Interesting take on strength

[Grissim Connery]

My friend recently worked out with the barbarians in boston.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i00UsztVJQ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbxEdnDrIk0&feature=related

he told me an interensting take that some of them had on strength. one of their goals was just to stay on a bar for as long as possible. this reminded me of ring work, but in a way i hadn't thought of. recently i'd been thinkin how a lot of sprint like sports do much more aerobic/alactic work than i would have thought. for example, i've had tons of swimmer friends who, like most of you probably know, swim for insane numbers of hours when their event is sometimes very short.

i've often taken the stance that to get better at handstands, one needs to spend as much gross time as possible in the handstand. obviously though as one gets bored and starts cranking out mad handstand pushups, fatigue sets in fast. it would seem more organic at that point to, instead of gritting it out in the handstand, drop down and just remain on the hands in any other comfortable fashion, whether it be an L sit or, for more comfort, an elbow lever (or for less comfort, a planche hah).

thus it would seem that for uppper body flows, one would spend as much time as possible in both hangs and supports. i then wondered how to apply this to lower body mechanics, and it seemed that the simplest mentality would be to stay in the air as much as possible (probably from a parkour/free running perspective).

i think i'm gonna play with this for a bit now, just trying to spend as much time during workouts in all three of these states.

[George Mounce]

Really interesting, I'll be looking forward to what you have to report!

[Derek Weaver]

As I'm understanding it, it's basically time under tension, right?

It makes sense, and I'm certainly interested to see how things translate with the lower body aspect.

[Grissim Connery]

because in the past i've done workouts where the gross amount of time spent in a handstand must be x number of minutes (generally 10-20 with however much rest in between), i figured a first draft version of this type of work would be to set x number of minutes in both the hang and supports. i don't think i could apply this same method to being in the air though. anybody got any ideas on how to measure this?

[Grissim Connery]

notes:

1. i can do much more support work than hang simply due to grip strength requirements
2. when doing hang work, do pullups before rows, inverted pulls, and german/skin the cat/back pulls. i find that latter groups deplete grip strength faster, especially the inverted pulls. i'm not as sure what to start with in terms of supports yet, but i think handstands are best to start off first. by doing them against a wall and facing it, you can easily perform cast wall walks and change angles easily. i kept paralletes nearby to do L and straddle holds.
3. a third timed interval can be straight-body work. i generally found that boat type v-up and candlestick/dragon flag movements were beneficial as well as headstands while maneuvering legs in all kinds of ranges
4. i added the straight body work after finding that only doing tuck work dramatically increased time in support and hang. i figured it'd be best to start off novice and keep it all tuck before progressing.
5. i tried to keep the time alotments even. next time i'm probably gonna do a 3/5/7 ratio of hang/support/straight body time alotments (probably just doubled to a 6/10/14 minute amount of work).
6. around-the-world-pullups work well for this type of endeavor. i applied it to supports as well

[Steven Low]

I was meaning to answer this the past time around, but I never did..

Anyway, the concept works much better for skill movements such as handstands etc. (aka practice makes perfect) BUT it must be quality practice.

On the other hand, you do get a grease the groove-like effect of just being on and doing something much more, but for most work you're going to have the problem of this is transferring more into endurance after a while than strength.

I do think it's valuable to just get tons of time on the bar every now and again, but it's not going to be of that great value. Obviously, getting into rings support a lot is critical to building up proficiency in the frictionless plane though so that will help out with everything on rings somewhat.

On the other hand, consider how much time monkeys spend on the trees with their arms. You will eventually adapt to being on the bar with a much stronger shoulder girdle. Is it worth it though tearing up your hands and potentially overusing a lot of your upper body? I dunno. It can be done though, but progression needs to take place over a while.

[Blair Lowe]

there is something to be said about doing mini ring strength routines such as the ones found on drillsandskills.com or gymnasticbodies.com

i think they usually took about 1 minute to perform in total. that's a long damn minute! if you manage to stay on the rings the entire time that's a lot of TUT even in the rest positions like support, L, HS, and basket