Thursday, April 9, 2009

2009/04/09 - Day 6: High intensity

Today's session felt like pretty hard work even though it seems pretty simple on paper. I felt particularly smoked after the gymnastics oriented strength work which is why Flowfit only got 10 minutes of my time today. The session looked like this:

Kettlebells:

OAJ (16kg): 2 minutes: 12/12

Snatch (16kg): 2 minutes: 16/16

OAJ (24kg): 2 minutes: 12/12

Snatch (24kg): 2 minutes: 12/12

Gymnastics strength work:

Tuck front lever (my version): 10 x 6 seconds

Ring support hold: 10 x 6 seconds

Pull ups: 3 x 3

Rocca (feet on box) 3 x 3

Flowfit: 1 x 10 minute round


The objective with the tuck front lever is to eventually get into a full tuck position with the back parallel to the floor. This of course while hanging either from rings or a bar. The whole process starts from a basic hang followed by lifting the knees and hips up and forward while "leaning" the shoulders back. At this point in time my attempt looks more like a hanging knee lift but I am starting to get a bit of a lean and my hips are moving a bit higher and more to the front than on the first day I started this. The ring support was OK today and I managed to keep my body pretty upright and my toes didn't have to go down to the floor for some assistance like they did on the first day.

The pull ups are still a pain - I have always struggled with these and I'm still doing them with a bit of a jump at the start. I am however trying to make the negatives as slow as possible. For those not familiar with the Rocca the basic version looks very much like a downward facing dog posture from yoga. The difference is that you raise on your toes and then do a push up. This posture allows a push-up to become more like a military press than a bench press. The version I did paves the way towards hand stand or head stand push ups. It is performed by placing the feet on a box and then walking the hands in as close to the box a possible. The closer the hands to the box the more inverted the push up position becomes. I was pretty happy with my efforts today. Maybe I will one day master the hand stand push-up after all. We'll see what happens.

2 comments:

Howie B said...

Ah, simple certainly does not equate to easy!

It does look though as if you went a bit easier with the bells. Are those now just a warm up exercise for you? =)

hunashaman said...

Nah, the bells are always too intense to just be a warm up. I have a bit of a cold so I chose to not push the endurance too much. I am also however a bit confused because I realized that I have mainly fast twitch muscle fibers which means that endurance exercises are not exactly my thing. I'm still thinking about where to go with the bells because I don't think GS is part of my future. As long as I can feel mobile and alive I will be pretty happy.