There’s a boy in a park in São Paulo who can hold a human flag.
Nobody knows. No belt, no certificate, no number. He posts it and gets four hundred views. Somewhere in Manila there’s a girl who has trained on the same rusted bar for three years and can do things most people in a commercial gym have never seen. She has nothing either.
A blue belt in Warsaw means the same as a blue belt in Rio. Swimming has qualifying times. Climbing has grades. Chess has a number that follows you around the world.
Calisthenics has a bar in every park on earth, millions of people pulling on it, and not one of them can tell you how good they are.
That’s the hole. That’s what I’ve spent the last month building into, and this letter is me telling you what it is and why I think it’s worth a hundred days of your life.
Where it started
It started with my dad.
In 2020 he was fifty, he weighed a hundred kilos, and he’d just been told he needed one of those machines to help him breathe at night.
I didn’t say anything about it. You don’t, do you. You don’t sit your father down and tell him you’re worried about how long he’s got, so instead I challenged him to walk a million steps in a hundred days.
I’m not a fitness person. I had no programme to give him and no expertise to offer. What I had was a number and a deadline, which is a polite way of saying I had nothing except a reason.
So we started, and I did it with him. That part matters more than the challenge. I wasn’t setting my father a target and watching from the couch to see if he hit it.
He finished in eighty eight days. Twelve early. Thirteen kilos down. Today he weighs seventy and he doesn’t use the machine.
He has never once let me forget that he finished early.
That’s the whole reason this exists. A number you can check every day, a date it ends, and somebody doing it next to you. Years later I was looking at a commercial place to live in, and half the reason was that you could fit a calisthenics setup in something like that. One of them had a jiu jitsu gym next door, and I’d been walking past it for about three weeks before the thought actually landed.
Is there a ranking system for calisthenics? Like the belts? There isn’t one. Not a small one, not an informal one. Nothing. I spent a fortnight waiting to find the thing I’d obviously overlooked, because a gap that size usually means you’re about to embarrass yourself.
I hadn’t overlooked anything. It just doesn’t exist.
So we built one. Seven colours, six movements, forty two standards. And about a week in I walked straight into the problem underneath the whole thing, which is that a ranking system is a claim about value. It says a muscle up is worth this much and a pistol squat is worth that much.
Who decides that? Because if the answer is me, this is worthless. It’s just my taste with numbers stuck on it.
The ranking system
The six movements are pull, push, legs, core, handstand and lateral. They aren’t my favourites. They’re the six things a complete athlete owns.
Here’s what having six columns exposes. The internet only ever asks you for your best move, so your best move becomes the only thing you train. Nobody ever tells you about the column you’ve been quietly skipping for four years.
You know the one. Everybody’s got one. Mine is core, which is a very funny thing to find out about yourself after you’ve built a system that grades it.
Which brings me to the rule you’ll like least. You’re placed at the highest colour where all six standards are met. Five movements at Maroon and one at Blue makes you Blue. Your rank gets set by the thing you’ve been avoiding.
People argue with this more than anything else and it’s the one I’ll move on least. Anyone can build one impressive skill and hide five weaknesses behind it, and this sport rewards exactly that, because one impressive skill is what films well. The all six rule makes it impossible.
Yes, one lagging column can hold your whole ranking hostage. Yes, I did this to myself. No, I’m not changing it. It’s what makes a white hoodie mean something, because the person wearing it can do six things instead of one. Separate from the colour, you get a score out of 100. The colour says what you’ve finished. The score says how far along you are, and it moves the moment any single movement moves.
The points aren’t my opinion about which skills look coolest. Each rank is worth what it’s worth because of how long that standard takes to earn from scratch. Two months to White, five to Green, ten to Yellow, eighteen to Blue, thirty two to Maroon, fifty to Brown.
I published the time estimates next to the points on purpose. It means the scale isn’t a preference, it’s an estimate, and an estimate is a thing you can be wrong about. If you reckon Maroon takes longer than thirty two months, come and tell me. That’s a conversation about training, not about whether I like your favourite skill.
And none of the progressions are ours. Nobody could invent them. Physics sorted the order out long before anyone wrote it down. You don’t full planche before you tuck planche. All we’ve done is cut a sequence everybody already trains into seven bands and put a colour on each one. It’s the least original part of the whole thing, which is exactly why you can trust it.
Now the bit where I admit something.
I passed the second rank. Then I did a backflip on a trampoline and landed on my shoulders. There’s no version of that sentence that makes me look good, so I’ll leave it there.
I’ve spent the last month fractured, not training, reading everything I could get my hands on and building this instead. I have written detailed standards for a full flag while lying face down on a mattress.
There have been some bad nights in there. You pass a rank, you’re finally moving well, and then you’re on your back for a month watching everyone else train. If you’ve ever lost something you were in the middle of, you’ll know the specific flavour of it. What I got out of it was time, and this is what I did with the time.
I’m not a black belt. I’m not close. I’m a bloke who broke his back on a trampoline and then wrote a mastery system all the way up to a rank he has no idea whether he’ll ever reach.
Here’s how I’ve made peace with it. I’m not selling you mastery, I don’t have it. I’m cleared to train from Day 1, so the hundred days starting on the sixteenth are my first hundred days back. I’m in it, from zero, same as anyone coming back from something. Dad is two ranks ahead of me and getting further away, on a ladder I designed, which is a specific flavour of humiliation I’d recommend to anyone. My brother has never trained like this in his life and starts at White.
Three of us, one family, three different rungs, same hundred days.
I also owe you this, because a few of you got a score from me and then got a different one.
The numbers moved three times. The first scale was too flat. The second squashed the top so badly that an athlete with three Maroons and a Brown tied with an athlete on five Blues. That tie is what told me it was wrong. Not anything I thought about it, just two numbers sitting next to each other that had no business matching. The third is locked. It’s the only one built from training time instead of from how the numbers felt.
I could have published the final version quietly and you’d have been none the wiser. I’d rather you knew it took three goes, because it tells you the thing I want you to know. The numbers answer to something outside my preference.
They don’t move again before Day 100. And if you’ve trained for years and you think one of these standards is pitched wrong, tell me. I mean that properly, not the way people say it and then go quiet.
Built for every park
Here’s the part I care about most, and it isn’t the ranks.
This has to reach everyone or it’s pointless.
Grading a rank costs the same whether you’re in Burleigh or Manila. A video is a video. A standard is a standard. No lease, no equipment, no reason someone in Jakarta or Lagos or Kyiv should have less access to this than someone with a platinum gym card. Calisthenics is the one sport on earth where that’s actually true, because the whole thing runs on a bar in a park and your own body weight.
The biggest calisthenics cultures in the world aren’t in the richest countries. They’re in Brazil, Poland, the Philippines, Ukraine, Indonesia. Places where people train outdoors because that’s what there is, and where some of the best athletes alive are completely unranked, because nobody ever built them a way to be counted.
I want that bloke in São Paulo to hold up a number and have a stranger in Warsaw know exactly what it took. Same six movements, same forty two standards, same verdict, everywhere. A standard that cares where you live or what you can afford isn’t one. Which is why Black isn’t the end.
Ten muscle ups, a full front lever, a straddle planche, a press to handstand. That’s not the top of this sport. That’s the floor for anyone who’d ever stand on a podium.
So Black is where it starts again. Above it the ladder keeps climbing, seven more tiers, gold at the top, same six families the whole way. But single holds run out up there. There isn’t much you can name that’s harder than a straddle planche, so the standards become combinations. Press into it, hold it, come out of it under control.
And I’m not writing those. I’ve got no business deciding what sits above Black when I’ve never been there.
So I’m asking the people who have. If you’re at that level, or you’re a coach who has spent years getting others there, I want you writing this with me. What actually comes after a straddle planche. Where the real jump is. How you’d film it so a stranger could judge it fairly.
Your name goes on it. Not a thank you at the bottom of a page. Whoever writes a standard is credited as its author, permanently, the way the people who wrote the rules of any sport are still named in them. If this lasts thirty years, that’s your name in it in thirty years.
What contribution never does is move your rank. You earn a colour by doing the movements, full stop. The moment rank can be earned any way other than performance, the whole thing is worthless. Authorship is the better recognition anyway. A rank says what you could do. Authorship says what you built.
One more thing I want written down so I can’t pretend later I didn’t know it. Standards spread by being let go of. Nobody owns the belt system, which is exactly why everybody uses it. At some point I’ll have to choose between holding this tightly and letting it become something nobody owns, and universal is worth more. I’d like to be the sort of person who still thinks that when it’s expensive.
Your 100-day book
See exactly what is inside the free Plan Book.
Now, what you actually get.
Everyone who enters gets a hundred day book built for them. Not a template with your name at the top. I take your six colours and your answers, and I write your ladder into a book that covers every one of the hundred days.
Let me tell you what is actually inside it, because I think it is the part people underestimate.
Every session, written out in order. All six movements, every session. A printed target for every set, and a box to tick when you have done it. You never open it and wonder what today is. That sounds small. It is the single most useful thing in the whole document.
The rule for when to move up. This is the question I get more than any other, and almost nobody has an answer to it. People progress at random, or they swap exercises when something gets boring, and then they cannot work out why nothing is moving. So the book decides it for you. Hit the printed number in two sessions and you move on. Miss it and you repeat the week. That is the whole rule. No judgement calls at seven in the morning when you are tired and negotiating with yourself.
Your ladder, drawn out. Six rows, one per movement, so you can see at a glance which column is holding your colour down and exactly what it takes to move it. Most people have never seen their own training laid out like that, and it is usually the page they stare at longest.
Your Day 100 clip list, named on day one. The six videos you will film at the end, written out at the start, so you know from the first session precisely what you are training for. Not a vague better. A number.
A deload week, built in at week thirteen. Adaptation happens in the recovery, not in the session. Most people find that out the hard way in week eleven.
And pages built around whatever you told me. Your equipment, your time, what else you are training, anything that hurts. If you have twenty minutes a day, the book is written for twenty minutes and it says so instead of quietly hoping you find forty. If you have no pull up bar, it is built around not having one. If a knee cannot bend that way, nothing in it asks the knee to bend that way.
Now, how they get made, because I would want to know.
I built a system to do the arithmetic so I could spend my time on the judgement. It works out how long each of your six columns takes to move from where you are, at your training age, and it does that per movement rather than across the board. Those columns do not travel at the same speed. A handstand is balance, which is a nervous system problem, and it answers to short frequent doses. A planche is connective tissue, which answers to months and cannot be hurried by wanting it more. Pacing them identically is how you end up with a plan that looks balanced and is not.
But the useful part is not what the system does. It is what it refuses to do.
It will not prescribe above what you have demonstrated. I found that one because a plan I had written asked a bloke to hold a fourteen second position in week one when his best was ten. He spotted it before I did. Every target in every book now gets capped against what that person has actually shown me.
It will not write around something you have told me you cannot do. If you tell me about an injury, anything in the route that loads it stops the book being built at all, and I have to find another way up. Not a warning in the margin. It does not get written.
And a goal you name has to appear in the sessions, not just in the paragraph about you. I found that one the embarrassing way too. Somebody told me he wanted a muscle up, I wrote him a warm paragraph about his muscle up, and then his plan spent a hundred days never training one.
Those three rules exist because real people found the holes. That is genuinely how this has been built. Somebody reads their book properly, tells me what is wrong with it, and it gets fixed for everyone who comes after them. If you find one, tell me. You would not be the first and I would rather look daft than ship it twice.
Two things the book will not do, and I would rather say them here than have you find out. It will not give you nutrition numbers. There is a page on eating, it is in every book, and there is not a single calorie or gram in it. I am a calisthenics coach. Diets belong to people who are qualified to write them and who can ask you about your health first, and a number from me would carry more weight than it deserves precisely because you would trust it.
And it will not program around a medical condition. If you have one, I will tell you plainly that it is outside what I can give you, ask you to take the book to someone who can, and rebuild it around whatever they say. If a physio contradicts me, they are right and I am wrong.
The last thing about these books is the honesty, and it is the bit I am most attached to.
If something you want is not going to happen in a hundred days, your book says so, on the page, in week one. It does not get softened and it does not get hidden behind encouraging language. What you get instead is four things that are actually true. On Day 100 you will have a filmed number instead of a guess. The work banks either way, because the strength and control you build toward the next standard still count before you pass it. There are three of these a year. And the ladder does not measure everything that will have changed about you.
A plan that tells you what you want to hear is not a plan. It is a sales page with sets in it.
That is a few hours per person and I am doing it for everyone, for free, because a rank without a route to the next one is just a label.
Here’s something I’d tell you even if you never enter. The rest between sets. Sixty to ninety seconds, twenty odd times a session, six days a week, for a hundred days. Hours a month of standing still, and right now every second of it goes to your phone. Put something in there. What the set you just did is actually training. What the next progression looks like. You’ll finish fitter either way, but you can also finish knowing more, and that’s what stops you needing someone like me next year.
And on grading: whoever trains you doesn’t grade you. Mostly that’s you, alone, in a park. Everything gets filmed and reviewed centrally against the same written criteria, and the person who did the work never decides whether it was good enough. If a rank can be given, it’s worth nothing. The pressure to soften that is coming from the first person who pays me and fails, so I’d rather write it down now while it’s easy to mean.
The Michael Jordan card
About the card.
The prizes come out of my own collection. I’ve collected for years, and most of it has spent that whole time in boxes doing nothing. A 1986 Jordan rookie is worth about eleven and a half grand and it has never once made anyone stronger. So it’s going to whoever changes the most in a hundred days, which seems like a better job for it. There’s more where that came from, and it’ll go the same way.
Biggest verified improvement wins. Your verified final CALI100 Score minus your verified baseline CALI100 Score. Not the highest score, because then we’d all know the winner before the thing started, and every beginner would be entering something they could already see they couldn’t win.
It rewards distance travelled. Which means the people with the most room to travel are the ones starting with the least. If you’re below White in a movement right now, you’re not behind. You’ve got more available to you than anybody.
The other half of that, said plainly: if you’re already advanced, this prize isn’t really aimed at you. The gaps at the top are years wide and a hundred days of excellent training might not move your number at all. That’s not a flaw in your training, that’s what the top of a ladder looks like. It’s also the thing I most want to fix next version, and I’d rather tell you now than have you find out on Christmas Eve.
Why 100 days
So why a hundred days, and not thirty, and not a year?
Thirty day challenges are the easiest thing in the world to start. That is the problem with them. Thirty days ends at almost exactly the point where the excitement of starting runs out, so you finish right when it was about to get interesting, and nothing has had time to become anything.
A year is the opposite problem. A year is too far away to begin. You cannot see the end of it from where you are standing, so it never quite starts.
A hundred days sits in between, and it is the only window I have found where both halves work. It is long enough for repetition to do its job. It is close enough that you can see the finish from Day 1.
What that length actually buys you is time to learn movements instead of rushing them. Time to build strength in the order the body builds it. Time to spend on the column you have been avoiding for four years, which is the one that decides your colour. Time to recover properly between sessions and time to change the plan when something is not working. And the whole way through, a score that moves the moment any single movement moves, so you are never guessing whether it is working.
Why calisthenics
So why calisthenics?
Because it measures what you can do with your own body, and there is nothing else in the sentence. No load on a bar, no machine, no number that belongs to the equipment rather than to you. You pull yourself up, you push yourself away, you stand on one leg, you brace your own midline, you hold yourself upside down, you hold yourself sideways. That is the whole sport. Calisthenics is the only training I’ve found where getting better means getting lighter, more mobile and more controlled instead of just heavier. You’re not adding load to a bar. You’re becoming the thing that moves.
It’s also free and it’s everywhere. No membership, no commute, no waiting for a rack. A floor and a bar.
And it holds up. Pull yourself up, hold yourself up, stand on one leg, brace your own midline. That’s not gym vanity, that’s the difference between the version of you at seventy who’s independent and the one who isn’t. My dad is fifty five now and moving better than he did at forty five.
The other thing worth saying is that none of this belongs only to advanced people. Your first proper push up counts. Your first pull up counts. Holding your own bodyweight off the ground for the first time counts. There is always another progression above you, and there is always a rung underneath you that somebody is working toward right now.
I’ll tell you what I want out of it personally, since I’ve asked you for a hundred days.
I’m thirty. I’d like to be black by the time I’m forty. Not for the hoodie. Because I want to still be moving properly at forty, and at fifty, and a long way past that, and I’ve watched closely enough to know that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you kept doing something for years.
That’s not a business plan. That’s the actual reason. I wanted something to follow for the next ten years, I couldn’t find one, so I built it. This first hundred days is me starting it.
Here’s the part that took me too long to learn.
Nothing about this is intense. There’s no session that changes you. It’s boring on purpose, six days a week, mostly small numbers, mostly things you can nearly already do. The change doesn’t come from any one of them. It comes from having done eighty six.
And that is the real argument for a written plan, more than any feature I have listed. People do not stop because the training was too hard. They stop because they ran out of decisions. Week six, standing in front of a bar, working out what today is and whether it is the day to try the next thing, is where it quietly ends for most people. A book removes every one of those decisions before you get there. It was already decided, months ago, on a day when you were not tired.
Week two is willpower. Week six is habit. Somewhere around week ten it stops being a thing you’re doing and becomes a thing you are, and that’s the transfer that actually matters, because the person who trained a hundred straight days is different at work, with their kids, and at two in the afternoon when the day has gone badly. YOU’LL GET A RANK OUT OF THIS. THE RANK IS JUST THE RECEIPT.
How the challenge works
Right, the actual thing. Here is how it runs.
It starts on the sixteenth of September and finishes on the twenty fourth of December. It is free to enter.
By Day 7, everyone privately sends CALI100 their Day 1 photos, a screenshot of their Find My Rank score card and the information needed to prepare their plan. Weight is not collected. Baseline grading video is only required if you want to compete for the Michael Jordan skill prize.
Then you train your plan. To complete the public challenge, post one movement video to your Instagram Story in at least twelve of the fourteen challenge weeks and tag @cali100.hq. Each weekly window runs from Monday to 11.59pm Saturday AEST. Nobody is counting likes.
Between the fourteenth and the twenty fourth of December, you send your Day 100 photos and final grading footage. I review every clip against the same written criteria.
What you get for finishing is a verified colour, a verified score and proof of the distance between where you started and where you ended. Public entrants who meet the published Rank Pack requirements also earn their official hoodie and numbered singlet.
There is a hundred dollars every week, drawn at random from everyone with a valid public weekly submission. One entry per person each week. It is not a popularity contest and it never will be.
Everyone who completes the public challenge receives one entry into the grand prize draw. The winner chooses the 1928 $100 Gold Certificate or A$4,450 cash.
And the biggest verified improvement wins the card.
Start with someone
Last thing.
You’ve probably got a version of my dad in your life. Someone who’d do this if somebody asked them and did it with them. Ask them. The format works because two people commit at once. Fair warning though, they might beat you, and you’ll hear about it for the rest of your life.
My dad didn’t lose thirty kilos in 2020. He walked. Every day, for eighty eight days, at fifty, carrying a hundred kilos. The thirty kilos was just what turned up at the end. That’s the only secret in any of this. There’s no version where you feel ready first. You start unready and you become the person who did it on the way through.
So wherever you’re sitting right now, whatever you weigh, whatever you can’t do yet, however long it’s been since you last tried, there’s a rung on this thing with your name on it. That’s the entire reason there are seven of them instead of one. You don’t have to be good at this to start. You have to be in it on the sixteenth.
A first pull up at fifty is worth every bit as much as a muscle up at twenty five. I’d argue more, because you had further to come.
A hundred days from now you’ll have a number, a colour and proof. Or you’ll be exactly where you are today, which is also a choice, just a quieter one.
I’D RATHER SEE YOU ON THE BARS.