As of 4th February 2021, Guinness World Records (GWR) has added a new page to its already enormous book of records, and it is about the Largest Calisthenics Park in the world.
According to GWR, “the largest calisthenics park is located in Doha, Qatar, and it measures up to 1446.72 m2 (15572 ft2 67 in2).” The development of the park was achieved by the National Service Academy in Qatar, with the devoted contribution of two important people: Abdelrahman Hamdi, widely known as Atto Hamdy former Track and Field national champion in Qatar, alongside Mahmoud Darwish the founder of Calisthenics parks in Qatar.
But before we delve into the story of how Atto Hamdy and Darwish were able to: sketch, establish, contribute to the development of the largest calisthenics park in the world, as well as becoming direct witnesses of the GWR official attempt. First, we must understand the term calisthenics and its significant in the sport field.
What is Calisthenics?
Exercises that use only the weight of your body as resistance are known as calisthenics. The word calisthenics itself originated from a combination of two Greek words: ‘Kalo’ which means beauty, and ‘Sthenos’ which means strength. The high resistance sport has rose into prominence since the 19th century. It was promoted by the “Father of Gymnastics” Fredrich Ludwig John.
John believed that calisthenics, gymnastics and bodyweight exercises were the perfect embodiment of beauty and strength. The goal of performing exercises that rely on resistance training is it to promote muscle growth and strength without the use of external weights and equipment.
The great thing about calisthenics exercises is that it is absolutely free. All you need for these exercises is the ground you walk on and a park with bars. The only time you might spend any money is if you prefer to buy supporting equipment such as suspension systems or gymnastic rings.
How Effective Can Calisthenics Be?
Strength-wise, calisthenics is as effective as lifting weights at the gym. However, in order to understand this, we must understand how our muscles grow and get stronger.
Muscular and strength adaptation occur when a stimulus such as weight is applied to a corresponding muscle. To ultimately make a muscle change its shape by growing larger, you need to use certain intensity or resistance to invoke a muscle overload.
Simply put, the more weight you move with your muscles, the more your muscles can adapt to a more toned shape that is bigger and stronger.
However, this does not necessarily mean that any type of weight movement will work for you. Take jogging for example, although it can be very taxing on the heart muscle and promotes cardiac muscle growth, it will not promote significant skeletal muscle growth, not even in your legs. This is because there is not strong enough stimuli or resistance to target those muscles. For this reason, jogging is not considered a calisthenics exercise.
On the contrary, other calisthenics exercises illicit high enough of a demand to hit the large muscle fibers which promotes growth and strength equally. Take pull-ups as an example, where on average, people can hardly even do five pull-ups.
This is because the movement in a pull-up demands all fiber types in the body to get highly stimulated and then exhausted, hence promoting muscle growth.
So, calisthenics exercise is a type of workout that uses a person’s body weight with little to no equipment. In fact, one can consider all bodyweight workouts that do not rely on external weights, instead it uses the weight of a person’s body itself as a source of resistance and momentum.
Calisthenics parks are designed especially for this type of training. The workouts usually include strength-related equipment like pull-up bars, parallel bars, monkey bars, and box jumps at the same location. The reason for the calisthenics popularity is because the public can perform these exercises no matter where they stand on athletic ability.
Largest Calisthenics in the World
A few months ago, the largest calisthenics park ever was officially established. It all started with a small idea, it was when Atto Hamdy was contacted by Qatar’s National Service Academy in hopes to develop a training facility for soldiers in Doha.
Due to his vast knowledge about sports and bodybuilding, Atto Hamdy was asked to come up with a sketch of a facility that would be fit for high and low intensity training, otherwise kwon as HIIT and LIIT interval training.
Atto Hamdy immediately thought of calisthenics. He then contacted his friend Darwish, who is the founder of calisthenics in Qatar, and together they came up with the sketch that will later on act as the main blueprint of the site-on-ground.
Upon approval from the authorized accommodations, Atto Hamdy and Darwish contacted a construction company called Intelligent Design and handed them the blueprints to start constructing the park, and implementing their once small idea into a bigger reality.
Within 3 – 4 years, the facility was completely developed and it stood over a whooping 1446.72 m2 squared of land.
Guinness World Record and Official Attempt
How did this precisely happen? It all started after General Saeed Ahmed Al-Noaimi noticed that the park was massive in comparisons with other calisthenics parks that he has visited across the world.
The Park was built on a huge piece of land, which is why it was only natural for him to want to confirm his deduction and have the land become certified by the GWR. After some time and research, Al-Noaimi found that the Qatari park was indeed the biggest one there is.
However, due to COVID-19 pandemic GWR could not gather a verification team and send them to Qatar. Al-Noaimi was advised of GWR verification process.
Naturally, Al-Noaimi reached out GWR in order to make an official attempt to register the calisthenics park. He then notified Atto Hamdy and Darwish of the possibility of becoming witnesses in this historical event due to them having specific qualifications set by the GWR, as well as at least a decade-long of experiences, each in their respective field.
He has asked Atto Hamdy and Darwish to become part of the team of reliable witnesses that are responsible to confirm the status and measurements of the calisthenics park, as well as confirm that the park is fit to hold national and international calisthenics tournaments and if it could be safely used by the public.
After submitting the essential documents to GWR, including background, personal information, documented achievements and experience, and oaths, Atto Hamdy was requested to go to the field in person. On the site, he was asked to witness the process of measurement while it was getting documented on film for approximately 2-hours straight.
The entire facility’s ground was captured on video. The witnesses were then asked to give verbal and written statements on what they saw during the official attempt. Yet, despite it being a long and exhausting task, Atto Hamdy was excited to complete it as best as he could, saying that he was “driven by the love of the country, sports and success”.
Finally, upon Atto Hamdy’s request, the official record was then submitted to GWR on the 9th of February 2021, as a celebration of the National Sports Day in Qatar.
By Lubna Hassan Amin