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GASSVILLE — An affable, coffee-loving, Baxter County man has racked up millions of followers on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook by teaching people calisthenics, and being really nice about it.
Hampton Liu, 28, is the founder of the fitness media company Hybrid Calisthenics and the creator of such videos as “You CAN Do Pushups, My Friend,” “You CAN Do Pullups, My Friend,” “How to Do More Pushups,” “Lower Back Pain Stretches,” “Supertuck Jump: Tutorial” and others that highlight his inclusive, low-key approach to building long-term fitness by using bodyweight exercises.
Through his videos, many of which were recorded on the deck of his home with a mug of coffee never too far away, Liu walks viewers through basic calisthenics, and if even the basics are too hard, well, no prob. He breaks down even easier variations that can be used to progress.
In “You CAN Do Deep Squats, My Friend,” he starts by showing first how to use resistance bands to do lying squats, then moves on to jackknife squats, assisted squats, chair squats, quarter squats or half squats and finally deep squats. The video, which was originally posted Feb. 4, 2021, and has more than 650,000 views, includes goals for sets and repetitions before moving on to the next variation.
Can’t do a regular pushup? Start with pushups against a wall, or do air pushups, Liu says. After all, he notes, people don’t start out bench-pressing 200 pounds. They work their way up using lighter weights first. It’s the same with calisthenics, and there should be no embarrassment or intimidation in that. It’s your journey, and maybe a wall pushup is the first step.
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Liu’s approach is all about accessibility. There is no gym membership or expensive equipment required. He doesn’t even wear fitness-guy clothes, often opting for jeans, a tank-top and flip-flops when demonstrating exercises.
In “What the Fitness Industry Doesn’t Understand,” an April 27 article for theatlantic.com about how beginner-level exercisers are often ignored, reporter Amanda Mull wrote: “If you tried to imagine the perfect gym teacher, you’d probably come up with someone a lot like Hampton Liu. He’s a gentle, friendly guy who spends most of his time trying to figure out how to make the basics of exercise more approachable, and he talks frequently about how he never wants anyone to feel shame for their ability or skill level.”
Rex Tullis holds a black belt in karate and is a friend of the Liu family.
“What you see in his videos is quite literally the Hampton you meet in person,” he says. “It’s not a facade, that is his genuine nature. He’s a quiet, polite kid who is extremely observant and intelligent.”
Earlier this month, at hybridcalisthenics.com, Liu introduced the newest version his full body fitness routine. Like all of his content, it’s free.
“I’ve always thought of myself as a servant of the community,” he says on a sunny May afternoon at Momentum Coffee, one of his favorite hangouts. “I don’t really need a business card, but if I did, I would want it to say ‘Hampton Liu, Hybrid Calisthenics: Servant.'”
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Liu is the only child of Clifford and Lilian Liu, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. They owned the Blossom Cafe in Mountain Home, which is pretty much where Liu grew up.
“It was a very immigrant kind of lifestyle, where kids are expected to work as well,” he says. “I can really say it was a blessing.”
Clifford, who now owns the Center for Integrative Medicine in Mountain Home, taught tai chi, a form of martial arts, and qigong, which integrates posture, movement and other elements to improve mental and physical health.
For Liu, growing up around martial arts, with its focus on bodyweight exercises and training, was an introduction to calisthenics.
“I was always a really active kid. When I was 17, I started doing pushups regularly and then I wanted to do a whole-body routine because I didn’t want to have muscle imbalances.”
He never attended high school. On the first day of winter break during his eighth-grade year, his mother had a stroke and Liu left school to work in the restaurant full time. Each year, he would take a state-mandated scholastic aptitude test and, when he was 17, scored high enough on the GED to earn a full scholarship to Arkansas State University-Mountain Home. From there, he went to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and graduated with a degree in international business.
In 2018, Liu was helping his father manage the integrative medicine center and started a Hybrid Calisthenics blog to write about fitness. During that year Lilian had another stroke, this one even more severe.
“She wasn’t able to walk or talk,” Liu says.
While caring for his mom, he was absorbing fitness media and started making videos of his own in late 2019, posting to Facebook and later on YouTube.
“At first, it was going to be about natural health, similar to what my father talks about, but eventually someone said I should restart Hybrid Calisthenics.”
In April 2020, Lilian died. The time Liu spent with her in the last two years of her life “were very transformative for me,” he says. “I haven’t really found out how to phrase it, but taking care of my mother is a big part of Hybrid Calisthenics. The peace, the vibe I give off, is from that time. You have to learn how to be at peace with yourself when you are doing that.”
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Liu was in the process of becoming a certified personal trainer when we spoke. He credits “Convict Conditioning,” the book by Paul Wade, as an inspiration for Hybrid Calisthenics.
“It’s one of the reasons calisthenics is as popular as it is now,” he says. “That’s where I got a lot of the exercises, and that’s where I got introduced to the idea of progressive calisthenics. The idea was that you can take any exercise and break it into a family of different exercises that go from very easy to very difficult.”
His early videos were made with friends in mind, which is why many start with some variation of the greeting, “Hello, my friend. It’s your brother, Hampton … .”
He had never been really active on social media but learned more about it and was encouraged by his then-girlfriend, Delrose (they got married in September). Liu’s content dovetailed with demand from people looking for fitness options as the pandemic kept them at home.
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His approach to content creation embraces simplicity. While his videos are of good quality, there is also a homemade feel to them that fits in with Liu’s egalitarian approach. He films outside because the light is better, talks to the camera while demonstrating exercises and often pokes fun at himself. His chickens have also been known to make an appearance in videos.
“I want to work with what I have,” he says. “I never really liked the idea of: ‘If only I had this, then I could do this.'”
His most popular video, “You CAN Do Pushups, My Friend,” which he says has been seen across the internet more than 100 million times, was shot in 2020 on his old Galaxy S8 smartphone.
“I was so new to this stuff, I used the front camera,” he laughs. “It wasn’t even the back camera, which is higher quality.”
Though content creation is his bread and butter, he has learned to slow down a bit.
“It’s a risky thing to lower the volume that you produce,” he says. “But I started to be more conscious of the fact that millions of people are going to see this and I want to put out the best possible information that I can.”
Jackie Brown owns Spintronix, a studio for colorguard performers in Mountain View, Mo., and is friends with Liu.
“I’ve been doing social media since 2010,” she says. “My channels started getting traction in 2014-2015. When he was first getting into it, I was actually giving him tips. And now his channels are way beyond anything I ever dreamed of getting.”
She even appeared in an April 1 Hybrid Calisthenics video as a stand-in, tea-drinking spoof of Liu.
Along with workout videos, Liu makes nonfitness content in which he speaks about subjects like loneliness, depression, reducing stress, tips for content creators and finding motivation. He also addresses some of these matters on the Hybrid Calisthenics/Coffee With Hampton podcast.
Brown has seen Liu develop as a content creator in a short time. “When he was first starting, one of the things we talked about was how he was a little apprehensive about being vulnerable. Seeing him be comfortable with opening up with all of those things has been really rewarding. The internet can be an awful place, and we need more people like him.”
Not that the occasional mean comment is going to bother Liu.
“I love bad comments,” he says. “It gives me the opportunity to judo them with kindness.”
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Liu is making a living at this thing, by the way, and even has two employees, but he is doing so on his own terms. He earns money through YouTube-generated ads and from selling merchandise like exercise rings and Hybrid Calisthenics gear.
He could probably rake in even more by selling his calisthenics routine, but he’s not interested.
“The idea is to make fitness accessible to everyone, where they can start regardless of their fitness level,” he says. “One of the most common reasons people don’t get into fitness is that they don’t know what do to. Here, I’m showing you what to do — and it’s free.”
He also doesn’t take sponsorships, at least not yet. If Liu likes a product enough to talk about it or endorse it in a video, he just does it for free, which goes back to his feelings on service.
“Authenticity still applies,” he says. “People pay you with views, with their time, and you have a responsibility to be authentic — content and businesswise — and to be about service to other people.”
Pondering the future of Hybrid Calisthenics, Liu says: “The goal right now is to offer a very good fitness app, because some people need that. At some point, I might consider the idea of training other trainers to become certified in Hybrid Calisthenics, but that’s a couple of years out, at least.”
There’s also a plan to build a free course for content creators similar to the free fitness routine.
“That’s something I get asked about a lot,” he says.
Tullis says Liu “is the perfect example of someone who is willing to follow their passion, learn about it in great detail and freely share what they have learned. That’s a beautiful combination. Hampton wasn’t planning on being one of the biggest fitness streamers in Arkansas, that was just him doing what he loved and sharing it with his friends, and it just went crazy.”
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