ups in a single set, 100 push ups in a single set, a 9 foot broad jump and a 30 inch vertical jump. Those aren’t just fitness standards. They are benchmarks for what a capable human body can do. And they are all achievable with nothing but consistent bodyweight training.

That experience changed how I thought about calisthenics. I went in thinking I was pretty fit. I came out with a much longer list of things to work on.

Why It Matters for the Rest of Us

You are not training to pass selection. Neither am I. But the principles are exactly the same.

Military calisthenics builds functional strength, the kind that transfers to real life. It builds endurance, the kind that means you don’t get out of breath carrying your kids up the stairs. It builds mental toughness, because when you’re 70 push ups into a set and your arms are burning and you’ve still got 30 to go, you learn something about yourself very quickly.

It also removes every excuse most people hide behind. No gym? Doesn’t matter. No equipment? Doesn’t matter. Travelling for work? Doesn’t matter. Your body goes everywhere you go. That’s the point.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Staying capable isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about being able to do the things that matter, for as long as possible, without your body being the reason you can’t.

Where to Start

You don’t need to go and train with special forces to get the benefit of this. Start simple. Pick three or four movements, push ups, pull ups, squats and a core exercise, and do them in circuits with short rest. Keep the rest periods tight. Keep the volume higher than feels comfortable. Progress the reps over time.

If you can’t do a pull up yet, that’s fine, that’s your starting point. Work towards it. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is just training. It’s always just training.

My dad set me a challenge at 14 that I couldn’t complete. It took me decades, a lot of training and one very humbling week with Building the Elite to fully understand why he did it.

He wasn’t keeping me out of the gym. He was teaching me that your body is enough. That you don’t need anything else. That capability starts with what you’ve already got.