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.

Training Status Update 1

OK, so I haven't posted in quite some time now. I think all but the most gifted blogger -and I don't presume to be among their ranks- comes up against the quality/frequency hurdle. On one hand, you want to post regularly, weekly, even daily if possible. On the other, you want every post to be of such remarkable quality, brimming with well ordered, structured content so as to separate it from the hordes of useless tripe and advertising multiplying on the internet daily.

That having been said, I now have more time to dedicate towards writing articles on here, having been distracted by the soon to be over climbing competition season and a new business involving teaching strength and conditioning techniques to climbers.

So I have reached a compromise. I will write a Training Status Update once a month detailing my progress with The Challenge and training in general. These will be accessible through the links on the right hand side of the page.

2009 Training Summary


I began training the Iron Cross and Front Lever at the beginning of January 2009. Using the rings training aid until July and combining it with pure rings sessions after that to prepare the elbow joints for the load (the ring training aid removes stress from the elbows thus failing to train them). I was making steady progress until winter hit, along with a busy climbing competition season and seasonal apathy.

Despite this, the two month rest appears to have improved my attempts at the cross. While I can't lift as much on the training aid, I've actually improved on the pure rings! I've put this down to the elbows having undergone conditioning and then a recovery period. Elbow pain was becoming more regular in October and stopping training was probably the best option.

The Front Lever was getting close at around the same time but I have experienced a loss of strength with it now due to the rest. I believe that the strength will return quicker than it originally took to gain.

I also achieved the Dragon Flag which I can now do pretty easily.

A good year and one that will probably begin to yield results by mid 2010 assuming continued training with that renewed new year vigour.

The Dragon Flag

I recently achieved the Dragon Flag which is item nine on my list. I've left it a couple of weeks to Iron out the glitches in technique and form before posting this video.

The Dragon Flag was first developed by Bruce Lee who performed it as part of a gruelling daily core training routine which included, allegedly, a thirty minute V-sit hold! It was later seen in Rocky 4 during the Russian training montage.


There is a lot of debate as to the "proper form" of the Dragon Flag with many believing that a curved body is cheating and others believing it to be correct form. Coach Christopher Sommer agrees with the latter; he states that dragon flags "are performed with an arch throughout the back which makes their performance significantly easier". He calls the straight form variation (above) the Body Lever.


I personally find it easier to label them all under the title "Dragon Flag" and to aspire always to progress towards the most difficult variant. From here I will begin practising the Dragon Flag off the edge of a bench so that my body can go below the horizontal and then perhaps with added weight.

Note: If your reader does not support video, you can find the video here.

The Importance of Setting Relevant Goals

                       The legendary Wolfgang Gullich on Action Directe 9a  

Setting goals is an excellent way to push ourselves beyond our current limits. Measuring progress is made significantly easier when you have an end point to measure against and it facilitates the direction of our mental energy towards achieving a single quantifiable objective.

That being said, we often use goals inefficiently; confusing them with the more romantically appealing but ultimately less practical "dream". The Oxford English dictionary defines a dream as "a cherished ambition or ideal; a fantasy". What relevance to our physical and mental expansion can a fantasy have? I would expect very little.

For example, I regularly meet young climbers who are fairly new to the sport (a year or two of experience) who when asked what their goals are will reel off a list of cutting edge classics such as Wolfgang Gullich's Action Directe (The worlds first 9a climb) and Parthian Shot E9 6c!. When asked what they are currently climbing they respond sheepishly with the beginner-intermediate grade expected from a climber of their experience. Now before anyone crucifies me for elitism or some other such offence, I'd like to make it clear that I'm no grade snob. I don't think the unlikely dream of one day climbing Action Directe shouldn't be held by an aspiring young climber -on the contrary- it just cannot be justified as a reasonable goal and therefore will often waste attention.

In directing our goals at the cutting edge, we often fail to pay the necessary attention to the relevant goals that are only just beyond our capabilities. An intermediate climber who on-sights 6c is far better off focusing their energy on on-sighting 7a than on dreaming of 9a. Just as a young Traceur who has recently learnt to Kong vault would benefit more from consolidating this relatively basic move before attempting it at height or in combination with other moves.


A goal should be:
1) easily measured
2) aimed at building on our weaknesses as well as our strengths
3) just beyond our current accepted capabilities; the next logical step

The first is obvious. We can't ever achieve a goal that we can't measure. Less evidently; people tend to lose motivation if they don't have a certain degree of perceived progress. You may be improving but it's important to find a way to measure that progress to keep up morale.

The second is very important as in whatever we do, our abilities and skills are always limited by the weakest link in the chain. A strong overhang climber who neglects slabs will be hindered by this weakness when climbing on Welsh slate. Additionally, the footwork skills learnt on slabs will directly improve the climbers overhang skills.

The third point is the main one of my argument. In my opinion, the most valuable lessons are always learned in the area just outside of our comfort zone. Stay within that zone and your development will stagnate. Push too far beyond it and you may get caught up in dreams of grandeur and lose sight of the valuable lessons close at hand. Learning advanced lessons are often dependant -completely or in part- upon the lessons learned at a lower level. Attempt to progress too quickly and you may stagnate once more. The lessons just outside our comfort zone are the ones most relevant to us, the ones most easily learned and the quickest route towards achieving those dreams.

A personal experience from the Gymnastics Rings showed me the importance of building up basic strength in the support position and with ring dips before training towards harder moves like the Muscle up and Iron Cross. After months of training these simple manoeuvres, I attempted the muscle up on the rings and was pleased to find it come quite easily. Friends of mine who attempt to skip straight to the Muscle up often lose motivation due to their slow progress in developing the strength far more easily achieved through the basics. For more information see my Muscle Up guide).

•A Traceur is someone who practises Parkour/Free-running meaning literally "tracer bullet".

• To on-sight a climb is to ascend it on the first attempt without knowing of the moves involved.