Power Rack Parallel bars

So I’m been making good progress in the pressing section of gymnastic bodies foundations courses and was getting close to Russian dips (search on YouTube if you need to). The problem was my old dip bar set up was just too low for the bottom position of the Russian dip. I could have packed the whole thing up higher but it was also to short for my arms to fit comfortably at the bottom position as well. Obviously the idea would be full size gymnastic parallel bars, but they are clearly cost and space prohibitive. Another good option would have been an outdoor station, but again space is an issue. After some thought, setting up something in a power rack was the best option for me.

Clearly too short (And the camera person is making faces at me)

A much better height (bottom of Russian Dip)

It was a relatively simple build, I needed to cover the spotter arms, to both protect the barbells, and stop them from rolling, and that’s really all that was required.

Made to fit

First step I built the staples to fit over the spotter arms, the timber is all off cuts from work, ripped down to size. The spaces are the same thickness of a barbell (28mm I think), so it was really easy to cut a bunch, and use them for spacing out, while stapling down the others. The whole thing is stapled together with 30mm wood staples, screws would probably work better, but I just banged this together at work with the tools available at hand.

So for Zero cost to me and less than 30 minutes of work I have and adjustable set of parallel bars. They’re not perfect; they are limited in their adjustability in terms of widths and height but they do the job I need them to so I’m really happy with how they came out.

When ‘stress eating’ can be helpful.

Always training hard

What I talk about in this post comes with a lot of caveats and reasons not to do what I’m suggesting. There are many situations where this won’t be appropriate and many people who this won’t be appropriate for; but it did seem to work for me so I thought it would be good to post about.

Let’s start back at the beginning 3 years ago. I was going back to University to study to become a teacher (didn’t work out but that’s a story for another day). The university I got into was over an hour drive away in traffic so I was going to have to get up at 5:30 am (I’m not a morning person) to get to my morning classes, then turn around and drive to work, then study, write assignments or prep for classes in the evening. In short I was going to be long hours with a lot of life stresses: early starts, late night, money trouble, grades etc. All on top for quite a hard training schedule as I was aiming for about 10 hours of training per week.

In thinking about how I would get through this I remembered on one of the Paleo solution podcasts Rob talked about a guy going through BUDS who just ate his way through with sticks of butter. While everyone else was losing weight, this guy put on several pounds which was unheard of during BUDS. This made me think, if I was going through a lot of stress, including stress from my workouts I could just eat my way through it, so that at the very least I could recover from my workouts. So in a way I should be able to mitigate that stress (or at least some of it). It went along with the idea that there is no such thing as over training, just under eating.

Now this is defiantly not a good idea if you have any disordered eating, if you have any past or present eating issues I wouldn’t suggest this. I would include regular stress eating in this category, there is no need to make that situation worse, since I’m suggesting this strategy for when times are really stressful. This also isn’t for competitive athletes or weight class athletes, this suggestion isn’t for you, also don’t get your advice from me, find someone more qualified. Also I’m only suggesting this to people who are training hard, I was pushing 7-10 hours per week of weights, gymnastics and two martial arts at the time. If you do some push ups and pull ups and run 5km in the weekend this isn’t for you. Generally if you have to ask, it’s not for you.

Peanut butter and dark chocolate, a favorite of mine.

Now for the what and how. The idea isn’t to just go off the rails are eat everything because ‘gains’. The goal is to eat just a little above maintenance all the time so that a lack of calories is never part of your life stresses. You should also stick to a paleo/primal type diet and not go off the rails since extra inflammation isn’t going to help matters either. For me I added a protein shake in the morning, and always had something around for an afternoon snack if I needed it (tuna or dark chocolate mostly). I was only adding a few hundred calories per day. Never eating too much but making sure I never went hungry.

The outcome of a year of this was no more than 5kg of weight gain, I don’t know exactly what the weight gain was because I never kept track of it, but it was definitely less than 5kg. I also started squatting and deadlifting that year as was about to build up to a 150kg squat and 200kg deadlift having never done either before. The important thing is that the scale weight doing up wasn’t a problem for me, and getting a little bit softer wasn’t an issue either. Just relax about those, there are more important things to worry about (job, study, life etc).

So after this year I was loosely is a mass gain phase and got up to around 88kg, but after some ups and downs I balanced out fairly naturally at around the 85kg mark. I’m currently keeping at about 80kg, which requires some discipline for me, but nothing extreme.

I would say this is worth considering for up to a year, maybe 18 months, but really not more than that. Any longer is also way to long in such a stressful time. I also wouldn’t suggest doing this yearly with cuts for summer (or competition), unless you have things really dialled in. That’s fine for competitive athletes, with less other life stresses, but throw in all kind of other life stresses as well as cutting and you’re in for a bad time.

My two most used pieces of equipment

I thought this was an interesting idea for a post, and then tried to add up in my head which piece of equipment I used the most (at first I was thinking about just one piece of equipment). I considered number of times per week, and per workout to try and get to the equipment I used the most, as opposed to posting about which I enjoyed the most. So it’s not the barbell, or power rack or even pull up bar.

Once I narrowed down the list I thought I would post two things, one cheap and one a little more expensive. It also worked out well that they aren’t things that often get mentioned but I find super useful. So without further ado:

Foam Mats

I bought two sets of these from Mitre 10 (a big hardware store) for $20 per set of four and it was money very well spent. I have (hard) vinyl floors inside and a concrete floor in my garage/gym so these mats are super versatile for all sorts of movements you don’t really want to do on hard ground.

I use them for all kinds of work, abs and body line drills, knee prep, some wrist prep, stretching etc. I could use a cheap yoga mat but I find these to be quite handy and comfortable. Now before someone goes off about being soft; most of your workout should be about building the body, so there is a time and place for building some tolerance to hard ground when that is the focus. The rest of the time when the focus is elsewhere you should set up your environment to best target that aspect (when you’re working on abs, just work on that, not some mental toughness linked to your lower back skin).

I strongly recommend getting a set, its $20 well spent.

Also as a side note I use these mats a lot when working in my garage on various projects, either to protect them or me from the concrete floor.

I didn't have any photos of my ab work or body line drills, but you can see the mats under the rings as a (thin) safety mat.

Gym boss timer

I bought this long before I had a smart phone, but I still use it now. I paid $80-$90 for it and I consider that a lot of money but I think it was totally worth it. I use it for timing both work sets and rest intervals and find it far better than using a regular stop watch or even my phone.

I’m not trying to sell these so I won’t write an ad for it here, I will say that its small size and being able to clip it to my shirt or shorts is really handy for when I’m moving between equipment, especially when I’m doing handing grip work.

For these I would clip the timer to my shirt

So while there are free alternative available I consider this to be an excellent luxury item for my training.  

Gymnastic training – Overcoming hurdles

I mentioned in my review of Gymnastic bodies that there are some mobility hurdles which can be really difficult to pass; in this post I’ll expand a bit more about what those hurdles are and how to work on them.

I found that in training gymnastics there were some very big hurdles which stopped me in my tracks and forced me to address them; sometimes this can take more than a year. I met these hurdles while using the Gymnastic Bodies courses, but I suspect in any system you use you will hit a hurdle of some kind. The three hurdles I encountered (in order of decreasing difficult) were a lack of mobility, a lack of strength and a lack of movement control.

I think a big part of this is that when doing standard weight training one can just put a little more weight on the bar each week. When you hit a plateau, de-load and work your way up again, or move to a different alternative movement for a while. You can get really strong just chipping away like this with fairly simple methods before you need to get a bit fancier than 3x10 and 5x5.

Gymnastics is quite different, a more difficult movement may require vastly more mobility, a new motor pattern, or you may uncover a weakness you never thought of. I suspect if you have your own coach you could overcome these hurdles a lot faster with individualised training and someone cracking the whip, but when you are on your own if can present quite a challenge.

The fact that these hurdles exist and can hold you up for up to a year or more can seem like a reason to steer clear of gymnastics style training but it should be the opposite. You should search out these hurdles; they expose you at your weakest and if treaded correctly will make you a great deal stronger.

Lack of mobility

Got to get the work in

In both Foundations and Handstand there are sections that I just cannot continue until I gain the required mobility. The strength components are easy, the mobility not so much. As I said in my first post I didn’t utilise the forum and the coaches there, but really these mobility sections just require some really solid work. You have to be consistent and push hard on your mobility but it’s still going to take a long time before you can get moving again.

I have also found there are some stretches I just couldn’t do to begin with. Some had regressions I could use and some didn’t. This left me floundering a little bit until I gained mobility though other stretches, until I was able to get into position to use the stretches I was having trouble with. This can be really frustrating but you have to stay the course, keep working hard and consistently to make progress. I also find that when you can finally do the stretch you previously couldn’t it opens up a huge area for rapid progression which is exciting and vindicates all your effort.

Lack of strength

This one is mostly a lack of strength endurance, which with simple exercises can be really frustrating. I talked about getting past this hurdle in my last post. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year. It’s boring and frustrating but worth doing.

Lack of movement control

Not perfect but not bad

This rears its head when you encounter a movement you have never done before which may require a movement pattern you’re not familiar with. In strength training I have found the movement pattern may not even be complex, just totally novel and it’s enough to stop me in my tracks. For example when I was training Convict Conditioning 2 reached the first levels of the human flag, but I just couldn’t get it. I was strong enough, but I had never held that position isometricly and just couldn’t fire the muscles right. To finally ‘get’ the movement I did negatives. I would jump up above the position, and do my best to control the lowering. This took a month or more, but I was finally able to hold the position. In these circumstances I have found negatives and/or isometrics work well for building some familiarity with the movement pattern in questions, and for me it takes just over a month to finally get the movement before I can start to groove the pattern in.

So those are the areas which I have found to be difficult to overcome in my gymnastics training. They are frustration at the time, but hard work pays off and it makes improving all the sweeter. I’d be interested to know when hurdles you have encountered in your training and what you did or are currently doing to get past them.

Gymnastics – Strength Endurance and more Volume.

I’m going to follow on from my last post reviewing theGymnastic Bodies courses and look at part of the course I struggle with an how I have overcome it/ am currently over coming it.

Something I didn’t explain in my last post was the structure of the training and the method behind it. In foundations each section of a workout is separated into two parts – The strength component e.g. a push up and its integrated mobility component. These are done like a super set with no rest. The idea here is to force the trainee to work on mobility and to test whether they have adequate mobility to continue with the program. Early in each section the reps are quite high (60, 20, 15, 10) depending on the exercise, once these are mastered more difficult exercises move into a lower rep range (10’s and 5’s). The idea behind this is to prepare the joints for the more difficult work. As I said in the last post this strength endurance range is something I really struggle with. Below I’ll outline three different methods I am currently using to get passed the strength endurance phase. The idea for this kind of approach I got from Legendarystrength.com

Extra strength work

This method seems to help me the most in being able to meet the rep requirements of the strength endurance phase. For instance when working on push ups I added bench dips into my workout week. Push ups were on Monday so on Thursday I added sets of bench dips. These were slightly more strength biased, and lower reps (but not too much lower). This allowed me to work a higher strength level, slightly lower rep range to round out my strength and feel stronger when doing my push ups. On another occasion I used a 70kg bench press for sets of ten, which also helped increase my push up strength endurance. The goal is to find a slightly harder exercise for slightly less reps to work on in a second workout each week. I wanted the exercise selection to be similar, but not the same, i.e. not weighted push ups. I think this helps to round out my strength, but I suggest experimenting to find what works best for you.

More volume

This method works well for me, those not quite as well as the extra strength work. I added extra volume in two ways. One is that straight after my prescribed number of reps and sets, I would add one more max set. Often I can only manage an extra 5 or so reps, but it all counts. I find this can assist me in adding 1 more rep to my last work set next week. It’s not much but slow progress is progress.

The other way I add more volume is at the end of my workout after all my planned exercises is to add 3-4 sets or 10-15 reps of whatever exercise I’m struggling with. So currently that means 3-4 sets 10-15 reps of extra decline ring rows. Again this just adds to my total extra volume within a range I can recover from.

Keep doing the basics

This last method doesn’t help with passing a section, but it forces me to maintain it. If I stopped doing the higher rep sets I quickly lose that level of strength endurance so when I have passed a particularly hard section (push ups) I keep it in my weekly workout as a staple. For me that means doing the top rep level of push ups, plus some extra volume every Thursday. This maintains my strength endurance and likely assists my work on my difficult exercises (at the very least is doesn’t harm it).

I have found these methods really helpful with getting over strength endurance roadblocks in the Gymnastic Bodies foundation course but you can also used these ideas in your own training to get a little extra strength endurance work and a little extra volume.