Bodyweight Calisthenics "Starting Strength?"

After spending some time in the high rep, light "weight" world I start to get worried that I will lose the fundamentals, the strength gotten from well-executed dips, squats, pushups and pullups.  So I go back.  Variety is good.  Yesterday I decided to go back in a big way.  What if I executed the reps on the Big Four (pushups, pullups, squats and dips) so well and so slowly that I could only do 5 reps?  Then I might have a bodyweight calisthenics version of Starting Strength, a very influential approach to strength building that touts barbells and four main compound exercises (bench press, deadlift, squat and one olympic movement that involves a shoulder press, not sure what it's called) done in sets with heavy enough weight that you can only do 5 reps.

I decided to go with slow and strict rather than trying to increase the "weight" by leaning or doing one side at a time because I want to keep to the fundamentals and wanted to feel the effect. Again, time under tension will have plenty to say about the benefits of this.

So I did 5x5 of slow dips, pullups, squats and pushups.  The squats and pushups I had to really slow down to make them difficult enough to only get 5.  In all cases I purposely did not lock out so I could keep the tension on the muscles.  For dips and pullups I went as slowly as I could and paused at the apex of the movement and then did an even slower negative.  For the last rep I did the longest negative I could.  Pushups and squats were very slow, especially squats.  Each set of squats probably took 20 - 30 seconds.  I did all of this in superset "rounds" and pushups were last, so I was already pretty fatigued pushing-wise and didn't have to slow them down quite as much as squats.  And I did them Russian.

This is a fun workout because it's intense and it doesn't take long.  Somehow that's much less daunting to me than high volume.  After I felt very spent and shaky, which is a good thing.  Today I'm a bit sore, which I haven't felt in a while.

I'm planning to keep this approach in two ways.  First, I will come back to it and do 5x5 days.  Second, in pyramid days I will make sure my "heaviest" set is a slow set.

Putting it all together.