Remember when you saw those anime characters executing incredible feats of strength, gravity-defying jumps, or impossible exercises? Ever watched anime and thought, “Can I do that move in real life?” We did too! In this article, we look at 15 exercises from popular animes & mangas and ranked them from easy to straight-up impossible. Want to know if these exercises can be fun to try? Keep reading! If they sound hard, don’t worry – we’ll show you some ways to practice them.
What you will learn in this article:
Anime Exercises: From Easy to Impossible!
Easy Anime Exercises
Squats
The Squat is one of the most natural and comprehensive movements the human body is capable of. Squatting is a lower body dominant movement, but you’ll also need some of the upper body muscles to stabilize your spine.
Squatting deep also requires some mobility and flexibility that many people, especially in the western world, lost. The good news is: you can always regain this ability through consistent training and by simply including deep squat movement patterns into your daily life. Besides this aspect, Squats are relatively easy when done with your own bodyweight, so it should be no problem to do them, even if you’re not working out regularly.
Sit Ups
Sit-ups are a classic, old-fashioned exercise but have a bad reputation because they are often done wrong. To do it right. Reduce the momentum as much as possible and don’t pull your neck with your hands.
If you want to train your abs in the first place without involving the hip flexors too much it’s still better to focus on different variations of crunches instead.
Medium Anime Exercises
Push Ups
This movement is considered a basics to effective workout routines. It’s simple yet effective.
Push-ups also target many muscles at once but mostly work your chest, triceps and shoulders while your core has to stabilize your body at the same time.
If you can’t do any push ups yet, just start by doing them on your knees or do incline push ups until you get stronger.
Hard Anime Exercises
Clapping Push Ups
This exercise is mostly about explosive strength and requires a good push up performance in the first place. So you need enough strength to be able to push yourself high enough from the ground not only to do the clap but also to move your arms back to the starting position. Proper joint control is also very important so that you don’t smash into your joints and stabilize your body on the way down.
To learn this exercise yourself, improve your basic push up count to 15 reps and start practicing hand release push ups to work on that explosive strength.
Push Ups With Just One Arm
One Arm Push Ups are more than twice as hard as the regular ones and require way more core strength and stability, especially when done with strict form.
If you can’t do this exercise by now try easier progressions like archer push ups or incline one arm push ups first.
Robe Climb
The rope climb requires you to release one hand from the rope to hold yourself with the other one. So, for this short moment you have to hold your complete bodyweight with just one arm. If you’re doing it with straight legs in an L-Hang it even gets harder because you need more mobility as well as abdominal strength to stabilize this position.
If you can’t do the legless rope climb by now, try some of the easier progressions first and improve your performance over time.
Very Hard Anime Exercises
Handstand Push Ups
Wall supported Hand Push Ups are already no piece of cake but doing them freely skyrockets the difficulty drastically. So, you not only need a lot of shoulder strength to push your complete bodyweight up and down, but you also need good hand balancing skills to stabilize your body the whole time.
To learn this move build the basic strength first with pike push ups and of course work on your free handstand balancing skills as well.
Weighted Push Ups
Push Ups with a 20kg weight vest are already not that easy, but imagine how hard it is to do it with another person on top. Of course the difficulty varies a bit depending on the body weight of the person you’re pushing up and down. But even if this person is a lightweight, it is still pretty challenging.
If you wanna try this exercise start practicing with a weight vest or try easier versions of the partner push up with that you don’t have to move the complete bodyweight.
One Arm Pull Up
This exercise requires an immense amount of relative strength because you’re pulling your complete body weight with just one arm.
To be able to do that you first have to master regular pull ups to a point that you can do them with ease. After that it becomes very important to work on your max strength with more advanced exercises like Typewriter Pull Ups or Archer Pull Ups.
Bent Arm Planche to L-Sit
This exercise mixes shoulder with core strength and lower body mobility.
The bent arm planche is often mistaken for the elbow lever, because they look very similar on the first view. In both exercises, you hold your body in a horizontal position, but the bent arm planche is much harder because your elbows are beside the body. While you support yourself on them in the elbow lever.
When it comes to the L-Sit you need decent straight leg quad strength and mobility in your hips. The hardest part of this move is the fluid transition between these 2 elements and this gets even harder the closer you are to the ground, especially if you have short arms. If you want to start practicing this exercise, start on parallettes with a decent height and break down the movement into easier progressions.
Baki Pose
This move requires good wrist stability, shoulder strength, balance and some mobility. Alex, recently learned this pose and he always started every set by twisting his upper body and holding it for preparation. This relaxes the muscles around the spine and allowed him to reach deeper with the elbow. Also, you should hold it with a more straightened arm which, needs a little more core strength, but is easier for balance.
The hardest part of the baki pose is to find the proper body position and the right center of gravity. In the beginning he always felt towards his shoulder, and it took him some time to balance himself correctly.
If you never tried this move before, we suggest starting with an easier progression and simultaneously work on your wrist stability as well as spine and hip mobility.
Baki Pose With Crossed Legs
This move could also be in the hard category, but what makes it so difficult is holding it on your thumbs. This kind of finger strength requires very specific training and also comes with a high risk of Injury. If you’re doing it on your hands or fists it is way easier but still not a beginner exercise.
To be able to do it you need good hip mobility straight arm shoulder strength and some balance. To build the foundation for this move start with practicing the frog stand and switch to the tucked planche later.
Of course it’s also important to work on your hip mobility to be able to cross your legs.
Baki Wall Split
Talking about mobility, the Baki Wall Split is the next exercise and looks like a mix of a front and side split. The major difference is that you need to take the position actively. So, you have to kick up your leg against the wall and then move into the split. This needs more active mobility than on the ground because your weight pushes you less down.
This move is beneficial for martial arts and you can learn it or support your progress by working with exercises like the horse stance, the lunge to kneeling pistol, hurdle sit switches, hip pendulum kicks, the pancake or the pancake side switch.
Impossible Anime Exercises
One Arm (or One Finger) Handstand Push Up
This take is a bit controversial, but we’ve seen no one until now that is actually able to do a clean free one arm handstand pushup. Yeah, if you’re performing it with a very limited range of motion like in Hunter X Hunter or use other ways for compensation it’s doable, but a real Free One Arm Handstand Push Up is out of the question.
Of course, this move gets even more unrealistic when it’s done with just one finger or on your thumb.
Sword Practise of Guts and Zorro
Guts’ sword called the dragon slayer has an estimated weight of about 300 pounds and let’s not even talk about the weight that zorro is moving in his training. To get an idea how hard this actually is, try some sword swings (20 kg or nearly 45 pounds) with a regular barbell without any kind of additional weight.
If you grab the barbell with both hands on the further end the difficulty skyrockets and it gets extremely hard to even just lift it up in the air.
Yujiro Hanmas Swim Practise
In the Anime, Yujiro Hanma swims for a whole hour with an estimated speed of 20 kmh. To put this into perspective, no human that ever lived was able hit a top speed of more than 10 kmh. This means that Yujiro is not only swimming twice as fast as the best olympic swimmers, he also maintains this speed for 1 hour straight.
How to start your training today?
Alright everyone, that wraps up today’s Ranking of Anime Exercises from Easy to Impossible! If you enjoyed what you read and are ready to start mastering this anime exercises, don’t forget to stay tune for our new articles coming or visit our blog for more topics about calisthenics. Also, this ensures you stay updated with all our latest routines. Looking for a comprehensive workout plan rooted in scientific research? We’ve got you covered. Dive into our specialized courses like Complete Calisthenics, Body Transformation, and the Mobility Program. Whether you’re aiming to bulk up, enhance mobility, boost strength, or master calisthenics techniques, we have the perfect program tailored for you. Ready to elevate your fitness journey? Head over to Calimove.com and select the program that aligns with your aspirations and current abilities. Join the movement!
Watch the video How hard are Anime exercises in real life?
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