Is Calisthenics the same as Street Workout? What's the difference?

When modern calisthenics first appeared in the early 2000s and began to gain popularity worldwide, from 2011 onwards, it was better known as “Street Workout”.

From the first Ruff Raiders DVDs, Bartendazz's videos and the legendary Hannibal for King YouTube video, what we were seeing was described as “Street Workout”.

The thing is, as this “new” training modality spread, people who understood about fitness realized that what they were actually seeing was “Calisthenics”, a term that had already existed long before and referred to bodyweight training, and they began to use that term as well.

For a few years, until 2014 - 2015, both terms coexisted almost equally in terms of popularity. And the purists said (we said) that there was a difference between these words.

Specifically, we argued that Street Workout was the new sport that had emerged and was setting the trend, with its parks in the streets, muscle ups, flags, front lever, etc. and that Calisthenics was a more general term that simply referred to bodyweight training, such as the physical preparation that a soccer or basketball player could do, or a soldier, without having those very specific characteristics that Street Workout had.

But, despite our efforts to maintain a difference in meaning, the reality is that people began to use both terms interchangeably to refer to the same thing. People said “I train calisthenics,” I said “I make calisthenics videos,” the competitions were “calisthenics competitions” and the athletes were baptized as “calisthenics athletes”

In fact, both in English and Spanish and in the rest of the languages, it turned out that the term “calisthenics” was more comfortable to use, easier to pronounce, faster and more direct than the term “Street Workout”.

If we look at the Google Trends graph we can see that the term “calisthenics” was already used since data collection began back in 2004. From then on, both terms had an equivalent popularity, going hand in hand until 2016, where the name “Street Workout” began to fall into disuse while “Calisthenics” has not stopped growing.

Therefore we can conclude that the terms “Calisthenics” and “Street Workout” initially had certain differences, but over time they were joined to refer to the same thing, until finally the name “Street Workout” fell into disuse and the word “Calisthenics” remained as the predominant term.

By Yerai Alonso