Meet Terry: The Story Behind Our Calisthenics Documentary

From Coloring Books to Comic Books

Terry has been drawing since he was three years old, and the origin story is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect from someone obsessed with superheroes: he grabbed a pen and scribbled all over the walls. His dad wasn't thrilled, but instead of just telling him to stop, he handed Terry a coloring book the next day. That coloring book was Superman-themed. The second one was Power Rangers.

Those two franchises still show up in his work today. Terry's ongoing comic series, Fusion Fighters, borrows its DNA directly from Power Rangers, Star Wars, and Tron — the shows that shaped his imagination as a kid never really let go.

There's also a family thread running through it. Terry's grandfather, also named Terry, was a well-known art teacher in Ghana. Terry says no one specifically pushed him toward art — it was just instinct. But he's the only artist in his family, and he was named after his grandfather. Everything after that first coloring book was self-taught: watching friends ask him for drawing tips, teaching himself technique, and just drawing every day for the rest of his life.

Finding the Park

Terry moved to Vancouver from Abbotsford in 2022 and wasn't looking for calisthenics at all — he wanted a regular gym. His mom kept telling him about a fitness park near his place, and he brushed it off, figuring it was just a track. He finally walked over one day and saw a stranger doing muscle-ups. That was it.

He walked up and asked the guy, a local named Spence, how he did it. Spence's answer was simple: he just does it. Something about the way he said it stuck with Terry, and he started showing up to the park every day trying to land his own muscle-up.

The second big influence came a little later, at a calisthenics meetup in Kitsilano. Terry showed up feeling confident — he had a muscle-up now, he was "that dude." Then he watched a woman named Jess pull off 360s, shrimp flips, and dragging spins with a level of control he'd never seen. That was the moment dynamic calisthenics — the spinning, flipping bar tricks Terry is known for now — clicked as something he had to learn. He still calls Jess his biggest influence in the sport.

Learning It the Hard Way

Terry's first real skill was the muscle-up, built through a month of practicing high pull-ups and a well-known drill where you step off the ground to help pattern the movement. His second was the handstand — one he says he never fully perfected, mostly because he had to work through a real fear of being upside down. Practicing against a wall got him comfortable enough to eventually try it freestanding.

But the skill that took him the longest, and the one he still drills every single day the weather allows, is the 360: a full spin off the bar where you let go, rotate in the air, and catch it again blind. He describes it as a move the human body has no business wanting to do. Getting there wasn't clean — he's torn a muscle and cracked his back on a bad landing along the way.

What changed things wasn't more strength. It was learning to get out of his own head. Terry talks about the 360 as a skill you can't overthink — the moment he starts consciously trying to control it mid-spin, his nervous system takes over and he bails. His fix now is breath: a deliberate breath right as he grabs the bar, which he treats as a cue to let go of thought entirely and let the movement run on instinct. He compares it to meditation — the less you think, the more the trick actually works.

His current targets are the 540 and Supra 540, with the 720 sitting as the long-term goal once those are locked in.

Why Not the Gym?

Terry used to lift weights, and he's clear that there's nothing wrong with gym culture — but it never felt like his. He remembers dreading the drive there, feeling like he had to force himself through the door. Calisthenics, by contrast, needed almost nothing: a bar, his body weight, and a willingness to show up. No membership, no equipment closet, no pressure to bulk up to fit in.

That pressure was real for him. Terry describes himself as naturally skinny, and says a lot of gym culture pushes a specific look that never matched how his body is built. One moment stuck with him from eighth-grade PE class: in a room full of stronger classmates who could out-bench him easily, he was the only one who could do a pull-up. He reads that as an early sign of where he actually belonged.

There was also a harder period behind the choice. Terry talks about a stretch where he'd lost his job, wasn't eating properly, and was struggling mentally at home. The park — and the people in it — became something he could lean on. Getting through a workout became a way of proving to himself he could get through the day. He credits the community as much as the sport itself: he calls calisthenics far more welcoming than the gym, a place where people cheer each other on and default to teaching rather than gatekeeping.

Where the Art and the Athlete Meet

Fusion Fighters, Terry's ongoing comic, centers on a flawed, risk-taking lead character named Kryos — and Terry doesn't hide that Kryos is basically him on the page. Both, in his words, don't take life too seriously, both have gotten into their share of trouble, and both learn things the hard way rather than being handed them. He sees Kryos as someone with a hidden heroic streak underneath the mistakes, which tracks with how Terry describes his own relationship with risk in dynamic calisthenics: he's not reckless, but he trusts himself enough to attempt things that could genuinely hurt him.

The influence runs both directions. In one of his comics, a group of characters chase Kryos through a sequence of parkour-style movement that Terry drew straight from what he's enviosined at the park — pull-overs and bar work translated frame by frame onto the page. It's a detail he's proud of: as far as he knows, freestyle calisthenics tricks showing up in a comic book panel isn't something he's seen anywhere else.

The superhero through-line goes deeper than aesthetics for him. Terry talks about characters like Batman and Spider-Man as figures who all overcame something before becoming who they were, and he holds onto that framing personally — proof, to him, that hard circumstances don't have to be the end of the story.

Freedom, in the Air

Asked what he actually feels mid-360, Terry doesn't reach for adrenaline first — he reaches for freedom. He describes it as the one feeling he chases over money, status, or anything else: the second he lets go of the bar, he says he's briefly free of thought entirely, just reacting. Landing it, he says, feels like the truest version of himself.

That idea of freedom threads through everything else he told us — the escape the park gave him during a hard stretch of his life, the imaginary worlds he builds in his comics, the heroes he grew up drawing. Different outlets, same instinct: build something he can control, something that's fully his.

Watch the full mini-documentary to see Terry put all of this into motion — 360s, comic pages, and the whole story in his own words.

Full Short-Documentary about Terry