Barbell Shrugged - 114- Improving Gymnastic Skills in CrossFit w/ Coach Christopher Sommer of Gymnastic Bodies

Episode Date: April 23, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Coach Somers from Gymnastics... I can't talk. Is it Somer or Somers? Is it ready? This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Coach Somer from Gymnastics Body. Oh, that's... I said it wrong. You don't want to say Gymnastics... Somers. This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Coach Somers from Gymnastics Body.

I can't say it right now for some reason. This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interview Coach Somers from Gymnastics Body. Bodies. Gymnastic Bodies. Not Gymnastics Body. Let's do it later. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged.

For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson. We've traveled down to Austin, Texas for the Paleo FX, I was going to say concert, conference, where a bunch of experts have descended on the city to talk about nutrition and training. I think a lot of people think about Paleo or paleo FX, and they automatically think this is all nutrition, which is definitely not the case. There's been some powerlifting coaching going on, gymnastics, and an assortment of other training stuff, even some machines.

Whoa. Whoa. So I saw Coach Somers here, and I freaked out for a moment because I totally forgot you were going to be here, to be honest. We came in as a favor for Rob. I have a short-term memory. Okay, cool. I remember looking over the list, but you wrote the book Gymnastic Bodies. Yep.

GymnasticBodies? Yep. Gymnasticbodies.com. When I saw you, I was like, this is going to be really cool because having been in CrossFit for a long time, originally being a weightlifter and being in CrossFit for a while, you know, I started digging for ways to improve my gymnastics. Right. Because I was a very lower body dominant athlete and there just wasn't a lot of progression stuff for upper body gymnastic stuff. And so I stumbled on your website somehow, ended up getting the book.

I started following the, what it was is I started following the workouts in the forum. So you post the WODs and then everything was really confusing for me. Like I can figure some of it out. And then I was doing all this research on the website to try and find videos, which was actually really good. That helped for a while.

But after about a month of doing a lot of those workouts, which were fantastic, I kind of gave in and just started buying everything on your website. And I like that. He's like, good. That's exactly what you should have done. Yeah.

And you know, there's a lot of fantastic progressions there that you're not going to get introduced to otherwise and I really like how it's all laid out unless you're unless you travel you've had the

opportunity to travel with world and Olympic champions and you know our Olympic coach and our national team athletes like I have for decades this is information you're not going to see

you're not going to have access yeah can you give us like a quick bio of just where you've come from and where where how you got here well i i got here from the airport but uh long time u.s national team coach uh for years and years that was the primary focus in my life was preparing athletes for national team and then to work their way on to being world and Olympic team members. That's our goal.

For whatever reason, there's a quirk in my personality where I like working with all different kinds of levels of ability. The breaking point for me, whether or not someone qualifies for my time, is are they willing to give me best effort? I like improvement. I like watching people go through the struggle i like sharing the success with them a lot of my peers if you're not an elite level athlete they don't have time for you right it's you're not a part of their world so for whatever reason that little quirk in my personality i can kind of straddle the divide, if you will. Bridge that gap. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah.

We'll get called. You know, if USA Gymnastics needs something, like right now we're in the middle of a big project with Hilton. We'll see if that comes to fruition or not. But USA Gymnastics, even though we have best athletes in the world, they didn't understand the regular fitness market. They couldn't do it. So they call us. It's tough. It's tough when you come from something that specialized and try to like, maybe, maybe I guess the right might not be the right term, but dumb it down for. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say dumb it down,

although they'll certainly look at it that way. It's a matter of, uh, when you work with the cream of the cream genetically for so many years, it skews your idea of what is normal. Yeah. And so you kind of forget where you came from and how it started. Yeah. I mean, I watched some of the, you've got some videos on your website and these kids are like maybe eight years old doing this shit. And I'm like, yeah, we've got destroyed trying to do it. Well, you know, we, we, we have our ones, our national team athletes that started very young, but, um, we uh we also have uh one of our stronger athletes started at 16 you know he it was too late to technically develop him for national team he

was talented enough so we focused on his strength yeah so about about a four-year window basically if you're if you train longer than four to six years and you're not a stud you're screwing up gotcha there's just there's not a site i'm not real PC. I'm not going to soft pedal stuff with people. National team coach is very pragmatic. It works or it doesn't work. So, you know, the bottom line,

if someone's not willing to put the work in, they're not going to get where they want to go. So Mike mentioned your book earlier. And I also read your book and it basically was just a big series of very well thought out progressions. I know with regard to CrossFit, high level gymnastics coaches have some very strong opinions about how CrossFitters train with regard to gymnastics.

They don't train. I'll give you guys the bottom line is that back in the early 2000s, I was the CrossFit gymnastic guy. And it turned out people like Metcon, when they started going with the 20% slop, Greg and I went behind the scenes, round and round and round and round and round and round. You know, bottom line is,

Greg has never been a world-class coach, and there are things he just doesn't get. He just doesn't get. The stronger your foundation, you've got to attend to details. Things have to be done right. Not for aesthetic reasons, but for muscle-ups, for example. We don't come come up and we don't lock and turn the elbows at the top

there's nothing to do with looking pretty has everything to do with are we correctly conditioning the brachialis for more advanced ring strength later yeah if you don't lock and turn you wasted your time and if you lock and turn that's that's a lot tougher on It slows them down because they have this failed thought that more work performed over time. You know, if I keep piling crap upon crap

upon crap, it doesn't suddenly turn into a diamond. It's just a big pile of crap. So that's why 10 years no ring strength. I've done dips

my whole life on a bar and then I found the rings and it was like, holy shit. And then once I discovered, well, when you do a ring dip like in a proper gymnastics fashion you get to the top you externally rotate those shoulders and all of a sudden i felt like my chest wanted to like pop off yeah and that's that's just uh a support on top of the rings if we go down into a cross now we're measuring that in torque yeah so we'll say 150 pound athlete. He's got almost

4,000 pounds of torque on him. So that's what we see people. And that's, you know, as a national team coach, if all I had to show for 10 years of work were some bad kipping muscle ups, they'd have thrown my ass right off this balcony. And I will say rightly so. Rightly so. Do you think that maybe there's a, and I think this might be the case, a really big focus on weightlifting progressions, but there's a lack of the gymnastics progressions. I know one of the reasons I found your book and got into that

and then also looked at your online products and courses was, you know, building programs that help you build your online products and courses was you know building programs that help you build your handstand push-up you know from you know with a proper progression you basically say if you can't do this many of this movement you've got no business moving forward well it's the same way that if someone goes into powerlifting or they go into olympic lifting they start with pvc yeah they don't they don't start well i don't even know what the weight lifting version of a kipping pull-up would be but a kipping pull-up is one of the last things we're

going to expose someone to they're hitting the bottom they're doing we're taking first we're taking someone who's not strong enough most of the time to do a dead weight body hang they can't do a regular pull-up their shoulder mobility is severely compromised so what do i do i'm going to take someone i'm going to have them fall i'm going to extend their range of motion past what they can normally handle. I'm going to bounce off connective tissue with multiples of body weight and come up for the top. So we never saw a rash of slap tears in an adult fitness population until that kipping pull-up came in. It's great advertising, but as far as conditioning, it's criminal. Where would you recommend, what would you recommend someone be strength wise? A minimum, minimum of five rep chins.

So be able to do. And that's if their mobility is adequate as well. So if I'm strong, but I can't go through full flexion, when they hit that bottom, if they're not strong enough to handle a single, they're going to hit that bottom with two to three times body weight. Yeah. It doesn't matter if they want to try to control that range of motion or not. They're going to arch. They're're gonna go past where they're capable that's why

they get about a two two and a half window before if they're doing high volume before they start getting slap tears in the shoulder gotcha it's inevitable it's like the sun coming up in the morning yeah so in crossfit as opposed to gymnastics a lot of people are coming into the sport when they're 45 years old unlike gymnastics where oftentimes kids are starting when they're single digits and different different though there's a difference between someone who's being prepared for a world class trying to make an olympic team that's that's the same you're not going to make an olympic team if you come into crossfit doing weight lifting at 45 right it's not going to happen. Bottom line is that if someone hasn't interacted

with athletes at that level, they literally have no idea how incredible those athletes are. I mean, this is the cream of the cream of the cream genetically. They are faster. They are more powerful. Their reflexes are better

than any of us, myself included, could ever hope to be. But that really doesn't matter, right? If you'll do proper training, you can still be stronger than 99 out of 100 people walking around you. So, yeah, maybe you're not the top six on the planet, but so what? You're still better than the other 99 walking around you. So you have to keep a sense of perspective. Most of our people are adults who are starting.

Our oldest, Fritz, very calm, very patient trainer. He's working iron crosses now. He's 71, 72. Yeah, he's a stud. The ones who do well, it's just like Olympic lifting. They'll take their time, they'll do their drills, they do their PVC, and you move on. The reason that gymnastic strength training is farther behind in terms of CrossFit and everyone else is the knowledge just wasn't available. I can kind of go everywhere and I can find some reasonable instruction for Olympic lifting. I can find reasonable instruction for power lifting, but where are you going to go for gymnastic strength training? You know, I saw someone play on a park, on some rings in a park i saw a video on youtube

that's not the same as having correct progressions married to correct joint prehab it's not the same it's not adequate so crossers they jumped straight to kipping pull-ups or banded pull-ups which is something that gymnasts don't tend to do from my understanding they don't really do any banded pull-up work no that's kind of one of god's bastard creations okay so uh for a for a crossword coming in you're 30 years old you're 30 pounds overweight and you want to be able to do your first pull-up ever like what kind of progression would you give somebody like the first thing you need to do is you need to lose the damn 30 pounds okay because remember with body weight training we're doing multiples of body weight so when we hit the bottom on a kipping pull-up we we're going to go two to three times body weight.

Depends on how far, how fast they're going loose and dropping. Every pound extra you're carrying is going on that connective tissue that they're not strong enough to handle anyway. So 10 pounds is an extra 30 pounds. So if they weren't strong enough to do a weighted pull-up to start with, why in God's name am I having to do multiples of body weight coming down with an extra 30 pounds on them. So how would you recommend someone prepare the connective tissue and get stronger and work that progression? Say they're losing weight, but you don't want to throw them on a pull-up bar yet. Yeah, we're not going to throw them on a pull-up.

What we start our people on are row variations. So feet on the ground, row variations. Generally, we'll start beginners. Everything we do with adults adults we found is that their mobility even more important than their strength is their mobility is non-existent they they are crushed they have frozen shoulders their hips don't work right they don't know where their scaps are they have no pelvic tilt either anterior or posterior they're just frozen in place so everything we do every exercise every set they do is combined with a mobility exercise

and the strong guys who come in they try to fly through the exercises and we just put the brakes Everything we do, every exercise, every set they do is combined with a mobility exercise. And the strong guys who come in, they try to fly through the exercises and we just put the brakes on them. Yeah, that was one of the things I found. I started doing some of the program off the website and everything was coupled. Every movement was coupled with mobility. There are no escape. And I am, I mean, I am mobile enough to weightlift, but I am not mobile enough to do some gymnastic stuff. Well, and I'll even interrupt a bit there. See, people try to use that as an out, that it's gymnastic stuff.

But there's not a child on the planet whose mobility and strength and their movement isn't already in perfect balance. Oh, sure. They can do every mobility element we can. Well, I've gotten tight in all the areas that don't need to be weightlifting. Well, exactly, because it was created. It was a created disability through incorrect training. And don't get me wrong. I like weight training.

I think the sweet spot is the combination of weights with gymnastic strength, but first things first. If all you do is get strong without addressing that mobility deficit first, you just poured gasoline on a fire. You made it worse. So what are some examples of paired sets? You're doing some pulling variation, some type of a row, and then you're doing some type of shoulder mobility right afterward? We'll do a lat mobility in that instance, and we'll break it down. So some will be shoulder, some will be hip, some will be knee. It depends really on what we're doing.

We have, surprisingly, we did not expect this. We have a lot of physical therapists around the world now who are using our stuff. Oh, wow. Who happened to, they didn't start that way. It wasn't intentional, but they came on for their own personal training. Loved it. We're especially popular in that area in Australia and England, but it works so well for them. they're using it with their clients. And what we generally find is the way things work is for trying to make a national team, trying to create a world champion, is if you're doing what's already out there, you're behind the curve, you lose. Right?

So most national team coaches, there isn't research to support yet what we do. Generally what happens is we go out, we figure out a way to make it happen and get it done. Sounds like anything in strength and conditioning. Exactly. The coaches find it first, research comes behind. Research comes to tell you why. Yeah. We already know it works. We really don't care how it works. We just want to know that it works. Okay. And that Olympic gold medal, there's not a special little extra gold medal that goes on the back of this as that was research supported it's no such no so at least in the crossfit community you think gymnastics you automatically think upper body upper body strength and mobility but

and especially strength but then again in the crossfit community especially you think leg strength you think you think weightlifting powerlifting and gymnastics is kind of left out what do you guys do for lower body strength do you guys use any barbells or weights or is it all body weight with lower body too? Well, remember my background though is national team coach. So we, we have to be very conscious of not building too much mass in the legs. Uh, we've spent a lot of time over the years working with Olympic coaches. We brought them in. Uh, we had all my elite athletes jerking body weight and a half in 40 minutes, uh, with, I was told not really a jerk, more of a spastic military press in 40 minutes, really the best we could do. But, uh, that kind of illustrates the strength that gymnastics builds.

We did kind of, we're kind of curious if we had had the time with those athletes, what could they have done? Uh, what we'll find is what's important for us is connective strength tissue, the rebounding work. So if we watch, uh, we, we do, you know, Olympic training center, I spent almost more time there the last decade than at home. Uh, we, we get a lot of sports scientists coming in pressure plates on the floor, even just basic tumbling elements, they'll hit 14 times body weight. So, you know, 14 times 150 pound athletes, 2,100 pounds of pressure, and that's rep after rep day after day. So you end up with just this ridiculous amount of power. We did have a, there was a wives tale floating around that a gymnast can't jump. They can only rebound off special. It's complete bullshit. Uh, we. We put up stuff of our guys,

part of their normal conditioning is just doing box jumps onto things head high. I mean, that's, we don't consider that special. That's just day in, day out. But again, if you're not in that environment, you don't get to interact with athletes at that level. You don't really know it exists. So a lot of high level plyos. A lot high-level plyo. Dan, John, and I had a nice conversation some years ago where he said, on track and field, if you don't have a double-bodyweight squat, they don't recommend plyos. Well, there's not a six-year-old gymnast in the world that does double-bodyweight squat. The Chinese will, but the Russians don't.

I mean, there's a progression for plyos just like anything else. Oh, absolutely. You know, technically double-unders. You know, jumping with a rope is a plyometric. I like jumping rope a lot for older population, even for beginning. What we found out is when we first started doing our seminars maybe seven, eight years ago with adults, was that the stronger the adult was, the least the, what's the word I want? The bigger gap there was in the conditioning of their connective tissue. So if they were a power lifter, for example, they actually

were strong enough to shred themselves doing little plyo series that I would do with my entry level athletes. So we learned the hard way. The first thing we do is we address basic strength. We hammer out these mobility issues. We spend time doing basic locomotion with them. Then a little at a time, we build into explosive work. The last thing we'll address will be that repulsion work. So that's, I'll go over in deeper. That's why you had that rash of Achilles ruptures a couple of years ago, where they pre-fatigued the Achilles at one of the CrossFit Open or CrossFit Games. High rep, 225-pound deadlifts, followed by box jumps in this competitive environment. So instead of jumping up, stepping down, they're jumping off and punching off the floor back up.

Was it nine ruptures that year? I didn't get a count, but that sounds like a lot. In an adult fitness population, that's an epidemic. That's ridiculous. And that's just, it's not that they're not capable of doing it. It's just the joints were improperly prepared for that kind of workload. Anytime you're pushing the level of performance, you know, you're taking it to the edge. There's that opportunity for injury.

That's for sure. Well, it wasn't just that. They took it to the edge in an arena in which they were physically unprepared to do so. They weren't prepared to do plyometric work. You know, they were prepared to do strength work. And so there's a difference between having muscular strength and connective tissue strength what are some plyometric uh progressions you would recommend for crossfitters specifically for crossfitters uh kind of for everybody so we

did a nice uh seminar out at polyquin headquarters where we were developing upper body plyometric work. We spent two, three-hour modules building them up to some repulsion work. We did a lot of stability for the shoulder girdle. We did a lot of rehab for the shoulder girdle. We did elbow work. We did wrist work. We did bent arm strength. We built them up through some explosive bent arm strength. We spent all day getting them where we could do some straight arm repulsive work.

What do you mean by bent arm strength? Hopping push-ups, things like that. By the time we got to the straight arm bounces, so like in a push-up position where they get on the ground, locked arms and be able to bounce up and down without bending. So it would be all shoulders, the scap? All shoulders, all scap strength. These guys were glued to the ground.

There was nothing there, and we spent all day These guys were glued to the ground. You know, there was nothing there. And we spent all day to get to the cherry on top. We spent 15 minutes is all they could handle. They were done. Where you take a gymnast who this has been their prime. I mean, that's where your moneymaker is, is that connective tissue strength. Right? When you get to the point where you have that, that's where you get just crazy strong.

That's where all our guys strength. That's why they could jerk body weight in half without trying. That's where they get the triple body weight deadlift. That's where all that comes from. But you got to pay your dues. You got to do first things first and you got to do it in order. If you do it wrong, you're going to end up where CrossFit is where after 10 years of being on the rings, all they have to do have to show are some poor muscle ups. What would you think like if uh they approached it the way you think they should and what do you think the competitions could be in regard to well i i gymnastics if you're if you're a serious competitor in my mind that's a huge blank check

because you're not going to get a big jump if you're a crossfit person you're not going to get a big jump on someone in metcon everyone knows how to train metcon you're not going to get a big jump on them in powerlifting everyone Metcon. You're not going to get a big jump on them in powerlifting. Everyone understands powerlifting. You're not going to get a big jump on their Olympic lifting. I mean, look, with their Olympic lifting, they've got CrossFitters now qualifying for regionals and nationals. But everyone's gymnastic strength at that level is pathetic. So to me, that's a huge blank check.

Anyone who gets their act together with that has a huge advantage. I think you might have something there, especially in the open where they always have chest bar pull-ups, they always have muscle ups. And especially for the ladies, there's a big separation. There's a, a big gap is created at that point. Yeah. And it shouldn't be. Where there's a lot of people kind of in the same spot, muscle ups pop up and all of a sudden, they fall, you know everything everything you know people start moving around really fast people that were behind you know move up in rank

and vice versa uh we went greg greg kept telling me back in the early 2000s you've got to do metcon you got to do metcon you got to do metcon and i'm brand new i'm not sure what's going on we got our guys we're training for national team so i'm like fine we'll do a Metcon. So just to kind of preface, these guys were doing muscle ups with half body weight hanging on them. So we set up something where on a single bar, they were going to do rounds. The rounds were 10 reps of a single bar muscle up. And then to give, so I had traffic flow issues. So to get them off the bar, they also did 20 jumping squats. So we ran it for 10 minutes what happened was uh the guys didn't notice it our winner did 15 rounds so he did 150 muscle ups in 10 minutes

and he did 240 jump squats he got bored during the jump squats and Davey started adding back flips at the top of them they went back and forth Our second place was 130 muscle-ups. And then Alan, who's a national team, you know, national champ, he was eight or nine at the time. He did 120 muscle-ups. And all those muscle-ups, they had half body weight hanging from them? No, no, that was just regular body weight. But the preference, the reason I mentioned that is that if your levels of strength are high enough, then your regular work is easy. It always is strength first, and then we do strength endurance. It's asked backwards to try to go strength endurance first and hope that's going to build strength. Never works that way.

How would you recommend we build that strength? How to build muscle-ups? Four muscle-ups, yeah. All right. My personal opinion, if you can't climb the rope, and not the bullshit reason rope is a form of transportation, we're going to use our legs to get up the rope. Get your damn legs off the rope and climb it right. So my guys, for example, just part of us.

They did legless rope climbs at the games last year. That's fine. They finally got there. It only took them 12 years. So we call that a slow learner. But our guys will warm up with a triple rope, up, down, up, down, up, down on a 7-meter. Get in the back of the line. Their teammates go. They'll do a double, up, down, up, down, up, down on a seven meter. Get in the back of the line. Their teammates go.

They'll do a double, up, down, up, down. We don't consider that strength. That's just warm up. So what we find is all these people who are trying to do muscle ups and can't, it's because they can't climb the rope. And then they're trying to climb the rope and they can't do pull-ups. They're trying to do pull-ups and they can't do rows. So rope would be first? I guess we would master the pull-up first.

Well, first I'm going to master rows. Master rows. And after rows, then we're going to do pull-up variations. So that would be things like ring rows. Ring rows are probably easiest on the grip and rotation on the shoulder. But you can row wherever you feel like rowing, but you need to row first. And that's usually with feet on the ground. So, you know, we used to, with our little guys, require front lever rows.

As we worked with adults, I found out that was not realistic. No. So we start with foot supported row, build them up, take them through their pull-up variations. That includes their L variations with the wide grip. The nice thing about the L is they can't lean forward. They can't get away. It forces just lats and scap. Kind of forces you in that hollow position.

Do it right or go home, right? Yeah. So that's one of the reasons I really, I like L pull-ups for a lot of people who have a hard time staying tight. Yeah. So you see a lot of people doing kipping pull-ups and then they're just getting almost,

you know, they're overextending at the wrong spots. And then if you throw in L pull-ups into their training, yeah, there's no way around it really. And let's examine the kipping pull-up further or the kipping muscle-ups. What does that do? The most productive part of the muscle-up

is going to be through the transition. We're right where we're coming up at the bottom of the sternum, up on top of the ring. Guess where an iron cross happens later? Where does a Maltese happen later? Where does all the advanced ring strength happen? It happens on the part where they skipped it.

So they spent 10 years of skipping the moneymaker of the exercise and they wonder why they have nothing to show for it. Using too much momentum to get through the transition. So they're not developing strength in that position is what you're saying? Exactly right. There are times where we use momentum, but at the right time for the right exercises and a muscle up is not the right time and it's not the right exercise. So if you're just doing kipping muscle ups, then you're never going to be able to move on to more advanced gymnastic skills. Not ever.

Not happening. Which most CrossFitters may not necessarily care about if it's never going to be something that's in competition. They'll care as we're getting more CrossFitters coming in and doing correct training and they'll start caring when they get their ass kicked. And so that then suddenly they're going to turn around and say, oh, maybe I better do this right. It's the same way where before, remember the old days of the WOD,

just kind of do random programming whenever you feel like it'll be good enough. And then as soon as people start doing real programming for lifting and they had a big jump, suddenly everyone wants to do real programming. It'll be the same thing here. Once someone starts doing it right and they start going head-to-head at the top and whooping on them, people are going to follow through. Why do you think that hasn't happened yet? Well, mostly because coaches at my level are busy in our gyms

training people for a national team. I do know that several years ago we took our gym, we did a field trip to a gymnastics place locally. And, yeah, the guy pretty much said, you know, he did us a favor that night, but he pretty much said he wasn't going to train any adults because he's only interested in training people who want to compete. Right. And there's no way.

I mean, I'd like to learn more advanced gymnastics stuff from a coach and have their eyes on me, but he wasn't going to spend any time with me because there's no way I'm competing. Well, it's not necessarily a competing. Like, as a national team coach, I was unusual in that I firmly believe that we build physical structure first if you want to do world-class skills first thing you have to do is you have

to build a world-class physique that can handle doing those skills it'd be to my mind someone trying to go straight into high level skills is a little bit like trying to drive an old beat-up toyota like an f1 racer you know you've done before. I'm sorry. It just doesn't work. So all our success came from doing physical prep first and then technical skills just fly. Life is easy because you built the correct tool for the job. Yeah. So do you think one way to raise the standard of the gymnastics training is to kind of raise the standard of the CrossFit competitions, maybe add in other movements that you can't just kip your way through. And then once they realize they can't just kind of kip their way through certain movements, they have to change their training.

I don't think it'll happen. Notice there was a CrossFit games where snatch wasn't really a snatch, kind of just turned into ground to overhead and there were bent arms. They were doing all this crap and a weightlifting coach would have cried the barbell swing as long as long as it's a competition for what they consider most amount of work done over a period of time they're gonna continue to do poor quality that's just that's reality now you maybe do that in a competitive environment I could see that yeah there where they get a problem is when they start doing that in their training environment. That's exactly what I was going to say.

Go ahead and let the wheels come off in competition is what I tell athletes. It's like that's the time to round your back on a deadlift. If that's what it's going to take to get one more rep and you're willing to put your health on the line, and most people are in that competition environment, and that's totally cool. I mean, the same thing that happens in any other sport. When you get to that competition arena,

no one's thinking about how they're going to feel tomorrow. It's about winning right now. So that happens at the games level. That happens at the Open. I mean, that happens with CrossFit a lot. But yet what needs to be happening is in the CrossFit gyms, I think coaches just need to make sure that they separate training from competing.

And I think that's where you might, we're going to see the best progress. That's an issue of education. So, you know, a lot, a lot of them, you know, I don't, I know I disparage them somewhat, but part of it is they need to make sure they're vetting their sources of information and they're going and getting out the best knowledge possible to pass down to their clients. I mean, it's their job. It's their life. Yeah, it's the individual.

I wouldn't try to, you know, maybe. I mean, you look at the CrossFit Games. I mean, they're running a competition. They're not running coaching. Not a bit. So, I mean, I try not, you know, you're not going to. I don't think it's fair to, like, attack the games for something like that across the games. And it's their games. They run it the way they want. Yeah. So, it's a to attack the games for something like that across the games. And it's their games.

They run it the way they want. Yeah, so it's a totally new sport, something totally different. Let's take a break real quick, and then when we come back, we'll find out how many beers you had last night. All right. And we're back. And we were just discussing the difference between competition and training and kind of how it's the it's the, uh, responsibility of the coaches and the athletes to take upon themselves.

Absolutely. To, uh, kind of get that more advanced training or, or to treat training like training and not like competition. So, uh, what are,

if somebody was wanting to be a competitive athlete and what you were saying in CrossFit, what you were saying is basically somebody at some point is going to take the gymnastic stuff very seriously. And then they're going to, you know, come around, whoop ass potentially. And especially for like, we were talking about chest bar pull-ups, muscle-ups being in the open and that being a big separator. What would you suggest people, how they change their training? Obviously the progressions doing rope climbs to prepare for muscle-ups and things like that. Well, we, as, as great as muscle, as rope climbs are, you still got to earn your rope climbs. Now you can't jump right into rope climbs. We'll get

beginners who say, you know, coach, I've been doing ropes and I've got tendonitis in my elbows. What should I do? I said, quit climbing the damn rope. Yeah. You know, you're, you're not prepared. Uh, you know, you should never train through pain. It's not manly. It's not tough. It's stupid. Bottom line is if you're training through pain, there's going to come a point where you push so hard that you're no longer training because you're injured. So if training is your priority and your body is your tool, you need to maintain that tool. Just like if you're keeping a knife sharp, you keep dragging it along the sidewalk constantly, constantly, you're going to have a dull knife. So it's your job to not train through pain. So that's your first indicator there, whether or

not what you're doing is foolish training. You have tendonitis, you're screwing up. You need to evaluate what's going on. You need to back off. It means you're working too hard. So for our guys, for beginners, we want them to start with more high rep work. I don't believe that a beginner should doing high intensity, low rep work. Their connective tissue isn't strong enough to handle it. You also recommend almost like a tempo type scenario. Yeah, we don't want them going through momentum yet. Most of them haven't used their body for a long time, especially people doing CrossFit. They're doing reasonably successful with their career.

They've been doing a lot of desk patrol. They've been doing a lot of sitting. They've been doing a lot of typing. Joints aren't healthy, so they need to be eased back into this. So is it going to take them six to seven months? It is. It's going to take six to seven months. Is it fun?

Is it exciting? No, it's not. It's reality. Deal with it. Get it done and then move on. So if we're programming pull-ups in a workout and somebody can't perform five dead hangs, what you would recommend just i we went back to a ring row yeah we go all the way back to ring rows uh we match that with

uh flexibility for the lats uh for beginners on those first two we're going to build them to 15 reps then before we even let them do negative pull-ups we make them do uh five sets of 60 second chin holds over the top oh yeah, yeah. And they hate that. That was something that I got a lot of those static holds from your program. I started implementing that. You were not popular, were you? No.

Yeah, I used it with a lot of athletes back in the fall. And then I know the three of us, we all trained together a lot. And we were doing all those together. And CTP was like, when are we were we were doing all those together and ctp was like when are we gonna stop doing this static whole shit yeah the back and forth on the l sit chin over bar and the handstand holds were wearing us out after a while yeah we were just doing it for time and rotation i uh i bastardized it a little bit yeah it was fun but it was tough yeah yeah we'd

go uh cycle between chin over bar holds holds and handstand push-ups. Well, and I like people mixing it up, but you guys are stronger athletes whose bodies are capable of handling that kind of load and that kind of random training. Where we get in issues are the people who are brand new to training, and that's why they have maybe a one, two-year window of people coming into CrossFit before they bail. They're either mentally burnt out or they're physically broken. Yeah.

I think a lot of times people may be suffering from a little pain in the shoulder or something like that and they never say anything. Well, they don't say anything or we run into these crazy things where you're supposed to have a packed shoulder, you know, all this other bullshit. Now, we think of it as bullshit because when you hit the bottom of a ring swing, if I'm doing a giant, I've got maybe 10 times body weight. There's no one in the world who's a 150-pound athlete who's keeping the shoulder packed under 1,500 pounds of load. It's not happening.

And that's swinging around the bar all the way. That's swinging around, yeah. Someone who doesn't know what a giant is. Well, and then what they do, yeah, and that's on the rings. So what they'll do, though, instead of addressing the problem and correcting the problem they just try to avoid the problem and you can't avoid it it's your shoulder

it's not going anywhere you gotta fix it you gotta fix it so for pull ups to muscle ups so you got ring rows you got chin over bar holds there's like 22 different steps

yeah there's a ton of them there's a ton of progressions we take them through with each progression you got the mobility matched up with it and not only the exercise gets more intense but the mobility gets more intense as well. I found that to be true.

Yeah, there were certain things when I was going through a lot of your stuff, the courses. I was not limited by the strength. I was limited by the mobility. And I, you know, set the ego aside. Good. It's really easy to set the ego aside when you're training by yourself. When you're training with 10 other people, that's when people start skipping steps and progressions. Well, but, you know, I mentioned this yesterday.

This is where how mature you are in your training comes in. Because someone, to my mind, it's easy. Someone is childlike in their approach to training or they're an adult in their approach. If you're a child, it means that I want results right now. I want instant gratification. I'm going to stroke my ego now. Someone who's an adult and mature in their approach to training, they're going to do what they need to do now in order to get what they want later. Yeah. So, and that's, you know, it takes some discipline. Yeah. So going back, master ring, ring rows, pull-ups, chin over bar holds. Yeah. And there's all, there's all

variations. And then there's variations for the ropes. Get the ropes down, then introduce vertical pulling on the rings. If you've done all that, muscle-up should take you less than a week to a good high quality. We've got people right now who are only in Foundation 1. They're still on their row work, and I get notes all the time. Coach, I was playing on rings, and I popped out a muscle up and it was a smooth and it was easy. And I'm a little freaked out right now. How did this happen? Yeah. The other thing too, I noticed

with some athletes, the, uh, what's limiting them on their, their muscle up is actually their grip. Wow. False, false grip is huge. And it's false grip is far more important than they think it is for muscle up because it needs to not just be a little bit of false grip hand on top it needs to be a 90 degree false grip locked in tight well and some people they're not either first they're not going to have enough forearm strength to maintain a good 90 degree false grip and then they're not going to have enough that's with bent arm then they're not going to have enough forearm flexibility to maintain the 90 degree with a straight arm hang with an open with an open arm and then that's just the start guys there's all kinds of brutal variations we go so we've got guy in the pipeline right now for 2016 games and he's doing some nasty inverted false grip

variations that he has to continue building false grip strength it just keeps going and keeps going he's gone so how do you build that false grip strength you're doing ring rows with the false grip first yeah we do rows we do pull-ups we do uh first we do bent arm hang we do straight arm hang so you would recommend like if somebody was like well my goal is to get a muscle up they should go back to the ring row and then do the ring row with the false grip oh absolutely not just holding on to it lazily we get people who do we have our course rings one we get people say oh am i going to learn an iron cross and rings one i was actually i was actually surprised like i bought the i bought the foundations and then uh and handstand push-up uh progression uh courses and it's like it's like you have like

these you know eight seven eight progression it's like it's like when you get the handstand push-up it just keeps going going you got it you got it it's the proper way to go. Well, what we found is that we base all of our training on how the tissues of the body adapt. So the problem is that most people base their training only on muscular fatigue and muscles adapt. We're going to replace all your muscle tissue in about 90 days. It's going to take me 200 to 210 days to replace all your connective tissue, all your collagen molecules. So if I'm only basing my training on what muscle tissue does, I'm further and further behind on what my connective tissue can handle, which means if you're one of the people who like to push hard in training, you're just an accident waiting to happen. So to build that connective tissue,

higher rep work, slow it down. You got to slow your your ass down so some tempo type stuff tempo stuff not using that momentum no moment absolutely no momentum now later we do want to get to momentum when you're a more advanced athlete all right because that's where we want to start doing the straight arm plyometric work but we got to build to that if i started you now if you're a young athlete i can start you on that immediately but their bodies are in complete natural balance. There are no issues. But as adults, there are tremendous issues, especially if they've been doing strength training. Notice, you all know someone who's a natural athlete.

They're big. They're powerful. They're agile. They're like a cat. There's no issues at all. But if we see a weight room trained athlete, they're not agile. They're not explosive. They're stiff. They only have one of the agile, they're not explosive, they're stiff. They only have one of the characteristics that a natural athlete has, they're strong.

Their athletic components have been developed out of balance. So in order to be healthy, we have to go back and we have to readdress those components that were not built correctly. That's why we'll see almost always the strongest athlete in the weight room is almost never. In fact, I don't know of any athlete who's the strongest in the weight room, who's the most successful athlete on the field of play, regardless of strength, unless it's a strength sport. All right. Yeah, there's a lot of stories I hear about that. Maybe I know Chris Moore tells some stories of guys in the weight room in football.

You know, he played D1 football, and there's these guys that just kind of like. Monsters. Well, they mope around in the gym. They can. You know, you play D1 football and there's these guys that just kind of like... Monsters. Well, they mope around in the gym. They can't get them to squat. You know, every once in a while they'll squat and they don't really put their work in there and they get on the field

and just destroy everybody. Destroy everyone. And then you got guys that... They're that natural animal. Yeah, you got guys that are squatting like 800 pounds but you get them on the field and they just kind of...

There's a big difference between lumbering around like a grizzly bear and being a big jungle cat. On the field of play, it. There's a big difference between lumbering around like a grizzly bear and being a big jungle cat on the field of play. It's the jungle cat I'm worried about. I'm not worried about the grizzly who's waddling. I'm worried about everything.

All right. Let's wrap this up. What, where should people go if they want to find more information? Gymnasticbodies.com is our website. We've got a huge community. we've got over 11,000 active forum members uh it's all gymnastic strength based the forum's got over i think we're coming up on 150,000 uh forum posts now all specific to that we're hitting about uh 22,000 unique visitors a week coming in so so we're growing all gymnastics specific.

The courses are all multimedia heavy, all hosted online. There are private forums to support questions. You can build little programs in there for yourself. Well, it's all automatic programming. Right, you just kind of select where you're at in the progression and that kind of builds out the week.

You select where you're at. It's all based on where your recovery abilities are. choose we recommend starting with less rather than more be conservative be conservative most people tend to overestimate how studly they are by a factor of about three now we got to hold them back yeah i've done that yeah i think i've rested myself i've done it i've done it the same these are all hard one lessons You guys have a huge video library of a bunch of moves that most CrossFitters probably never even seen before. Probably true. Yeah, there's a lot of free videos on our YouTube channel. So I don't know.

We're at 4 million, 4.5 million views, something. Yeah, I find even if I'm not going to try to do some of the programming, I just find myself going from one video to the next to the next to the next being like, come watch this, come watch this kid. This is incredible. It is. It's stuff that I can't even get close to doing.

You got the progressions in there. You just keep, hit the next button, and it takes you to the next progression. As long as the people understand it's, that's where they're going to end up. That's not where they're going to start. Yeah.

Well, cool. Thanks for joining us. I appreciate it, guys. Make sure you go to barbellstroke.com, sign up for the newsletter, and we'll notify you when we post these podcasts.

You bet. Cool. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Make sure you go to barbellstruck.com sign up for the newsletter and we'll notify you when we post these podcasts. You bet. Cool. Thanks. Thanks guys. That was fun. I can't be politically correct. I apologize.