Archives for December 2016

The Top Ten PCC Blog Posts of 2016

December 27, 2016 By Al Kavadlo 9 Comments

PCC Collage 2016

With 2016 coming to an end, it’s been almost 4 years since the inception of the Progressive Calisthenics Certification, and it continues to be an amazing ride. This year the PCC visited China, Australia, Germany, Holland, and The UK, in addition to traveling across the United States. We certified hundreds of new PCC instructors and reached so many more people through this blog. As we head into 2017, the world’s #1 bodyweight strength training certification is still going strong!

As lead instructor for the PCC, I personally select and edit every post that we run here on the PCC blog, so I am intimately familiar with all of the content we’ve shared since the beginning.

Here are my top ten PCC blog posts from 2016, in no particular order:

– The O.G. of PCC himself, “Coach” Paul Wade, analyzed bodybuilders’ muscular development over several decades in an attempt to determine how much muscle mass you can really gain without steroids.

– My PCC co-lead instructor Danny Kavadlo shared this humorous and introspective post about questioning one’s own body of knowledge.

– PCC Instructor Robby Taylor’s article on calisthenics neck training helped me take my calisthenics training to the “necks” level.

– PCC Team Leader Matt Schifferle’s “Centerline Principle” is a great piece of exercise theory that you can apply to your workouts right away.

– Senior PCC Adrienne Harvey shared this helpful article on improving your hand and grip strength with calisthenics.

– PCC Instructor Brad Sadler’s Workout Tips For Busy Professionals are perfect for anyone who has a hard time fitting their workouts in around a hectic schedule.

– PCC Team Leader Matt Beecroft’s tips for learning the freestanding handstand are sure to help you progress with your hand-balancing practice.

– PCC Instructor Benji Williford shared three of his most inspiring clients’ motivational stories about how calisthenics played a role in overcoming breast cancer.

– PCC Team Leader Grace Kavadlo broke down the PCC approach to the bodyweight row, aka the Australian pull-up.

– I wrote several articles for the blog myself this year, but my ten minute bodyweight squat challenge got more likes and comments than any of the others that I wrote, so it must be my best.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog and support the PCC movement. I can’t wait to see what next year has in store for the PCC and the entire bodyweight strength training community. Let me know what your favorite posts were from this year in the comments below.

I hope to see you at the PCC in 2017!

We’re Working Out!

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Al Kavadlo is the lead instructor for Dragon Door’s Progressive Calisthenics Certification and the author of several best-selling books, including Street Workout and Pushing The Limits. For more information visit www.AlKavadlo.com.

Five Ways to Gauge Your Calisthenics Progress

December 20, 2016 By Matt Beecroft 6 Comments

Calisthenics Progress by Matt Beecroft

When someone asks me how long will it take to learn an elbow lever, human flag, handstand or any other intermediate/advanced level calisthenics move, my response is always, “It will take as long as it needs to.”

For the most part, if your only concern is how long it will take to achieve your goal, I believe you are in it for the wrong reasons. Immersing yourself in a healthy daily practice of self-improvement is really where the gold is. Not the destination—although it is totally sweet when you do get there.

When it comes to learning calisthenics, everyone has different athletic backgrounds and everyone learns at their own pace. It also depends on the coaching and the cues that are used.

For example there is no “one” way to learn a handstand. There is no secret or holy grail. Some of the best hand balancers are self-taught, and while their methods may have worked for them, they may not work for you or your athletes.

Most gymnastic coaches will swear to you that their way is the best way and yet they all differ in their approaches. The background of the trainer, whether it is gymnastics, calisthenics, yoga, circus or b-boy will usually determine how the handstand is taught. So the cues that coaches use, and how that resonates with the student can heavily influence the learning outcome.

So the, “How long will it take me?” question is an impossible one to answer.

I’ve also been blown away by my own assumptions. Some people, because of their athletic background, I have assumed would progress very quickly, and have not, and others with no athletic background, have surpassed my expectations very quickly.

Such is the complex nature of skill training and calisthenics.

Advanced calisthenics exercises are skills, and skill work does not always progress in a sets-and-reps mentality, as other strength based training often does. That approach can work with early progressions, but as you get closer to your end point—be it a handstand, human flag, pistol squat or other such feat—the training needs to be more organic.

Al assisting handstand

So once you can kick up into a handstand, or perform any other calisthenics position, exercise or hold, how do you know that you are improving?

As you progress there are subtle things that you will observe. It’s not just whether you can hold the progression or do a number of repetitions that is important as you work towards mastery. And sometimes it can be really hard to know if you are improving or not.

Here are five questions to ask yourself in any of your exercises in order to gauge your progress:

How does it feel?

First, how hard do you feel like you are working on a scale of 1-10? This is known as the rate of perceived exertion (or the Borg scale or RPE) and ultimately we would like it to be a 6 or lower (10 being the highest). In other words, the hold or repetitions should feel “moderately easy” before you move onto a harder progression.

Similarly, I believe a progression generally isn’t achieved unless the participants perceived exertion level is a 7 or lower on a scale of 1 to 10, while their rate of perceived technique is a 7 or higher. And a rate of perceived discomfort (10 being agony and 1 being insignificant annoyance) should be no higher than a 3 out of 10, and there should certainly be no pain. Once all these things are roughly in line, then we are ready to move along to the next level as some proficiency has been achieved. If you feel you have plateaued at a certain number of reps or time for a hold, look for these three parameters. You are probably improving and didn’t even know it!

Matt Beecroft pistol squat

How is your breathing?

Here’s my best advice on breathing: don’t stop! Breathing is a big indicator of a person’s overall comfort level. When a participant is in fear or working at the edge of their threshold, they will typically inhale and hold their breath, bracing the body. This is a high threshold training strategy and it’s not typically sustainable for longer sets or holds. When breathing is synchronous with the movement performed, we have moved into a higher level and are one step closer to mastery of an exercise. If your breathing is comfortable and controlled, you are winning!

Are you in control?

Calisthenics is all about being able to control your body. If we look at the example of the handstand, many people are very heavy whilst kicking up and coming down from the wall. Being able to come into a position and out of a position softly, slowly and with ease shows true movement competency. When learning the handstand, kicking up against the wall too hard teaches you to over-kick, which will make learning the freestanding handstand more difficult.

As skills progress, your body awareness improves as does your awareness of your surroundings. This may mean your ability to gauge your distance from a wall correctly, or a fellow practitioner (scissor kicking someone in the head while coming down from a handstand is never a good move.) So if your calisthenics are becoming more controlled, and you are becoming more aware of your body and your training environment, then you are certainly improving.

partner headstand

Do you need a lot of preparation time or recovery?

What you will notice is that as you continue to work your calisthenics, the soreness and stiffness you once experienced isn’t the same. The body is an adaptive survival machine and it gets efficient quite quickly, so recovery from exercises you are used to doing is more expedient.

Secondly, as our skills improve we need less time to prepare the body. It has always amazed me that masters can often just go into a position, hold or perform repetitions or display amazing skill with no prior preparation – the body just “knows” it. That’s not to say they don’t warm up or do preparation work but the skill is performed on command. So as you progress in your training you will feel that you can move into a hold or do a certain number of reps when you feel like it without all the preparation, and depending on what your training entails, your recovery will be quicker too. This means you are making progress!

Is it repeatable?

To go back to our example of the handstand, being able to hold a consistent and repeatable 10 second handstand is what I consider actually being able to do a handstand. Not a fluke hold for a second or two depending on which direction the wind is blowing.

An “on command” and consistently repeatable 30 second freestanding handstand is considered a benchmark before moving onto more advanced balancing variations by many professional hand balancers. This is considered to be an amateur balancer!

Some days or weeks you will feel like you are not progressing at all, and then others you will feel like you are really getting somewhere. There are going to be lots of peaks and valleys that will be part of your journey. It is all just feedback. Please don’t worry about failure with your training. Often when you feel you aren’t getting anywhere or you have plateaued, is often where you are learning most. Just keep on turning up. It is all about the positive mental attitude.

Matt Beecroft L-sit

If you look for these markers of improvement listed above, you may be more dialed into the subtleties of your training, which in itself is a form of growth. Progress is not always set, rep or time orientated. It’s not always about the numbers!

There will be light bulb moments in your training but the real magic is in the small improvements from day to day, week to week and month to month. Learning calisthenics is never a linear progression. If you are like me, longevity is the ultimate goal and this is measured in years, not workouts.

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Matthew Beecroft is a PCC Team Leader, Senior RKC, and CK-FMS certified instructor. He is also a GFM and Animal Flow instructor and Expert Level 2 instructor with Krav Maga Global and a Muay Thai coach who has trained amateur and professional Muay Thai champions. He can be contacted through his website www.realitysdc.com.au or his Facebook page facebook.com/MeetLifeHeadOn

Six Reasons to Start Your Workouts With Unilateral Calisthenics

December 6, 2016 By Eric Buratty 4 Comments

unilateralcalisthenics1

Quick quiz!

What’s the one thing missing from most fitness programs that translates into extraordinary progress?

Ice Cream
More Posterior Chain Work
Single-Sided Bodyweight Exercises
Chipotle
A Good Workout Partner

While a case could probably be made for any of these choices, the answer that has the greatest return on your time investment is C. Single-Sided Bodyweight Exercises.

Behold, The Domino Effect: One Side Fits All

Also known as unilateral movements, focusing on one side at a time with the upper or lower extremities has been shown to play a key role in promoting equilibrium, transforming mental and physical ideals into reality, overcoming current health setbacks, and preventing future issues from happening. These positive changes are especially noticeable when you consider the value of starting your workout on a high note with such moves—which is arguably the most important habit you can develop to increase workout productivity.

If there is such a promising range of benefits from their application, why don’t we see more single-sided exercises being performed by others on a regular basis?

Well, there are three understandable reasons why some fitness gurus still don’t prescribe one-sided exercises in their training programs. The total number of repetitions take more overall time to perform (which can lead to impatience), they don’t allow the practitioner to add a sexy amount of external load (which can influence ego), and they’re significantly more challenging on both the mind and body to perform (which can make poor form inevitable). This puts many well-informed coaches in a tough position when it comes to attracting new business and ultimately selling their training philosophy.

The good news is, no matter where you’re at right now in your fitness journey, you can have the best of both worlds—catering to both your wants AND your needs—by including unilateral calisthenics movements in the first half of every workout. The following list vivifies the healthy domino effect of this “one side fits all” training strategy—meaning that, once one of these motives is set in place, you will set off a chain reaction for the rest. Hopefully after going through this list, you too will find new motivation or be able to put previous advice into healthier perspective by balancing movement from both sides of the body more effectively.

Train and Recover Smarter

The cool thing about training one side of the body at a time is that it encourages you to do more work without exceeding your capacity to recover. More specifically, once you become aware of which side is less strong, you have a few options for splitting up the total volume (i.e. reps) more evenly. For example, you could begin working your non-dominant side while you are more energetic, and finish on your stronger side to elicit a healthier adaptation response. You might also find alternating between sides throughout a given “set” to be beneficial—particularly when performed with a “flow” mindset. Finally, you could split up the work into halves, thirds or quarters depending on your target number of reps. As long as you sustain a quality over quantity mindset, you can really use one-sided movements to your advantage.

Eric Buratty raised lunge

Improve Core Strength

Having visible abs is considered the holy grail in the field of “bro science.” However, don’t neglect your glutes, back muscles and psoas muscle group when training your entire core. Fortunately, unilateral calisthenics moves take all the guesswork out of the equation, allowing you to turn on these key muscle areas when they matter most: when you’re OUTSIDE of the gym and NOT in a workout state of mind. The best set of cues I’ve used as an instructor to help others work their core more effectively is to turn on their glutes (an internal cue) and then pretend like they’re about to get punched in the stomach (an external cue)—before doing anything. Being able to do this without thinking about it (i.e. create a habit out of applying core strength) will ultimately contribute to further longevity.

Cultivate Mobility, Joint Health & Overall Movement Quality

Mobility is defined as the ability to move a joint or a series of joints actively through a range of motion that encourages a healthy interaction between muscles, joints and the central nervous system. So you are not just passively increasing the range-of-motion for muscles that lack full flexibility, but you are using exercise as a tool to move your joints actively while simultaneously improving strength. If these words are a bit too complex to digest, just take any lunge variation—a unilateral lower body move—as a simple example. Holding the bottom of that lunge position will obviously increase hip flexibility, but when performed dynamically (i.e. for reps), you will also give the hips an opportunity to make the position “stick” for next time you practice the move, allowing strength & stability to settle in better. Ideally, you’ll want to include both isometric and dynamic style reps as part of any sustainable training program—always ending your practice on a high note for medicinal-like effects. By using unilateral calisthenics moves as mobility insurance, you’ll unlock new gains in movement quality and correct left & right muscle asymmetries because you’ll truly be moving your joints in every way, every day. Just remember this equation the next time your progress seems to have stalled: Strength + Flexibility = Mobility.

Eric Buratty unilateral exercises

Activate Your Nervous System

How many high-threshold muscular units does it take to stimulate muscle growth? Ideally, you’ll want to fire up as many as possible. In order to make this happen, though, you must first activate the neural pathways to your fast-twitch muscle fibers. Two-sided explosive strength and power training (with and/or without load) is an extremely effective way to do this. But what if you’re not ready for that style of training yet? Well, you have a few options. Your first option is to do absolutely nothing about it, and continue being weak and lame. Your second option is to start familiarizing your body with exercise through cardiovascular and weighted machines at a commercial gym. Your third and final option is to explore progressions and regressions for unilateral calisthenics moves. I don’t know about you, but that last option sounds the most fun and rewarding to me.

Just imagine for a moment what it would be like as a gymnast—being able to turn on an extremely high percentage of the muscles in your body. At that level of body tension, your muscles really have no choice but to display superhuman strength and build lean body mass. Back to reality, you can create similar opportunities for physiological gains by working one arm or one leg at a time because the nervous system has no choice but to send electrical pulses from head to toe to close any energy leaks. In this context, energy leaks are the same as leverage—which dictates how much effort you’ll be able to apply before form starts to break down. For beginners and taller/long-limbed individuals, unilateral calisthenics training will offer an even more distinguished neural activation effect—due to their experience level and anatomy, respectively.

Eric Buratty crawling exercise

Increase Energy Expenditure

It’s kind of hard not to burn a ton of calories while being more athletic. More specifically, while training for strength, speed or power on one side at a time, the demand for hormonal adaptations is quite high. This heightened hormonal response leads to some favorable changes in energy expenditure and body composition that are commonly associated with active people in general—such as elevated insulin sensitivity, lower cortisol, optimized growth hormone and thyroid secretion, along with a healthy balance between testosterone and estrogen output. However, what separates unilateral resistance training from most other forms of exercise is the additional amount of time, space and force that’s required to execute such moves. This basically means that more range of motion is covered for every rep—which significantly reflects your mobility.

Look Cool, Have More Fun!

At the end of the day, being able to have fun while working out is what it’s all about. ‘Cause if you’re not having fun, you won’t do it. Period. While everyone’s definition of fun may be slightly different, I think we can all agree that looking cool can play a healthy role in having fun. So, even if you currently suck at unilateral training or it’s not your favorite training strategy, keep in mind that we all need to start somewhere. Just because these benefits exist does not mean you have to totally ditch your bilateral movements, either. Besides, there’s a strong chance that you can already do something pretty cool that even Olympic-medal athletes or your favorite celebrity cannot do—whether fitness related or not. Start facing your weaknesses today before they turn into tomorrow’s health problems.

Eric Buratty One leg bridge

Summary of Unilateral Training Recommendations – To Infinity And Beyond!

Now that you have the motives behind the Who, What, Where, When and Why of unilateral calisthenics training, let’s recap with the three most practical ways for How you can get started today.

Perform unilateral calisthenics along with your 10-15 minute full-body warm-up.
Perform one 45-minute workout per week exclusively dedicated to unilateral calisthenics movements.
Perform unilateral calisthenics movements for preventative maintenance–once or twice a month for tune-up purposes or year-round for complimenting your other bilateral workout programs and rebuilding your body all together.

Do you have a favorite unilateral calisthenics move? How about a unique exercise modification to the various progressions and regressions commonly practiced? Drop any questions, comments or wisdom you’d like to share below, and I’ll be sure to address them soon. Thanks for reading!

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Eric “E-Rock” Buratty is the health & fitness coordinator at MMA & Sport, located in Damascus, MD. When he’s not fine-tuning his own awesome core strength, he teaches fitness enthusiasts of all levels how to achieve their goals. Eric offers both individualized sessions and group classes, creates evidence-based health content for websites and blogs and offers expert tips on how to prevent and manage diet—for lifestyle-related health issues. To learn more about Eric, feel free to connect with him on his Facebook page.