Training Status Update 5 - The Fruit Of Labour

 

The Handstand Push Up

It's now been ten weeks since I began training the handstand push up and progress is fairly steady. Each session lasts one hour so I allow plenty of rest (five to six minutes) between sets. I kick up into handstand where my spotter holds me in position and counts reps as I do the push ups. He checks for proper straight backed form and disregards bad reps.

I began just doing them on the floor so that the bottom of the rep is where my head touches the ground. In the last few weeks I've extended the range of motion (ROM) by raising my hands. On this basis, I measure increased ROM in the admittedly dubious unit of "Childrens Encyclopedia Britannica" whereby +2 corresponds to 2 books beneath my hands. This raising of the hands extends the range of motion by giving the head longer to travel before the ground stops it.

I now begin each session with a normal set on the ground and then proceed to do the following nine sets with increased ROM. When I am able to do ten repetitions with 2 books, I will add another 2 books and continue with the same pattern.

Thanks to this training I am now able to push up into handstand without a spot in a variety of different positions. I still can't do three consecutive reps though which is the criteria for ticking it off my list.

The Handstand Straddle Press

This one is pretty much in the bag, I will post a video shortly. I can usually do it when I'm fresh now but need to fine tune the techique.

The Iron Cross

Just practising regularly on the rings to condition the elbows. It's feeling more stable each session.This one is going to continue to take a while.  

Back-swing into Handstand

I've recently been playing around on the parallel bars on days where my elbows need a rest from the rings. I recently managed to achieve the back-swing into handstand in the gym. Yesterday, I found myself training a friend at the outdoor training area in Primrose Hill, London and thought I'd attempt it on the P-bars there.

I expected to be intimidated to go up into handstand without being completely surrounded by crash mats as I've become accustomed to... in fact it felt completely natural.

Sorry about the video quality, it was taken on a phone.

The Handstand

I've been practicing the handstand solidly for a while now and am making slow but steady progress.

The basics of the position are relatively easy to learn but it feels like one of those things that take a lifetime to master.

I found one site particularly useful in building up the basic posture and body positioning. Jim Balhurst's Beast Skills is a site jam packed full of tutorials for a variety of bodyweight feats including the One armed pull up, the front lever, the human flag, the true one handed push up and of course the handstand. All tutorials have gradual progressions to build towards your goal and are illustrated with colour photographs.

While I've been learning, I've also tried my hand at teaching a few others how to handstand. It is through this and my own practice that I've put together some fundamental points in holding a handstand. Note: Many of these are already mentioned in the sites above but as they are extremely common mistakes I feel it's worth stressing the point.

Tips to an improved handstand


1) Use a shoulder Width hand placement: One of the things I've noticed is that people -especially men with built shoulders due to the reduced flexibility- seem to like to place their hands quite wide apart from each other. Before I started practicing them regularly, this is how I was doing it too.

The first time that I placed my hands at the relatively narrow shoulder width, I was shocked at how much easier holding the handstand felt. I believe the reason for this is that your centre of gravity follows a much straighter line with the hands tucked in by the ears. Widen your hand placement too far and you'll find holding the handstand significantly harder. The problem is that a wider grip feels more natural to most people. If your shoulder flexibility is limiting you, try Shoulder dislocates which will improve your ability to hold a handstand with a shoulder width hand placement.

 
2) Good posture is paramount: There's more value in a five second handstand with good posture than a ten second handstand maintained by walking on your hands, bending elbows and piking hips. Focus always on attaining balance, not greater time spent on your hands.

• Open out your shoulders - Push the ground away from you and pull your shoulders right back behind your ears.
• Keep your elbows locked straight - You can rescue a failing handstand by bending your elbows but this can easily become a bad habit and will only impede your progress.
  
• The head must remain neutral - remain looking at hands rather than in front of you as this may cause your back to arch.
• Keep your core and lower back tensed - Some conditioning for each may be required if you're constantly bending at this point which is common.
  
• Tuck your hips - I never understood what people meant when they said this. The best way to explain it is to tense your glutes as tightly as possible. I also imagine that I'm pushing the sky away from me with my legs. This keeps your hips in line with your back.
• Legs must stay together - Accomplished hand balancers can split their legs and maintain balance but as a beginner, it will only make it harder to hold.
• Point your toes - I always forget this. I feel like it helps me maintain a straight body position when I do it though.
• Walking is cheating - If you're trying to hold a static handstand but you're walking on your hands to balance, you're failing. I trained myself out of this one by handstanding on a low wall. On a wall, the last thing your mind will let you do is walk.   

WARNING: Make sure your pirouette from handstand is good and that you're confident doing it from an elevated platform before trying the wall handstand. For gods sake, don't try to forward roll out of a handstand on a wall... I'm told it hurts.

Time spent working on good posture is an investment and will yield far greater returns.


3) Practice on different surfaces: Until just recently, I had worked exclusively on hard floors like concrete, wood and even my tiled kitchen floor. It made me feel pretty good when people commented on how good my "head" must be to handstand on hard surfaces and so I continued doing so, blissfully ignorant of my developing over-specialisation.

However; every time I ended up hand balancing in a park on some grass, my handstands failed after a fraction of the time whilst those who feared concrete would outshine me. Each time I told myself that it was just a bad session and would subconsciously avoid uneven surfaces like grass as much as possible. I've finally started practicing on grass and hills etc. and have made enormous improvements. The only way to master the handstand is to develop proficiency in a variety of situations.

Hard surfaces help with posture and quickly teach you how to pirouette, uneven surfaces give you a greater versatility of balance and a better understanding of the handstand. You may also find that harder surfaces are more responsive to adjustments made through the fingers as they don't yield like softer surfaces do.

Practice everywhere!

4) Video yourself: Record yourself balancing as often as possible. Not only will you be able to monitor your progress, you'll be able to better analyse why your handstands are failing and how best to improve them. 

In fact; if you send me a link to a video of yourself in a handstand, I'd be happy to give you my opinion.


5) Feel it: No this one isn't a space filler. The most important method of improvement for me -greater even than a video- has been a gradual improvement in my physical understanding of what makes a handstand work. Knowing why your handstand failed by actually feeling it will help you better apply the correct technique in future. Try to literally feel each part of your body while you're inverted and build up a mental map of the relative positions of each component during your successful attempts. Spend some time focused on specific body areas and actions (like pointing the toes) and remember how it felt so that you can bring it all together later.

This takes time but will eventually teach you to rescue a failing handstand by altering your body position.

Finally, never let yourself believe that your handstand is perfect, there are always ways in which you can improve it. As soon as you let yourself believe that you have mastered something, you close yourself off to further learning.

On that note, if you can offer any recommendations on how I could improve my own handstand -see video- I would gladly hear them!

Training Status Update 4 - Five Weeks In

Just over a month ago, I set myself three goals in which I want to focus. Here is my progress thus far. In the diagram below, the numbers represent repetitions per set of HeSPU and reps in which my back arched were not added to the total. Volume is the reps per session:

Full Range Handstand Push Up (HSPU)


My goal here was to go back to basics and practice the Headstand Push Up (HePU) with very strict form until I was able to complete ten reps. From there my goal would be to increase the range of motion (by raising the hands progressively on books) until I'm able to perform the HSPU.

Note: A HeSPU is a push up from handstand with the hands on the ground while the HSPU is the same thing on parallets so that you can go much deeper. The latter is many times harder.

 I have only been doing one session a week and became injured between the 7th and 18th of May but the volume increase has been high. I aim to reach ten reps in a couple of sessions.

Handstand Straddle Press

I actually managed to do this a few times over the last month but still lack consistency. I've been working on the eccentric (negative) version in order to build up control and progress is almost as steady as the handstand push up.

Iron Cross

With the two week injury of my shoulder, (falling off the parallel bars while swinging back into handstand) I've made stagnant progress in the Iron Cross. I'm feeling more motivated than ever to achieve it though and have a few new techniques to try out so watch this space.

Miscellaneous

I'm learning the back handspring and managed to get it on the sprung floor with a spotter and on the soft mats without one. Tumbling's never been my strength but now I'm spending much more time doing gymnastics and feel it's time to remedy this.

Training Status Update 3 - Three Simple Goals

So, I've been back from Borneo for one month now and have made the single biggest change to my training in seven years... I've stopped climbing.

Simply put, I've had far too many active goals for too long. By "active" I mean goals which I am currently training for. As well as the goals on my list, many climbing oriented goals began finding their way into my program e.g 1-5-9 on the campus board. Combined with a busy competition season, my irregular gymnastics training was reduced to a weekly session for which I was already fatigued.

The problem with too many active goals is that your body soon suffers from overtraining. Sessions on fatigued muscles contribute nothing to your strength training goals and result in a lower training volume and lower training effect than training on fresh muscles.

To prevent stagnation, I decided to focus on just two items from my list and one item that I believe to be a necessary stepping stone to achieve the planche. They are:

1) The Iron Cross (back to training with a vengeance)

2) The Full range Handstand Push Up

3) The Handstand Straddle Lift

The Iron Cross, I've been working for a while and will continue to do so. I aim to reach my previously highest level within one more month. 

The full range handstand push up itself is not on the list but will translate to the easier free-standing variant nicely. Finally; the handstand straddle lift has been a side goal I've been working for a while without much progress. Incidentally, after a month of focused training, I achieved it yesterday. (Sloppily).

I will continue to improve upon it and will post a video in the next few weeks. I recently managed a one minute handstand too.

Short Cuts, Quick Fixes and Natural Talent

If you've browsed the web in the last year or so -and I imagine that in reading this blog then you probably have- you'll no doubt have encountered several prevalent ads selling highly questionable panaceas to problems such as obesity and yellow teeth.

The very fact that such scam ads have successfully permeated such a great extent of the internet is shameful but it's not the subject on which I'm writing today. What I'm interested in is the source of our obsession with short cuts and cure alls when most of us know deep down that such methods will fail.

Take the web page in the screenshot to the right as an example. I've seen the ad that links to this page plastered all over the internet; in forums and in otherwise respectable blogs (often within the google adsense widget).
Now whoever is behind this "blog" claims that you will become "ripped in just 30 days" without ever going to the gym and through only taking a cheap acai berry product. This is a preposterous claim. How can anyone believe that someone can lose as much weight as is claimed on this site and pack on muscle through only eating an extract from an over hyped "super-food" berry?.. but they do.


Forget the internet, take a look at the world around you. Our entire culture has become saturated with shortcuts. Instead of eating healthily we opt for weight loss supplements or surgery, intense detox programs or fad diets. Rather than practice our skills in a new sport or pursuit, we purchase advanced equipment unsuitable for our current skill levels in an effort to boost effectiveness. You'll see people using buses to travel one or two stops and our meals have sacrificed flavour, texture and nutrition in favour of convenience.


Our tools have developed to make us increasingly passive (I just used spell check to alter a typo for which I knew the spelling), computers, machinery and modern vehicles make us intolerant of the increased time required to undertake tasks manually. Food can now be delivered straight from the supermarket and we can access all but the most elusive items online.


All of this is reflected in our expectations. We expect to see instant results and quick progress in everything we turn our hand to. I've seen many people avoid starting to learn something they find difficult, citing their "obvious lack of natural talent" as reason not to begin a difficult but fulfilling pursuit. I believe that natural talent only offers a head start or at times the differentiation between top athletes. Those of us not aiming for the Olympics can overlook the need for natural talent in favour of dedication and practice. I've seen many a gifted climber be overtaken by a more enthusiastic learner who had started at a lesser level.



Few of the quick fixes we opt for work and those that do often fail to fix the underlying problem, allowing history to repeat itself later. Someone who undergoes liposuction without altering their diet and lifestyle will find the weight pile back on.
 
Right now we live in a world where there are few shortcuts to a good, happy and healthy life. Our relationships cannot be perfected by five simple rules and we cannot master the violin, any sport or any subject with just one book. Our lives will be riddled with twice as much failure as success and we will work long and hard for the smallest of results. If we're aware of this from the beginning, our lives may not feel easy but at least we will tackle life's difficulties head on and with the appropriate attitude of responsibility and perseverance. If ever this changes and the world becomes a place in which one can take a magic pill to drop weight and bulk up -all within a month- we'll have lost one of the most important mechanisms for the development of the human race, our capacity to learn, to adapt, to develop.

Training Status Update 2 - Bouldering Competitions 2009-2010

After an unexpected win in a bouldering competition in early October 2009, I changed the focus of my training to bouldering related strength and away from the items on my list.

For those of you who don't know, bouldering is a form of rock climbing which focuses on powerful, technical moves but trades in the rope and harness for a relatively small wall and a crash mat. Most boulder "problems" as we call them, are 5 metres tall at the most.

Having dominated my training focus for nearly five months, I thought that it would be relevant to post my results in the comps in this update. The last competition ended today and this post will function as a record of the season.

Most of the competitions work in the same way. You have between 15 and 25 boulder problems to climb within the time constraints of the competition. If you climb a problem on the first attempt (on-sight) you get ten points. A second attempt gets you seven points and a third attempt gives you three or four points (depending on each comps rules). Any successful climbs after three attempts yield the competitor a single point.

If a competition has a maximum score of 200 points for example, it will have twenty boulder problems.

The four comps can be seen in the diagram above. The "King of the Mez" competition at The Castle and "The Southern Indoor Bouldering League" (which was held at six different venues) were both league type comps. King of the Mez had four rounds and The SIBL had six. The "East Versus West" competition had two rounds. Finally I entered the first round of The Works climbing walls indoor bouldering league in Sheffield.

I thoroughly enjoyed this competition season and am happy with my results. Therefore I've decided to enter the British Bouldering Championships in June.

Congratulations to Bodley Zhang who won the SIBL and Grzegorz Karolak who won The King Of the Mez. I learnt a good deal in competeing against them and the many others this year.