Finally, after lots of work, I’ve finally hit my goal of 10 unbroken muscle-ups. Frankly, I could have hit this goal months ago, but I’ve been busy (which is also the reason for such infrequent updates in the last little while). Unfortunately this feat was attained at home and there were no witnesses. Fortunately, however, I managed to catch it on camera…
Ok – I know I’ve been pointing countless videos of my handstand efforts, but I keep progressing, so I’ll just keep posting.
In an attempt to focus on the following details, I’ve been finding it much easier to maintain balance:
Saw this video linked from Beast Skills. Dominic Lacasse enters the Guinness book of World Records with a 39 second flag hold. Brilliant.
This past weekend I attended a crossfit certification in Toronto at Moss Armory. In all honesty, I really had no idea what to expect, but I was absolutely blown away by the whole experience. I’ve often read in the comments on the crossfit main site from others who’ve raved about crossfit certs and how amazing they’ve been, and through the course of Saturday morning to Sunday evening, I’ve been completely convinced of the same.
I expected getting squashed by a couple of hardcore workouts, so no surprise there, but for some reason, what I didn’t expect was the professionalism of the whole thing and the incredibly high quality of the lectures and teaching.
It was a brilliant weekend and I encourage anyone thinking about attending a crossfit cert to do it – it’s worth every penny and then some.
I’ve been a little under the weather lately. But tonight was the first night in almost a week that I decided to head to the gym and do some weight lifting, avoiding any high intensity work in favour of more strength type training.
To my dismay, I saw more crossfit type functional training at the gym than I’ve seen there in a very long time. It was very nice to see. There were clean and jerks, deadlifts, floor wipers, kettle bell training and other things going on, but a couple guys were also doing the virtual shovelling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXvy9sq5wLs) that came up on the crossfit website just a couple of days ago.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting as the globo gym isn’t known for such training. Honestly – I didn’t see a single curl being done. Seems like they should invest in a few more pullup bars and maybe a couple sets of rings.
The Summer has only a couple days left and while that means shorter and cooler days are looming, it also means that the Fall TV lineup is right around the corner. Personally, I don’t have many favourite TV shows anymore, but as a glutton for super-hero related stuff, I like to set aside space on my PVR specifically for NBC’s Heroes.
Heroes Season 3, “Villains”, begins September 22 and looks sweet as usual. With the season premiere being less than a month away, I thought it prudent to do some Heroes related research to see what king of training the cast actually go through. I came across this video of Hayden Panettiere’s workout at a “training session” in West Hollywood with her trainer :
The biggest problem with these exercises is that when included in a routine as major elements, they’re really just a waste of time. A superior workout, done in a 10th of the time would have simply been something like 50 dumbbell snatches + 50 lunges.
We saw Spurlock’s “Super Size Me” taking on the fast food industry by having the him gorge himself on McDonald’s at least 3 times per day, claiming that if he kept going at his pace, the high fat content would surely kill him. For years, the public has been made to believe that eating fat makes us fat and causes health problems. Now a new documentary, “Fat Head“, by Tom Naughton, is coming out to attempt to use Spurlock’s documentary techniques against him and the rest of the anti-fat community.
Here’s a trailer:
The muscle-ups are coming along. My “training” effort to get 10 in a row has paid off a bit as I’ve more recently been able to get 8 in a row. I think if I were fresh I’d have gotten at least 10.
Anyway, I’ve been concentrating on stricter form and using less of a kip, which is paying dividends in arm strength. I’ve also managed to get a back lever and I’m now working on a front.
The video below demonstrates.
Woke up this morning and decided to capture some parallette “training”. The 20 second l-sit is quite a hurdle to get past. I’m expecting that by mid-July I should be able to hold at least 30 seconds. As far as my handstands on the parallettes are concerned, I continue to have difficulty balancing in a locked out handstand. There were only a couple of attempts that had a somewhat solid balance. Strength wise, however, I’m feeling far more comfortable with the parallettes.
Recently our crossfit classes have been inundated with a bunch of young high school aged guys. I enjoy it – they’re a nice group of kids and fun to work out with. But one thing that has become apparent to me is that at that age, reaching their fitness potential is far easier (and far less limited) than when you’re older (in my case, 30). It took me months to get proficient at pull-ups and a half a year to get comfortable with the muscle up. Just a couple weeks into the program and these guys are hitting muscle ups like a pro. Of course, us older guys tend to be a little heavier (and are thus able to lift a lot heavier too), but these kids are able to pick up the technical stuff with ease.
Now that they can muscle-up on the rings, however, we’ve started a little competition for bragging rights – the first to 10 consecutive muscle-ups. I’m already ahead of them as I can consistently get 5 in a row now, but there’s no doubt that these guys are going to catch up in no time. So it’s pedal to the metal muscle-up time. Goal: 10 solid consecutive muscle-ups. Timeframe: ASAP… Ok, so now what’s the plan??
How can one go from 5 to 10 MU’s in just a couple of weeks? What kind of training would be necessary and is there any way to accelerate the process?
At the very least, I plan on attempting either max MU’s or several smaller sets on a daily basis. This, in itself, would probably get me to my goal, but it would likely also be a longer process. So I’ll need to supplement the training. With pulls and presses being the primary movements involved in a MU, I plan on using dips, pull-ups and seated rows as secondary training exercises. So in short, MU training is going to be every day – MU sets plus 2 days per week of dip\pull training (likely Saturday and Tuesday). This is in addition to my already almost every day workout schedule (albeit mostly fairly short workouts).
Not being very certain of how to best approach my schedule, I’m going to try the following the first week:
M: 5×2 MU
T: 3×8 Weighted Dips 40#, 3×8 180# seated row, max MU attempt
W: 4×3 MU
TH: max MU attempt, 5×1 MU
F: 6×2 MU
SAT: 5×5 40# Weighted PU, max MU attempt
SUN: max MU attempt
As for accelerating the process, I’m toying around with the idea of dropping a few pounds before my final max attempt and additionally working on my kipping technique. We’ll see where I’m at next week.
We recently got our hands full and have been seriously short on “free” time lately. By having our hands full, of course, I mean that we just got two kittens who’ve been having a hard time adjusting to a new environment and each other. They’re cute, but they sure are two little terrors. So between them, work and other misc life things, it’s been difficult getting a bite in to eat, much less have time to workout. But as I was pushin through my 175th squat tonight, I thought to myself, anyone could fit this in.
15 minutes and a bucket of sweat is all it really takes to get in some muscle building, fat busting burn. It may not sound like much, but after 150 or so squats and 40 hand stand pushups it certainly feels enough.
