Plainclothesmanperson: Noun. A police officer, especially a detective, who wears civilian clothes when on duty. And so I declare the Plainclothes Athlete to be one who wears regular clothes while exercising. Put another way, perhaps one who does not need to change clothes to exercise.
Calisthenics is the perfect form of exercise. (I’m not biased.) Calisthenics was “invented” by the Greeks several thousand years ago. They named it, developed it, and perfected it, as they did with most things worth knowing, doing and having. Kalli (good, beautiful) sthenos (strength). And they definitely used it to their advantage in times of battle. Callisthenes was the Greek historian who accompanied Alexander the Great on his compaign. The Spartans used it. Modern Greeks are reviving it. But everyone who moves their bodies in space and time reinvents calisthenics and knows what it is even without knowing its history. When you run, when you climb stairs, when you crawl, when you get up off the ground, when you climb a tree, when you squat, you are doing calisthenics. When you systematically practice the movement patterns underlying these activities as a way to get stronger, more flexible, more mobile, and healthier, you are a calisthenics practitioner. An athlete.
If you really think about it, athletes wear funny clothes. I play baseball, I know this.
Uniforms show group membership and may have originally offered some kind of strategic advantage, but for a solitary sport, they are not necessary. Yet many people, even people who do not consider themselves “professional” or “serious”, would not consider running without skimpy running shorts or biking without a spandex Mr. America costume and click-in shoes that you can’t walk in. For many people, if not most people, the uniform has to accompany the activity, no matter how much of a novice we are at that activity. In fact, sport uniform is now nearly inseparable from everyday dress. Oh, Athliesure! (If I’m being honest I really wouldn’t mind never seeing another pair of yoga pants again. Ever.)
There’s nothing wrong with group membership, and if the spandex sausage casing makes you feel like you are part of a group and motivates you to ride a bike, then more power to you. My problem is that it has become synonymous with bike riding and has set the standard for the activity. But this kind of dress goes with a very specific kind of biking – racing. The point is to go as fast as possible, safety and comfort be damned. Racing bikes are small, light, expensive, uncomfortable, delicate, and impractical. The very opposite of what a bike should be, in my opinion. Again, if racing is your thing, fine, but racing is NOT why most people ride bikes and why most people SHOULD ride bikes, and so it should not be the default format for biking. Yet, Google the word or go to the bike store and most things you see will be related to racing, whether it be on mountains or roads.
My preferred form of exercise is body-weight calisthenics done in micro-workout fashion (pun intended). This means whenever possible, all day long. It requires no uniforms, no equipment, no memberships, no travel, no large expenditures of time, and no real planning. If I had to change clothes for this, I’d be changing clothes three to ten times a day. And if I had to change clothes to do it, I probably wouldn’t do it.
Giant
Here are some pictures of some of my favorite calisthenics athletes, in uniform.
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time learning more about Hassan Yasin. He is the founder of a movement called Giant Bartendaz. He is Giant. They are a world-wide community and a social movement. Below is a recent Instagram post of Giant at the gym in strict uniform doing his highly orthodox, by-the-book routine. 😉 Note that this is not a young man, and yet he seems to float above the bar…
The motto of the Bartendaz is “health is wealth, movement is medicine.” The pull up is the central movement but it is also a metaphor for pulling oneself up to a better life. Aside from the fact that there really isn’t a more important message to be found anywhere, the Bartendaz do exercise in a whole new way. They don’t focus on sets and rep schemes and routines and body-part splits and hypertrophy and all that other stuff that we become so obsessed with at the expense of the big picture and what’s really important. Rather they focus on form, on creativity, on mastering the movements. To the Bartendaz, calisthenics is life. It’s strength-building but it’s also inner-strength-building. We don’t care about the size of your bicep, we care about the size of your character. And so we do not say that we have succeeded because we can do 20 strict pull-ups. We say that we have succeeded because we have mastered the bar, we can do things now that we could not do before and we can create moves that no one else has ever done. And we have inspired others. And how do we conquer the bar? We practice and we grip the bar and we pull and we move and we improvise and we get SO good at pull-ups that they become like breathing. The bar is integrated into our every day. There is no uniform for this.
Do me a favor. Get up from where you are sitting right now and do a set of push ups. Really feel it, don’t worry about how many reps, just feel it. Change your hand position a little mid-set, keep going. Do it until it feels natural. I bet you could do this all day long. Oh, and by the way, what are you wearing? Guess what? You are a plainclothes athlete.
Form Is Everything 
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