Your calisthenics training plan: ten questions, one programme

The apps that promise a new body in thirty days all start with a questionnaire — and end with a subscription. This one stops at the questionnaire: ten questions, and a bodyweight exercise plan built on what you answered, with nutrition guidelines that are calculated, not guessed. You can do it alone, or as a pair: training with your partner is one of the few ways to keep up a programme for more than three weeks.

What this plan does, and does not do

Calisthenics is bodyweight training: push-ups, pull-ups, squats, core work and their dozens of variations. It has three qualities that gyms do not: it costs nothing, it can be practised anywhere, and every exercise comes in versions from the easiest to the hardest, which lets you keep progressing for years. For each group of movements, the plan picks the variation that matches your level and your equipment, leaves out whatever is contraindicated by what gives you trouble, and fixes the sets, the reps and the rests according to your goal: short ranges and long rests build strength, high-rep circuits with short rests burn more and build endurance.

It works no miracles. Losing fat depends first on what is on your plate; building muscle takes months and sleep; regaining mobility takes consistency more than effort. And no questionnaire replaces a diagnosis: pain that lasts is something you show to a professional, not to an app.

Why four weeks, and why start again afterwards

Four weeks is the time it takes a beginner to learn the movements and be ready to step up a level, and the time after which an established trainee needs to change variations to keep progressing. The fourth week is deliberately lighter: it is during the light weeks that the body consolidates what the heavy weeks have demanded. Then redo the questionnaire, answering honestly: if you can string together fifteen clean push-ups, you are no longer a beginner.

Nutrition: what the tool calculates

Daily expenditure is estimated with the Mifflin-St Jeor formula (sex, age, height, weight), multiplied by an activity factor that depends on the number and length of your sessions. Your goal then adjusts the target: a moderate deficit of about 400 kcal to lose fat — enough to lose one to two kilos a month, not enough to lose muscle — a slight surplus of 250 kcal to build it, maintenance otherwise. Protein is set between 1.4 and 2 g per kilo depending on the goal, water at about 35 ml per kilo. These are orders of magnitude, to be corrected after two weeks according to what the scales say: the body is not a formula.

If you do not enter your measurements, the tool gives the guidelines without the figures. It does not keep them: everything is calculated in your browser, and nothing is sent.

Training as a couple

Two people who train together keep up their programme markedly longer than either would alone: you do not miss a session that the other is waiting for. The “together” plan adds to each session one exercise done as a pair — face-to-face push-ups, towel pulls, back-to-back squats, assisted pull-ups — and suggests alternating sets on the others: one works while the other counts and recovers. If your levels are different, each do your own questionnaire: the variations change, the rhythm stays shared. The physical activity page explains why consistency matters more than performance, and the one on healthy eating sets out what is established and what is just fashion.

Frequently asked questions