Athlete uses calisthenics to elevate fitness
Wyatt Elias shows his fitness level hanging off a bridge. Photos submitted
By Tom Victoria
Wyatt Elias is reaching a peak fitness level without hitting the gym. He uses calisthenics to heighten strength, balance and physique.
“It's definitely a fun sport and I surprise myself every day,” he said.
Wyatt, 21, of Washington State enjoys being able to do his workouts almost anywhere since calisthenics exercises mainly uses one’s own body weight.
“I've done weightlifting in the past, but it was for sports,” he said. “It was always a pain to either go to the gym or somewhere else to start the workout. And making it that much easier to start the workout has just been the best part for me.”
Wyatt employs what’s at hand if he’s out and about.
“If I see a bench or something that looks cool, I'll try some stuff on it,” he said. “I definitely look at random items and be like, I could do handstand push-ups off that.”
Wyatt can also be seen walking on his hands.
“I made a video of that actually,” he said. “I was driving past the campus and I was like, you know what, let's just record here. It was raining and I like the rain. It was just a mood I was in.”
Wyatt is working while he saves up enough to resume his education.
“I did two years of college and I have my transfer degree now,” he said. “I got my two-year. That was the cheap part. And now the four-year, I have to build up a little bit more money before I get into that.”
Wyatt’s career path is technology oriented.
“Computer science, so coding for the most part,” he said. “It's gotten a lot more competitive since I first had an interest in it. It's quite a bit harder to find a job for it now than it used to be. AI does take the jobs. It makes coding easier, so it's like in the art world, how when AI started to be able to make art, it made it more difficult to find jobs for that. Well, AI can also code. You can design one that can just code for you.”
“I started at the beginning … posting calisthenics. It's not even really comparable how much I've grown because I did YouTube and stuff before, but it was just gaming videos. But my channel has really blown and I just made a full switch over to fitness.”
Wyatt prefers calisthenics to traditional gym exercises as it can be done almost anywhere.
However, Wyatt made the distinction between the technology that exists now and fictional AI as portrayed in such examples as the Terminator movie franchise.
“So there's not an actual intelligent being,” he said. “It's more like a chatbot where it thinks of a word that will come next. It recognizes patterns really, really well. And it's like, what should I put next? And it asked that over and over again.”
Some autocorrect programs for writing often make erroneous assumptions. Wyatt attributed that propensity to lack of information fed to the program.
“What's cool about AI, though, is you could actually train it to be better at that job, too,” he said. “You could just implement more common phrases into it and it would recognize them. It recognizes patterns and if it hasn't seen that pattern before, it just won't do anything with it. Any AI bot that we interact with right now, it's not actively learning as we're talking to it.”
Wyatt explained the real leap in technology will come when AI doesn’t need coding to adapt.
“They program it, they give it a bunch of info and then they send it out to the public,” he said. “It's already coded. It's not going to learn anymore. As soon as it starts learning as we're interacting with it, that's when it's going to be crazy. There's so much less control over it that way. And it's kind of scary in that way because we can't determine how it will become. It's also exciting. The possibilities are going to be really cool with AI.”
“I hope to make a community that would be able to follow me. That's why I try to make my videos more like interactions, show more of me than anything else. It's a personal level than just look at this guy who's strong.”
Wyatt improves his strength, flexibility and coordination through calisthenics.
Wyatt chose the career to be a problem-solver.
“It's the challenge and the feeling you get whenever you solve the challenge,” he said. “You can struggle for an hour straight just trying to figure out what's wrong with it, fix something, make something work. And when you get everything to work how you want, it's just such a nice feeling. It's like the a-ha moment. I just built my own computer. The thrill you get from that is just so much. You press the power button and it turns on and then you code it and it works.”
Wyatt’s athletic background included grappling.
“The main one was wrestling,” he said. “I wrestled for almost 10 years. Wrestled in college, too. It was actually the year I stopped wrestling is when I started doing calisthenics. I was like, man, I need to do something.”
Wyatt said wrestlers tend to learn to be humble.
“It's just you and your opponent,” he said. “If you mess up, there's no one else to blame. I bet wrestlers are the best at self-improvement because you can't blame stuff on other people. You realize that you did something wrong and instead of blaming, you're just like, how can I fix this? Wrestling is something that you can never perfect, but we're always in pursuit of it. There's never perfecting wrestling. There's always more you can learn.”
Wyatt is a state champion in the sport.
“I won state my senior year,” he said. “I took first for my senior year. That was the first year I was able to compete at state for one reason or another.”
Wyatt quit wrestling for a loved one.
“Because of my fiancee at the time and now wife,” he said. “I wanted to spend more time with her. My biggest supporter. I'm very lucky to have found someone so soon.”
Wyatt was inspired by another athlete to try calisthenics.
“It was another wrestler,” he said. “His name's also Wyatt. He's bigger, too. He's 175, which is a bit bigger for calisthenics. It's not huge or anything, but it's definitely more weight than what's normal. He would do backflips at practice. And I was like, man, I want to be able to do stuff like that.”
Wyatt, who hasn’t ruled out doing content creation full-time, isn’t aiming for his social media followers to obtain something in particular from viewing his posts.
“I don't really have a goal for that,” he said. “I started at the beginning of this year (2025) posting calisthenics. It's not even really comparable how much I've grown because I did YouTube and stuff before, but it was just gaming videos. But my channel has really blown and I just made a full switch over to fitness.”
Wyatt does want to continue to expand his reach.
“I hope to make a community that would be able to follow me,” he said. “That's why I try to make my videos more like interactions, show more of me than anything else. It's a personal level than just look at this guy who's strong.”
“That's the most important part. If you're setting yourself goals that are not obtainable, you're going to get burnt out and hate it.”
Wyatt is bemused by some folks thinking he’s on a stringent diet to help maintain his fitness level.
“I saw this joke on TikTok at one point where it's like when you go to Thanksgiving and everyone's making fun of you for calorie counting,” he said. “And then it happens to me. I'm like, oh my gosh, no, I'm not counting. I'm not cutting. I don't have to watch what I eat like that. I eat normal. I eat the same stuff I did before I did the fitness stuff.”
Wyatt stays motivated to work out.
“It can be hard for sure,” he said. “One thing was make it easier to start the workout, so I don't have to drive somewhere that's 15 minutes away. That alone can make it more difficult. And the other thing is just finding a reason to do it. I was doing my series every day. I would post a video every single day. And that was my motivation. If I'm not working out, I'm not posting anything.”
Wyatt dispensed advice to anyone wishing to start doing calisthenics.
“Set realistic goals,” he said. “That's the most important part. If you're setting yourself goals that are not obtainable, you're going to get burnt out and hate it. But if you just take what you're able to do, whether it's just five push-ups, that's fine. Make a realistic goal of making that 10 by next week. That can be realistic. And then you just continue making those small goals and you reach something crazy.”
Wyatt’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlew4x4/
Wyatt’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@littlew1687