In this article, we will explain a shoulder routine that includes different exercises. From those that involve great complexity in their execution to the easiest to perform. You can find this routine on 

The dynamic will be as follows: we will start with one rep and we will add one more in each exercise. This routine will allow you to know all the shoulder exercises that you can use to strengthen the muscles and, in addition, it is a challenge to complete it.

As you may have noticed, we have not added planche progression exercises because in this case we are focusing on strengthening the shoulders. While it is true that progressions are important (learning how to place the scapulae correctly, advanced tucked, tucked lean planche), ultimately, if your goal is to do the planche, you need to strengthen your shoulders. Therefore, the purpose of this routine is to use reps exercises, whether they are difficult exercises with few reps or simpler exercises with more reps. Since the most difficult exercises are placed first, you may not be able to do any at first. In that case, start from the exercise that you are capable of executing and gradually add exercises until you reach the complete routine.

 from the Smart Progress section of the app.

18 effective exercises that target shoulder muscles (including a challenge)

There are some keys to the psychological factor in training that are often underestimated and that will make your results noticeably better. These keys can directly result in you achieving your goals, instead of failing as happens to most people who set themselves a training regime.

The main factor that we are referring to is integrating training as part of your life: you have to train, whatever the conditions, just like you have to eat, just like you have to drink water, etc.

If you are traveling and have no equipment or park, you train on the floor and the wall. If you have a shoulder injury, you train your legs, if your knee hurts, you train your shoulders, if you have a very busy day and you don't have much time, you do 100 push-ups in 5 minutes wherever you are. If you can't leave the house because you have to take care of your cousin, you train at home. If you're sick with a cold, you train easy. Is it raining or is it very cold? You train at home.

Just like when you are hungry you look for a way to eat, whatever the circumstances, just like when you are thirsty you look for a way to drink water, whatever the circumstances. This is how you have to treat training, you have to do it, in whatever way, whatever the circumstances.

There are times when there are compelling reasons not to train, if you have a high fever it is normal that you do not train that day, if you are admitted to the hospital it is normal that you do not train that day, but apart from extreme cases, almost, almost always you can find a way to comply.

One of the advantages of calisthenics training is that you can do it anywhere, even if you do not have adequate space or equipment, even if you normally train with weights, do crossfit or weightlifting, when you have no option to train as you like, you can resort to calisthenics as a substitute. In 

 we have in the routines section, a complete section of 

 which are routines that can be done without equipment so there you have a wide variety of options to choose from.


These training sessions may not be the most optimal or the ones that give the best results, but they are better than nothing, they keep you striving for your goals, they prevent you from going backwards, they build your consistency and they build your discipline.

What is achieved with this mentality? Imagine that for a year, because of different excuses such as the ones we mentioned above, you cancel an average of 1 training session per week and there are 3 full weeks that you do not train at all due to a minor injury, vacation or because winter is coming. This equates to about 60 workouts you miss in a year, 60 sessions you don't do.

Do you know the progress that can be achieved with 60 training sessions? Can you imagine the difference in one year from having missed 60 training sessions to having missed only the strictly necessary? What would you be like today if you hadn't made so many excuses and missed so many workouts? Even if those sessions are not perfect or with the ideal circumstances, the difference would be brutal.


And this assuming that you continue training, because another very common situation is that you have a setback that does not allow you to train as you would like and you stop training, you lose the habit, and then when you want to resume it, you no longer have the willpower, you no longer see yourself with enough motivation and you simply leave it, either indefinitely or for a much longer time than necessary.

If you had only looked for a way to continue doing something, in any way, if only your training was part of your life, if only you had built the habit...

In my personal case, I am proud to have fulfilled what I comment in this article. When I have been injured, I have trained what I could, when I had knee surgery, I trained upper body, when the quarantine arrived, I trained at home and virtually with many of you, when I have been sick, I have trained more lightly, when I have been traveling I have trained without equipment or have looked for the nearest parks.

During all these years they may have seen me with a better or worse physique, with better or worse abilities, depending on the training objectives I had at each moment, but you will never have seen me out of shape, they will never have seen me lose all my musculature or all my strength, and I've been uploading content to the networks since 2014, so you can check if you want the last 8 years to see if you find any slip.


And now that I have a more aesthetic goal, I encourage you to follow me so you can see the results that are coming, I promise I won't let you down.

As a final tip for you to apply what is explained in this article, I recommend that you look for the exercises, training methods, routines and objectives that you like the most, there is a wide variety to choose from so look for the ones that you are most passionate about, the

How to get results with Calisthenics

When we train calisthenics there are times when we take some concepts for granted, or have some wrong beliefs, or maybe we don't realize some details that could possibly be holding back our progress. In this article we will see some of the most frequent.






In calisthenics we have a practically infinite variety of exercises, and we can also use our creativity to add variants or "extras" that occur to us.

But you have to be careful because sometimes those exercises are not giving us what we are really looking for.

Especially this happens a lot with exercises that look impressive or flashy, but that really don't add much. Or exercises that you perform hanging or positioned on the bars in an almost acrobatic way when you could really do the normal "non-acrobatic" variant of it and it would be just as useful.

It also happens with people who use elastic bands to work in a way that they really could do with basic exercises.

When you include an exercise in your routine, check that it really is an exercise that works the muscles or skills you are looking for, check that you are not complicating the execution and that there are no simpler exercises to perform that are more effective.




There are people who need everything to be perfectly in place in order to train, and as soon as there is something that does not fit well, they use it as an excuse not to train.

For example, there are people who train during spring and summer and then when it's cold they stop. People who train in times when they have a lot of free time but when their schedules get a little complicated they stop. People who as soon as they feel some discomfort in some area of the body stop training completely... etc.

With this predisposition to stop training so easily, it is difficult to obtain results, because those long breaks make you lose your progress. If you really want your training to be effective, you have to find a way to continue training consistently, adapting to different circumstances.


If it's cold, train warmer, train at noon, or train indoors. If you have tighter schedules or you have to study a lot, do shorter workouts. If you have wrist or shoulder discomfort, focus on training your legs until you recover. If you have a sore knee or ankle, focus on training your upper body until you recover.

As you can see, the key is to achieve consistency in the long term and avoid those periods of wasted time, to ensure that the results will be there no matter what.




In contrast to the previous point, there are people who are constant for a long time, but still do not have good results, because they settle into practically fixed routines and forget to apply progressive overload.

Progressive overload consists of increasing the intensity of an exercise, set of reps, routine or training as the body adapts to it. It can consist of increasing repetitions, increasing sets, increasing added weight, reducing rest periods, increasing the difficulty of the exercise, or combinations of several of those parameters.

Therefore, if a person does not apply progressive overload, what will happen is that his body will adapt to the routine, and at that point there will be stagnation.

My advice is to keep a record of your workouts, be it a notepad, an excel file on your computer, a notebook or any method that is comfortable for you and check that over the weeks, months and years your routines become more and more intense, so that you can make sure that your body receives the stimulus it needs to continue progressing.


This topic can become much more complex with the use of programming with mesocycles, macrocycles, deloads and so on, but we will leave that for another article in which we will analyze it in depth. On a general level, as long as you make sure that over time you increase the intensity, it will be more than enough so that you do not waste time with your training.





Sometimes we "motivate" ourselves more than necessary and we want to progress as quickly as possible, demanding our body to reach limits for which it is not prepared.

In the previous point we mentioned that you have to progress and increase the intensity, but it has to be in a moderate way, we cannot try to make very large level jumps in a short time. Sometimes, especially when our routine is really adjusted to our level, it may be enough to increase one or two repetitions in one of the exercises so that the training is intense for us and we keep moving forward.

Our muscles and, above all, our connective tissue, need time to adapt. One of the most common cases in which we force more than necessary is when we learn a new movement, such as the muscle up. We are so excited about our new skill that we want to do it every day and in large numbers, which is a mistake and can lead to injury. Our muscles and our connective tissue are not adapted to this new movement, so we must give them time to assimilate it and not make excessive attempts or excessive repetitions.



The same goes for rest days. If you have been training for several days in a row and your body is asking you to rest, do it. If you have been training consistently for several weeks or months and your body is asking you for several days of rest, do it.






Another of the mistakes that you can regret over time is not knowing very well what you want to achieve with your training. Many people train with a rather vague goal like: "I want to be in shape" or they go from one thing to another in their training, one day they train front lever, another day they train hypertrophy, another day they train freestyle tricks, another day they do strength exercises and so on.

For both beginners and people who train casually, this somewhat loose approach is acceptable, but for people who want to get good results it is necessary that they have better defined goals and that they are clear about how they have to distribute their training and their routines in a manner consistent with those objectives.


If you don't know how to distribute your workouts, remember that in the pro version of 

 you have training programs of all kinds, which specify what to train each day to achieve each of the objectives.

5 common mistakes in Calisthenics that slow down your progress

There is a type of routine that is widely used in the world of bodybuilding, especially for biceps curls, known for geterating a great stimulus for muscle growth. We are talking about the method known as “21”.

The 21 basically consists of doing 7 full range repetitions, 7 partial range repetitions at the top of the movement and 7 partial range repetitions at the bottom. In this article we are going to see why this type of training can be interesting and effective for you and how to apply it to different calisthenics exercises.


One of the first feelings that “pops out” when doing this type of routine is the sensation of pumping, the sensation that the muscle is receiving a very intense work and that it is swollen with blood. At a psychological level it is very important and at a physiological level we are making sure that said muscle receives work that will stimulate its growth.

Another benefit of this type of routine is that it can provide you with variety, fun, and a challenge, which can come in handy when you feel monotony in your workouts. Also you will give a different stimulus to the muscle, which is often known as "surprising the muscle."




It is also a positive aspect to work in different areas of the range of motion, as it can help you break plateaus or work weak points of the range, which in the future will help you achieve more repetitions in full range.

In addition, for people who are a little tight on time or need to do a quick but effective routine, it is very useful, since in 20 minutes you can do 3 or 4 series of 21's (or one of its variants that we will see below), even with long breaks.





As we mentioned at the beginning, this type of routine is usually used in bodybuilding with the biceps curl, so perhaps the most direct example in calisthenics would be with chin-ups, we would start in full range, then in the upper half and finally in the lower half.

But it can also be done in all kinds of exercises, for example in dips, push-ups, handstand push-ups, even in triceps extensions if you want more isolated work.

In the muscle up we can divide it by the parts of the movement and do 7 complete repetitions, then 7 bar dips and finally 7 pull-ups.


An important fact to keep in mind is that it does not necessarily have to be with series of 7 reps. The essential thing is that you find it very demanding and intense, but that you can complete it. This means that sometimes, depending on the exercise, you will have to do it with fewer or more reps. 

For example with leg exercises like squats, you may need to do something like 12-12-12 or even more. But for example with difficult exercises like handstand push-ups you can do 5-5-5.

In case you are using added weight you can leave the repetitions fixed and adjust the weight.



In calistheniapp you have some 21 routines, you can use them directly or save and modify them according to your level and needs. I leave you the links below:





Our recommendation would be that you use these types of routines as a boost to give a little variety to your training, or as a way to get a little more intensity on a specific day.

We do not recommend always using them for every training day. It would also be convenient if you add progressive overload, for example if the first day you do 7-7-7 and you manage to do it without problem, the next day you can try to do 8-8-8, try a slightly more difficult exercise, add a series more etc.

Gain muscle with Calisthenics - The 21 method

The holy grail of the fitness world has always been trying to gain muscle mass and lose fat at the same time. When you've been learning about these issues for a while, you realize that the general consensus seems to be that the process to follow is to do a bulking phase, in which you gain muscle mass and also gain fat, and then a cutting phase, in which you lose that fat and also lose some of the muscle mass you gained, but not all of it, resulting in a net increase in muscle.

Another general consensus is that gaining mass and losing fat at the same time is something that only occurs in beginners who are just starting out with training, but it is not possible in people who already have gained muscle and have been training for a long time.

But now comes the interesting part, in recent years, leading voices in the "scientific" fitness community have begun to suggest that perhaps this "body recomposition" is possible even in advanced athletes, if certain guidelines are followed and optimized.



At first it seems that, within the complexity of this body recomposition, it would be easier for people who are losing weight, with a hypocaloric diet. Although with the patterns that we are going to study below you can make a diet that in principle could be normocaloric or slightly hypercaloric and that also produces a drop in fat (without defying the laws of thermodynamics).

In this article we are going to discuss what those factors would be to optimize, whether you are a beginner and want to get the most out of your possible body recomposition, or if you have been training for a while and want to try to achieve it.





Recomposing your body, by definition, requires that your diet be close to the calories your body needs to maintain your current weight. If the diet has too few calories, you will inevitably lose fat and also muscle in different proportions, and if the diet has too many calories, you will inevitably accumulate fat, even though you manage to gain muscle mass.

In case you have a significant excess of fat, you would have to follow a slightly hypocaloric diet, to try to lose that fat, but that the calories are not excessively low so that your muscle does have the possibility of growing.

In case you do not have a significant excess of fat, the idea would be to eat a diet with just the calories your body needs to maintain itself, or slightly higher (about 200 or 300 kcal maximum). In the following guidelines we will see how to try to convert this small excess into muscle mass and not into fat accumulation.

Regarding physical activity you have two options, you can modify the diet for the days you train, adding 100 or 200 more kcal. Or you can make an average between the calories you would need on training days and rest days (taking into account how many days a week you train and how many you rest) and use that average for every day. In the end, in the overall calculation of the weeks or months, the result would be equivalent.

To measure all this and know exactly how many calories you need, we will use calorie measurement tools, such as freely available mobile applications. These types of applications, and even the most serious bibliographical references, can give you reference values taking into account your age, weight, height and so on, but the only way to know the real values for you is trial and error. You should also keep in mind that these values are not fixed forever, but rather they move as your body evolves. If you want more information on how to carry out these measurements and how to manage them as you evolve, I recommend the article on how to do bulking and cutting.





One of the ways to try to "hack" this process of burning fat and gaining muscle is to add ways to burn calories but with a very low intensity exercise that allows the body to use fat as an energy substrate, and not be forced to resort to other substrates.

In reality, your body will always use the different forms of energy, it is not possible that it only uses the fat reserves at 100%. But depending on the type of exercise and the intensity with which we do it, we can encourage it to use one or the other more. Another factor to consider is that the more we encourage the body to burning fat, the more efficient it becomes at doing so, so progress may be slower at first and speed up over time.

What forms of gentle exercise can we use? Mainly walking, light jogging, pedaling, swimming... All of them in such a light way that at no time you notice your heartbeat or breathing accelerated.



Normally the most used resource is to count the steps and make sure you do at least 10,000 daily. This value of 10,000 steps is certainly arbitrary, but in practice it seems to be a good reference.

To count the steps you can use an application on your mobile or a smart watch. Be sure to do these steps, or an equivalent effort in other forms of light cardio, every or most days. In this way there will be synergy between your almost-normo-caloric diet, your training and your cardio.




One of the most important and often underestimated factors in optimizing your training results, muscle mass gain, and fat loss is sleep.

The recommendation that I make is that you try to sleep for a minimum of 7 hours, with an stable schedule that adapts to the natural cycle of day and night. Make sure that your sleep is quality sleep, in a very dark room, without noise or distractions.

As bedtime approaches, avoid bright white or blue-toned lights and try only low-wattage, warm-toned lights. Activate the “night light” or “reading light” option on your phone, which you can program to activate automatically at night.

In addition to tracking sleep, you can also use an application that will analyze your sleep pattern and help you improve it. I personally use a so called “Sleep Cycle”





Our goal of body recomposition is quite complex and difficult to achieve, so it is important that we have control of everything that can benefit us.





After analyzing the highest level natural bodybuilders, it seems that the approach they use the most is to divide the workouts into push-pull-leg training or some slightly modified variant of this type of training. So I recommend you try it for this goal of body recomposition.

Normally we will train more than 3 times a week, I recommend between 4 and 5, so what we will do is rotate these training sessions in turns. You can also give  priority and repeat more times the training that you consider needs more reinforcement or that needs more volume of work, for example, the leg workout is usually a good candidate to have more frequency.

I leave you some examples of routines of each type with Calisthenics:





Another of the "secrets" of natural bodybuilding that have ceased to be so secret in recent years is the issue of water and salt. Traditionally, due to the influence of doped bodybuilding, many people believed that in order to look more shredded and with fuller muscles, without having water retention under the skin, it was convenient to reduce salt and even cut water at certain times.

The problem is that it can be effective when you have external doping substances that allow you to use those resources. But in natural bodybuilding without substances, it is the other way around.

Increasing your water intake and your salt intake will facilitate the accumulation of glycogen and intramuscular water (not subcutaneous) so you will have a more "full" and rounder appearance, among other benefits.




(you don't have to drink salt water, just make sure you drink the amount of water we recommend and add salt to your meals)



The generic recommendation that is usually made to ensure that we are very well hydrated is to drink between 0.6 and 0.8 liters of water for every 10 kilos of weight. Therefore a person of 70 kg. of weight would have to drink between 4 and 5.5 liters of water a day. Another way to check that we are always well hydrated is by the color of the urine, the idea is to try to make it always clear, except for the first one of the day. The recommended amount of salt is usually in a ratio of 0.5 grams of sodium per liter of water, or 1 gram of conventional table salt per liter.

Obviously we recommend consulting to your doctor to see if this is suitable for you, since there are certain pathologies or conditions that may require sodium or water control.





Another of the correct knowledge that, luckily, has become more and more popular is that supplements do not work miracles. The important thing is training and diet, while supplements can give you a little extra in your performance and your results. The point is that for a body recomposition, we do care a lot about that little extra.

Therefore I recommend paying special attention to supplementation, albeit with a simple approach. The supplements that have proven their effectiveness the most and that interest us the most for the purpose of this article are creatine and protein powder.



With the protein you you will ensure that your diet is not deficient in this macronutrient and that you always have reserves available to build muscle. And with creatine, you'll have an almost endless list of benefits, including: improved performance and increased muscle mass.

I leave you links to Prozis where you can buy these products and get a 10% discount plus gifts using the code: YERAI

Protein: 



Another factor that is known to be not the most important, but that can provide us with a small percentage of improvement that in our case interests us a lot, is vitamin D.

Normally it is obtained with some animal foods and with exposure to the sun, although it would be advisable to supplement it to ensure that you have optimal levels.




Vitamin D is very important to have hormonal levels that promote muscle mass gain and fat loss, favoring our testosterone levels to increase.

If you have the option of sunbathing, we recommend that you do it daily, for 15 or 20 minutes. Avoid the strongest hours of sun and use sun protection if you are going to be there longer, have very white skin or are going to sunbathe at mid day. 

If you don't have the option of sunbathing, I'll leave you the Prozis link where you can buy vitamin D3

Vitamin D3: 



Achieving a body recomposition in non-beginners is no longer an unattainable myth, but requires a very precise intervention in which different aspects of our daily routine are optimized. If you have the 7 points that we have explained in this article under control, you will have a much better chance of achieving it.

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18 effective exercises that target shoulder muscles (including a challenge)

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