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Progressive Calisthenics - The Official Blog for the PCC Community

Kavadlo brothers

Taking The GET STRONG Transformation Challenge

May 16, 2017 By John Du Cane, CEO and founder, Dragon Door 26 Comments

John Du Cane Pull-Ups Get Strong Transformation Challenge
John Du Cane comes off the bench to help John Du Cane with the Get Strong Phase 3 Pull-up and Chin-up sets.

What mechanism acts as both the Great Protector of our health and well-being—while often acting as the Great Saboteur of our attempts at physical transformation?

That mechanism would be Homeostasis:

  1. “The tendency of a system, especially the physiological system of higher animals, to maintain internal stability, owing to the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus that would tend to disturb its normal condition or function.”
  2. “A state of psychological equilibrium obtained when tension or a drive has been reduced or eliminated.”

As the cliché goes, we are creatures of comfort. We seek to minimize pain and to quickly eliminate any perceived threat to that comfort. Without this overriding tendency, of course, our internal systems would collapse—as they de-regulate into a chaos of conflicting and unbalanced energies.

But when we seek to transform ourselves physically, the whole construct has to shift. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Now, we have to deliberately, savagely, nastily traumatize our own bodies—to shock them into change…

We have to willfully terrorize ourselves out of the sloth of our addiction to ease…

Far from reducing or eliminating tension and drive, we need to psych ourselves up into an unreasonable quest for dis-comfort, dis-equilibrium—and a kind of planned mayhem. We freaks of fitness storm the barricades of complacent physical mediocrity—and to hell with the naysayers and stay-at-home couch potatoes…

However, all this savagery of intent still screams for proper leadership. Whatever the fire burning in your belly, you’ll go nowhere fast if you don’t have wise guidance from fitness experts who are true masters of their game.

Otherwise we become a foolish, disorganized rabble, our dreams of physical transformation derailed by misinformation and false promises.

And here’s the great beauty of a well-organized, well-planned transformation program: it helps jump us out of the rut of our normal meandering exercise patterns. Instead of two steps forward, three steps sideways, one step back, woops, two more steps back, yikes, half a step forward and so on—boom, we suddenly have our marching orders, a goal to achieve, fire in our eyes, confidence in our hearts, competitive juices flowing and a sense of driving purpose.

30 perfect Feet Elevated Push-ups can be surprisingly demanding
30 perfect Feet Elevated Push-ups can be surprisingly demanding

Now—against all the homeostatic odds—we can embrace the pain-drenched ecstasy of the struggle for physical glory. And succeed, right? 🙂

Get Strong is exactly that well-organized, well-planned, proven program you can count on to effect the changes you desire. You can do it on your own, of course, but why not join forces with other bodyweight exercise enthusiasts?

So, when Al and Danny Kavadlo created their Get Strong 16-Week Transformation Program, we thought it would be perfect to include a community contest to help motivate us all to give this thing our best possible shot. We can join forces with a bunch of fellow maniacs, urging each other forward, come what may…

While waiting for the printed copies of Get Strong to arrive from China, I decided to preview the Transformation Program myself. Almost without any exception I train alone: bodyweight exercise, kettlebells and Chen Tai Chi. Mostly in my office. This is all well and good, but this solitary training has its pitfalls—as I quickly realized once I embarked on the Program. I will describe my experience below, but first, here’s the contest we devised:

To qualify:

  1. Submit one or more Before photos taken within three days of beginning the contest.
  2. Submit one or more After photos taken with three days of completing the 16-week contest.
  3. Submit an article detailing your performance progress through the Get Strong program, beginning with the Phase 1 Test as the baseline.

Entries can be submitted up to October 30, 2017, sent to support@dragondoor.com
Winners will be announced November 15, 2017.

Judges: Al Kavadlo, Danny Kavadlo and John Du Cane.

Grand Prize: $500 in cash, one free RKC or PCC workshop, interview, dedicated PCC blog piece.
Next four best entries: Interview, $300 off any Dragon Door workshop.
Next fifteen best entries: $100 off any Dragon Door workshop.

We have also set up a private Facebook group The Get Strong Transformation Challenge. Purchase the book and we will automatically invite you to join or accept your request to do so.

My experience with the first three phases of the Get Strong Program

The First Phase is called The Foundation—and it is literally that. Raw newbies would need the full four weeks, if not additional weeks, to be able to test out. The thing though about all the Phases, is the inclusion of one or more exercises that you may have been neglecting in your own practice.

John Du Cane Handstand
A work in progress on my Wall Handstand—some technical tightening needed on that left elbow…

At age 68, my current biggest vulnerabilities are my elbows and my right knee. I had reduced my pull-up practice because of tendinitis in those elbows, so I definitely felt the one-minute Active Hang part of the Phase 1 test. Those tendons were letting me know of their existence… Yes, I tested out with ease overall, but I realized Phase 2 was going to up the pain factor by a fair amount.

Phase 2 is called Brick and Mortar. I did NOT pass the Phase 2 test at the end of the four weeks and had to repeat Weeks 3 and 4. The villain was the Wall Handstand. Amazingly, I had never practiced handstands in my life. Strange, but there it is… So, I entered Phase 2 a handstand virgin and paid the price. The test requires a 60-second hold. I made it to 55 seconds! An undoubted weakness that I have enjoyed confronting in Phase 3—which requires two sets of 60 seconds in Week 4.

Did I have any other problems with Phase 2? For the testing, probably the toughest part was only being allowed one minute between each exercise. Those who have taken the Century at the PCC would appreciate the energetic demands of completing 30 Push-ups, 10 Chin-ups, 20 Hanging Knee Raises and 40 Squats plus an additional four exercises with just one minute rest between each…

On to Phase 3, Concrete and Iron, where things start to get more challenging for sure…

Phase 3 is where both my elbows and my right knee asserted themselves. Phase 3 introduces Assisted One Leg Squats and Bulgarian Split Squats. As a former sprinter and longtime martial artist my legs have been my strong point—pistols for instance were never a problem. However, for quite a while now, I have stopped doing unilateral leg work—and have just done regular squats or double-kettlebell squats. It was a shock to discover how much weaker my right leg was than my left. I have enjoyed the challenge of fixing that—big time.

Combining relatively high reps of Assisted One-Legged Squats and Bulgarian Split Squats is not the breeze you might think it to be…
Combining relatively high reps of Assisted One-Legged Squats and Bulgarian Split Squats is not the breeze you might think it to be…

My elbows are really squawking from attempting 2 sets of 10 Pull-ups, plus 2 sets of 10 chin-ups plus 3 sets of Hanging Straight Leg Raises—mixed in with other arm-intensive drills in close succession to each other. Here, I am straight-out being sensible. From bitter experience, I know that pushing into the realm of tendinitis will be highly counterproductive to future progress… There is good, constructive pain, then there is foolish, destructive pain… So I am going to take the time I need to advance without injury, whatever pace that might require.

John Du Cane Hanging Leg Raises
3 sets of 10 reps. I don’t feel this in my abs, but I sure feel it in my arms…

The most challenging new exercise for me in Phase 3 has been the Feet Elevated Pike Push-up. I had never performed this move in my life other—so another hump to surmount.

To succeed with the Get Strong Program, particularly when you are older, proper recovery is essential. I have become acutely conscious of needing that much more sleep, that much more rest and that much cleaner a diet. To that end, I have found Wim Hof’s ice therapy and breath-holding exercises immensely helpful. A very recent and wonderful addition to recovery has been my discovery of the Air Relax dynamic compression system. It’s hard to truly quantify, but I believe it has cut the recovery time for my leg work by perhaps as much as 50%. Exciting…

All in all, test-driving the Get Strong Transformation Program has been an exhilarating personal experience for me—and I have been immensely enjoying the additional strength I have gained from a religious adherence to the Kavadlo Brothers’ blueprint.

I hope many of you join me in taking the challenge—and I look forward to hearing your stories down the road!

Filed Under: Contest, Motivation and Goals, Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: bodyweight exercise, calisthenics, Get Strong, Get Strong Transformation Challenge, John Du Cane, Kavadlo brothers

Kavadlo Brothers’ Calisthenics Arms Workout

April 11, 2017 By Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo 20 Comments

Al and Danny Kavadlo Calisthenics Arms Workout
Fans of progressive calisthenics know that you don’t need weights to pump up your arms. With nothing more than your own bodyweight and a few bars, you can blast your guns without any external resistance.

Though you won’t find any dumbbell curls or triceps push-downs in this workout, the following exercises will blow up your biceps and triceps, and help you carve out cannonball delts. In addition to your arms, this simple sequence will actually hit your entire upper body – even your abs. When you perform exercises that employ compound movements, it’s easy to target multiple muscle groups at once.

If you are unable to complete this workout as written, you may add additional sets in order to complete the same total number of reps. For example, when the workout calls for 3 sets of 10 reps, you can modify it by doing 6 sets of 5 reps (or 10 sets of 3 reps) in order to make the workout more manageable. You may also substitute a different variation of an exercise if you need to, such as pike push-ups instead of handstand push-ups.

Aim to perform the exercises in sequence with approximately 60-90 seconds of rest in between each set, though you may also try performing this workout as a circuit, if you are looking to enhance its cardiovascular benefits.

Close Push-up
Start in a push-up position, only with your hands closer together. Bend your arms and lower your chest toward the floor, keeping your elbows fairly close to your sides. Pause briefly with your chest approximately one inch from the ground, then press yourself back to the top. The close position of the hands places additional emphasis on the triceps.

3 x 20 reps

Chin-up
Hang from a bar with an underhand grip, then pull yourself up until your chin clears the bar. Avoid shrugging your shoulders, bending your knees, or using any momentum. Lower yourself back to the bottom position with control as well. This exercise works the entire upper body, while the underhand grip places additional emphasis on the biceps.

3 x 10 reps

Handstand Push-up
Kick up into a handstand against a wall. Look in between your hands, bend your arms and lower your head toward the ground. Pause briefly when your nose touches the floor, then press yourself back to the top. The handstand push-up is the ultimate calisthenics exercise for the shoulders.

3 x 10 reps

Aussie Pull-up
Get down under a bar that’s about waist height with your legs extended in front of you to form a straight line from the back of your head to your heels, then pull your chest toward the bar. Pause briefly at the top, with your chest approximately 1-2 inches from the bar, then lower yourself back to the bottom with control. Aussie pull-ups work the entire upper-body with emphasis on the biceps and mid-back.

3 x 10 reps

Parallel Bar Dip
Position yourself upright between two parallel bars with your feet off the floor. Bend from your shoulders and elbows, lowering yourself until your elbows are bent to at least 90 degrees. Pause briefly at the bottom, then press yourself back to the top. Parallel bar dips will finish off whatever is left of your triceps, shoulders and chest.

3 x 20 reps

Watch the video below for more:

***

Al and Danny Kavadlo are Master Instructors for Dragon Door’s Progressive Calisthenics Certification. The Kavadlo Brothers have authored several internationally-acclaimed, bestselling books, including their latest, Street Workout, and have been translated into over a dozen languages. They have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and Men’s Health, and are both regular contributors to Bodybuilding.com.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, arms workout, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, PCC, progressive calisthenics, upper body, upper body workout, workout, workout video

Partner Calisthenics: It’s Still Bodyweight Training!

June 28, 2016 By Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo 13 Comments

Kavadlo Brothers Front Levers

We’ve often said that the possibilities are limitless when it comes to bodyweight training. Beyond all of the variations and combinations of calisthenics exercises that can keep one busy for a lifetime, the realm of partner bodyweight training opens up an entirely new avenue to explore. Though we recommend a solid foundation in bodyweight basics like push-ups, pull-ups and squats before attempting these moves, once you have established a baseline of strength and body awareness, you can have fun playing with these partner variants.

When performing coordinated bodyweight exercises in tandem with another human being, the proprioceptive challenges are increased, and you are forced to pay extra attention not only to your own movements, but those of your partner as well. The following exercises are all about communication and working as a team. Both parties must use their entire bodies in distinct ways to achieve success in this arena. Remember to switch roles with your partner when practicing these exercises, as each person’s role is different within each move and experiencing both sides of the equation will lead to a more well rounded training session.

So grab a friend and let’s get started! Hey hey hey – it’s still bodyweight training!

Human Flag and Human Flag Pole
This is the exercise that the Kavadlo brothers first became known for in the Dragon Door community. We appeared on the cover of Paul Wade’s Convict Conditioning 2 performing this feat which went on to become a signature exercise for us. The book also went on to become one of Dragon Door’s best-selling titles and has since been published in nearly a dozen languages. People all over the world have now seen this iconic image immortalized on that infamous cover.

German Convict Conditioning

The human flag is impressive enough when performed on a steel pole, but when it’s performed on another human being it is even more amazing!

At first glance, it’s easy to discern that the flagger has some extra work on his hands. Obviously, no one’s skin is completely taut, no matter how hard they train, so the flagger must constantly adjust his grip—and many other nuances—to the uncontrollable wavering of his partner’s skin.

The flagger must also be extremely conscious of where he places his hands. The lower hand should be placed close to the foot to maximize stability. If you put it too high, not only will you put yourself in a mechanically disadvantageous position, you may snap your partner’s shinbone!

The partner being flagged upon (the human flag pole) faces an enormous task as well. First of all, you’ve got to be as solid as a rock—both physically and in your mental focus—for someone to flag off of you. Secondly, be prepared to subtly lean away from the flagger as they lift their feet off the ground to get into position. Failure to counter the flagger’s weight will result in both of you toppling over. Extend your free arm to help strike a balance.

Reverse Human Flag and Human Flag Pole
Though still a challenging move in its own right, this “foot flag” variant can be more suited to intermediate level practitioners than the previous incarnation. Unlike the original human flag and human flag pole combination that put us Kavadlos on the map, which is harder than it looks, this variant is actually less difficult than it may appear.

Kavadlo Brothers Partner Calisthenics

Begin by having the person who will be the “pole” stand with feet together and knees partially bent. The flagger will then proceed to hold their partner’s hand(s) for stability as they step one foot up on top to their partner’s thighs. (Try to keep your feet low down on your partner’s thighs and close to the knees for a more solid foundation.) From there, the flagger will carefully slide their opposite foot behind their partner’s head (the partner can use his or her hand to help) and begin extending the body outward, while actively flexing that foot toward the partner’s neck for stability. When both people are ready, you may slowly begin to release the hands.

As with the previous variation, the person acting as the pole must lean in the opposite direction of the flagger in order to provide a counterbalance. It is important that the partner lean back from the hip and extend from the back, rather than solely at the knees, to provide the right leverage for this balance.

Partner Shoulder Stand
For those of you who feel that the previous exercises may be too advanced, the partner shoulder stand can be a slightly less intimidating place to start.

Begin on your back, with both arms in the air above your shoulders. Lift your feet with your knees bent to around 90 degrees, then have your partner stand below you and grab the tops of your shins. From there, they will lower their upper traps/shoulders into your hands and begin shifting their weight forward off of their feet. Keeping your elbows locked, press away from your chest like you are locking out a push-up as your partner shifts their weight entirely into your hands. The person on top should aim to get their hips in the air above their shoulders, eventually lifting themselves into a full inversion, supported only on the knees and hands of the other person.

Partner Shoulder Stand

Biceps Curl Front Lever
This is the feat that we can be seen performing on the cover of our new ebook Street Workout. While the standard front lever is already a difficult bodyweight challenge in its own right, performing it while hanging from the arm of another human being can pose an additional challenge.

First and foremost, the person acting as the base must keep a solid footing. From there, bend at the biceps of the arm to be levered upon until your forearm is parallel to the ground. Be prepared to keep complete body tension all over, particularly in this arm, as it will be supporting the entire weight of your partner.

At this point, the person performing the front lever needs to grip said forearm with all the strength he or she can muster. A mixed grip (overhand/underhand combo) is recommended to combat the elasticity of the skin. As is the case with the aforementioned Human Flag and Human Flag Pole, a bar is much more rigid than the epidermis. Now both partners need to maintain tension in the arms, abs, legs, glutes and shoulders as the party performing the front lever moves into position, keeping their arms locked out at the elbow and body parallel to the ground, while maintaining a straight line from shoulders to hips to feet.

It’s very common for people to inadvertently fold at the hips when attempting the front lever. Do your best to avoid this pitfall by looking at your toes to make sure you are maintaining a straight line from shoulders to heels. Smiles and scowls optional.

Street Workout eBook

These exercises are just the tip of the iceberg. Watch the video below for more!

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics, Tutorial Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, calisthenics, Convict Conditioning Vol 2, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, partner calisthenics, partner exercises, partner training, progressive calisthenics, street workout

STREET WORKOUT is Here!

June 14, 2016 By John Du Cane, CEO and founder, Dragon Door 48 Comments

Danny Kavadlo and Al Kavadlo

Life is mysterious. Small acts blaze up into wild firestorms. The glimmer of a slight desire transforms into an incandescent passion that seems to light the world. A single thought triggers a raging torrent of ideas. A casual encounter leads to the deepest of bonds. The force of creation sparks new patterns of beauty and insight. Webs of interconnection form beneath the surface of our understanding.

We wonder why we do what we do, from where we came and to where we go…

Of such stuff has been my friendship with two remarkable men, the brothers Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo…

It was Paul Wade who nudged the Kavadlos into my consciousness for the first time. A couple of rangy, flamboyant, tat-drenched, muscular misfits who decked out Convict Conditioning 2 with their calisthenic stylings. Their Human Flag—set in the same Alcatraz rec yard once haunted by Al Capone and The Birdman—signaled that a new band had crashed the stage…

Convict Conditioning Vol 2

And it was Paul Wade again who made the next nudge—recommending Al’s writing to me and suggesting that I consider publishing him. So I checked Al out…

What I discovered was not just Al himself, but a whole nother world…

I discovered that Al was an artist whose preferred medium is his own body. Calisthenics means “beautiful movement” and Al re-creates himself daily, on that basis, as on ongoing artwork. Now, artworks need a setting in which to best display themselves—and that setting becomes an extension of the artwork. In his case, Al chooses to display himself against the gritty graffiti, scaffolding and distressed brick of down-and-dirty, “street” NYC. Al’s favorite workout spot? Tompkins Square Park—where the doors have been ripped off the toilets to cut down on the fix-traffic of local junkies…

As part of his art, Al cultivates a smiling, happy Zen-guy look—even when performing some of the toughest moves on the planet, like the one-arm pull-up or the front lever. Yet simmering beneath that Zen smile is a fierce will, a formidable drive and a fanatical commitment to doing things just right. As with almost all great performers, Al’s rust never sleeps…

That other world that Al is a portal to? That would be the culture and international network called “Street Workout”. If Al’s immediate setting is New York, his global context can be defined by those two words…He and his brother Danny represent the street workout ethos to the max. Their book, Street Workout, is not only a paean to this movement but is sure to become that movement’s Bible…

Street Workout Book Cover

As a publisher with a passion to share the best-of-the-best when it comes to the realm of physical cultivation, I like to work with authors who are the “complete package”. The author as “complete package” combines many, many attributes: they bring innovation and insight to the table. They are creative, thorough and inquisitive. They walk their talk and look the part. They are natural leaders. They are relentless and skilled self-promoters. Their writing style scintillates with their individual, distinct, differentiated voice. They have a strong and loyal following. They know their stuff inside out, but remain open to new ideas and input. They are passionate about every aspect of their craft and their physical practice. And finally, they are a joy to work with.

Rare to find? Yes. Very. Tall order? Yes. Very. Got some such “complete packages”? Why…yes, yes, I do…and Al Kavadlo is one of them…

So I both applaud myself and feel fortunate to have taken Paul’s hint and signed on Al as a Dragon Door author. Talk about small acts that blaze up into firestorms… We have gone on to publish a series of wonderful titles with Al: Raising the Bar, Pushing the Limits, Stretching Your Boundaries and Zen Mind, Strong Body. And now, the monumental Street Workout he has co-authored with brother Danny…

It’s not much of a surprise, then, that when Paul Wade and I were looking for a natural born leader for our Progressive Calisthenics Certification (PCC) program, we chose Al… who in turn recruited Danny to fellow-preach the new bodyweight exercise gospel.

Right from the get-go Al and Danny knocked the PCC ball out of the park. From its launch in June 2013, the PCC has become the undisputed gold standard for calisthenics training—nothing else comes close. And there is no question in my mind that it will remain THE place to go for the finest bodyweight exercise instruction, globally. Al and Danny’s deep passion, humility, care, graciousness, kindness, knowledge and skill have inspired hundreds upon hundreds of practitioners to go forth and spread the good word about the wonders of calisthenic cultivation. It’s a great thing to behold…

Al Kavadlo Pull-Up Demo UK PCC

Street Workout is saturated with the vibe and brilliant teachings I have experienced from Al and Danny at every workshop I have attended. And you’ll see phenomenal photographs taken in almost all the countries they’ve taught in, be it Italy, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, England, Australia, China, Holland or the USA… “Rich” doesn’t begin to describe the breadth and depth of the creative artistry of the illustrations—off the charts.

Now, one of the best things that has happened in my life is to count Mister Danny Kavadlo as a good friend—and to watch the rise and rise of this great man within the Dragon Door community. And how remarkable is it to have two brothers who can both live up to my “complete package” descriptor? Because Danny is most certainly also the “complete package”.

A perfect foil for Grandmaster Al, Danny’s menacing scowl, bristling musculature, stacked intensity and punkoid posturing belie a heart of gold and a deep-felt love for his fellow humans. When Danny does smile, he lights up the room. When Danny’s booming cadence penetrates the room with his urgent inflections, it’s an outright delight to watch the fire of his passion ignite his students. So good…so good…

And like brother Al, what a coach! Danny celebrates every achievement of every student with an infectious, ecstatic roar that rings with authentic excitement and happiness for their accomplishment. Like Al, Danny squeezes greatness from his clients with his care-infused observations and skillful cueing. No one interacts with Danny without leaving enriched…

Danny Kavadlo Teaching At PCC

Yes, Danny has his demons—don’t we all—but he is the ultimate celebrator of life. I have joked that Danny would see the worst situation as a “glass one-tenth full”—but mostly his glass appears to be more like “nine-tenths full”. Love it!

Danny is also a multifaceted artist, a creator, an instigator of transformation and a very literate gentleman. All three of his previous titles with Dragon Door, Everybody Needs Training, Diamond-Cut Abs and Strength Rules have shone with his distinct, flamboyant creativity. Danny knows how to plunge to the nitty-gritty of what’s really real in the fraud-filled fitness biz. He savages the flimflam of the supplement and packaged foods industry, in a way that is to-the-point, convincing and simultaneously amusing. He nails what you really need to do in your workouts to get real, lasting results—and keep on getting them.

And talk about “walking the walk”… Danny is a striding billboard for what the physical cultivation artist can achieve with calisthenics alone. Danny’s a specimen all right—but he radiates “hard-earned”. Brutally honest about all the training and diet follies he’s fallen for in his earlier years, Danny’s own body is his own best proof he’s got this training thing figured out finally!

Many years in gestation and many years in the making, Street Workout is the brothers’ first collaboration in print. The two of them are a rock star act at the PCC workshops. But a book is a whole nother kettle of fish… Each brother has their very distinct personality, writing style and presentation method. To successfully merge two great artistic talents into one cohesive text is a major feat.

Well, I’m here to report that the brothers have pulled it off…

Street Workout is one of those landmark titles that define a genre—the treasured lodestone and must-have reference for hardcore fans and raw beginners alike. The brothers bring it—and then some. I can tell that their trenchwork teaching at the dozens of worldwide PCCs, their previous experience authoring Dragon Door titles, their consistent engagement through blogs and articles with their constituency, and their constant absorption of new perspectives has elevated both their games to dizzying heights.

Al and Danny have listened well and grown accordingly. They have given and given so much—and have received back in equal measure. Street Workout is the fruit of that splendid dynamic.

Whether it be the section on foundational progressions for push, pull, squat, flex and bridge… Whether it be the section on the skills and “tricks” you need to achieve floor holds, bar moves and the human flag… Whether it be the section on programming that covers assessments, street workout and training templates…—all is systematically revealed, with a mix of clarity, precision, intelligence, creativity, humor and pizzazz that have become the brothers’ hallmark.

Congratulations on your masterpiece, Al and Danny—and thank you for being in my life…

John Du Cane
Founder and CEO, Dragon Door Publications

Street Workout Book Announcement

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, book release announcement, Danny Kaavadlo, Dragon Door Publications, John Du Cane, Kavadlo bros, Kavadlo brothers, street workout, Street Workout Book announcement

An Irish Blessing

May 13, 2014 By Danny Kavadlo 13 Comments

Blog.1Five days ago I boarded a plane to Ireland with my brother and fellow PCC Lead Instructor Al Kavadlo and Dragon Door CEO John Du Cane. It was uncharted territory for us and we did not know what to expect. This was Ireland’s first Progressive Calisthenics Certification. Not to mention the fact that we’d never been to the Strong Room or met our host Adrian Harrington. In fact, none of us had even been to Dundalk, Ireland. We were really going out on a limb with this one.

You could say we were “lucking” it.

Blog.2We got off the plane in the Land of a Thousand Welcomes, and rather fittingly were welcomed by Mr. Harrington himself. Looking into his smiling eyes, it took no more than a handshake and a few minutes to find out we were all kindred spirits. You see, in the world of body-weight training, there is a bond that exists which defies geography, history, even culture. There’s something special about the solidarity between calisthenics aficionados—we are connected, even when oceans apart. It seems that wherever we go, we stand united with our PCC brothers and sisters. The enthusiasm, dedication and purity bring us together from all around the globe, no matter what our roots. We’re all here for the same reason: to better ourselves and learn from each other. I love meeting people from different backgrounds, age groups and walks of life who share my passion. And the posse’s gettin’ bigger!

Adrian took us out to the lush, green, Irish countryside and served us a homemade breakfast of fresh eggs, “homegrown” ham, coffee (with butter!) and of course, homemade blood pudding, prepared fresh by his Mum. If you truly want to experience a culture, eat the food. We had never been here before, yet we felt right at home.

Blog.3When the workshop began the next day, it was déjà vu all over again. We could see that each and every one of the attendees, regardless of any differences in past history or present skill level, stood exactly where we stand. (Not to mention the fact that the Strong Room turned out to be one of the finest facilities I’ve ever practiced calisthenics.) We worked on push-ups, pull-ups, human flags and muscle-ups. In addition to the thrill of teaching these skills and the satisfaction of seeing so many PR’s (first muscle-ups, flags, one-arm push-ups and more), we got to make so many new friends. That’s the part you can’t really see on the internet. It can only be experienced firsthand.

Day two was even better. So many folks who were on the fringes of achieving the elusive back lever, one-legged squat and back bridge got to see their dreams become reality and so did we. Have I mentioned that I love my job?

In what felt like an instant, it was already Sunday, the third and final day of PCC. The pleasure of witnessing so many brand new inversions and elbow levers, the emotions running wild during Century testing and the tears of joy at the end of the day made it an experience none of us will ever forget. But it was is bitter-sweet; we shared so much with so many! Just two days ago, the people we met were perfect strangers, but now we see they were just like us all along. It’s so hard to say goodbye.

PCC Dundalk proved to be the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Blog.4We are thrilled to have made the trip and are looking forward to coming back. I await with anticipation the prospect of meeting more future members of our PCC family and doing it all over again. As the Irish saying goes, “Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb… that’s where the fruit is.”

***

Danny Kavadlo is one of the world’s most established and respected personal trainers. He is a Master Instructor of Progressive Calisthenics and the author of Everybody Needs Training: Proven Success Secrets for the Professional Fitness Trainer. A true in-person experience, Danny is known globally as a motivator and leader in the body-weight community. Learn more about Danny at: www.DannyTheTrainer.com.

Filed Under: Workshop Experiences Tagged With: Danny Kavadlo, Ireland PCC Workshop, Kavadlo brothers, motivation, outdoor training, PCC Workshop, Progressive Calisthenics Certification Workshop, skill training

PCC is Taking Over The World

April 29, 2014 By Al Kavadlo 52 Comments

PCC_ConventionCenterSignLast weekend my brother Danny and I led Dragon Door’s fifth-ever Progressive Calisthenics Certification along with PCC Team Leader Adrienne Harvey. With the rapid growth of the PCC, it’s amazing to think that it’s been less than a year since our first certification course last June in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In that time, we have certified nearly 200 trainers in 3 different continents. Every one of those new PCCs is now sharing their knowledge with others and spreading the word about calisthenics. It blows my mind sometimes to think about the impact that PCC has already had on the fitness world, but we are still just getting started!

In the months ahead we have workshops booked all over the world including Ireland, Germany, Holland and Egypt. It’s amazing to travel the globe teaching calisthenics, but I’m also very excited about my hometown gig in NYC this summer.

It’s beginning to feel like PCC is taking over the world!

PCC_St_Paul_2014_2

For our most recent certification, we returned to the Twin Cities. This time the event was held in Minneapolis at the city’s downtown convention center. Once again, an extremely impressive group of fitness enthusiasts, fanatics and aficionados showed up to hone their skills, inspire one another and attempt to take on The Century test to earn the title of PCC instructor. I’m proud to say that this group had our highest passing percentage yet since beginning the certification!

The caliber of candidates we’re seeing at each PCC seems to be continually improving. It’s an amazing feeling to be in a room with so many incredible bodyweight athletes who all have the same love for calisthenics. Everyone at PCC comes away with a unique experience, having both shared their own knowledge and received new ideas in return. We can all learn from one another and I am continually learning more myself each and every time we do the PCC.

If you’d like to attend (or host) a PCC event in your city, let us know in the comments section below. In the years ahead, we want to bring the PCC to as many places as possible! There’s nothing quite like the in-person experience of spending 3 intense calisthenics-filled days with other like-minded individuals.

We’re Working Out!

Al

PCC_St_Paul_2014_3
***
Al Kavadlo is the lead instructor for Dragon Door’s Progressive Calisthenics Certification. Recognized worldwide for his amazing bodyweight feats of strength as well as his unique coaching style, Al is the author of four books, including Stretching Your Boundaries,  Raising The Bar: The Definitive Guide to Pull-up Bar Calisthenics and Pushing The Limits! Total Body Strength With No Equipment. Read more about Al on his website:www.AlKavadlo.com.

 

Filed Under: Workshop Experiences Tagged With: Adrienne Harvey, Al Kavadlo, Century Test, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, Minneapolis, motivation, PCC Workshop, Progressive Calisthenics Certification Workshop, Twin Cities, Upcoming Workshops, world wide

The Bodyweight Revolution

April 15, 2014 By Paul "Coach" Wade 146 Comments

Al and Danny Kavadlo
The Kavadlo brothers are the face of
the Dragon Door bodyweight revolution!

If you have been keeping track of the fitness world over the last five years, you have definitely heard the term bodyweight revolution used by writers and teachers.

Lots of folks have used this term, but few—if any—have defined it.

To me, if there is a common theme behind the modern bodyweight strength revolution, it’s this:

Cutting edge athletes and coaches are starting to break down the distinction between bodyweight training and externally-weighted methods for adding strength and muscle mass.

What does that mean?

Well, up till fairly recently, the fitness “status quo” treated bodyweight training and, say, weight-training very differently. Weight-training was done to get ya big and strong as possible. To achieve this, you were supposed to follow three basic rules:

  1. Train hard for strength and mass. (A given. No pain, no gain, bitches!)
  2. Be progressive. (The goal is always: add weight to the bar!)
  3. Focus on load, not reps. (Folks will ask: how much can you bench? Not; how many reps?)

Fairly simple, huh?

And it worked, too. For the last fifty or so years, barbells and dumbbells have been the “go-to” method for bodybuilders and strength trainers alike. Some coaches and exercise ideologists have gotten so wrapped up in the romance of the iron, that they have told us that these tools are the only way to maximize muscle and power. (This is horseshit, but you know that already, right?)

Compare this model with bodyweight training. Over the last forty-plus years, personal trainers, writers and fitness coaches have been force-feeding the world with a philosophy of bodyweight training which is built on the following three principles:

  1. Train moderately for skill or conditioning. (e.g., soccer drills, circuit training)
  2. You can’t be progressive with load. (Sure, you can add weight to pullups, but then you are weight-training, right?)
  3. Build to high reps. (How many pushups can you do?)

Notice something? The bodyweight training principles are pretty much the diametric opposite of the weight-training principles! Why? Because it was figured that there was no point in treating calisthenics like a PROPER strength and muscle discipline, coz there was no way to make the load progressive. For this reason, bodyweight training ceased to be viewed as a power and strength method. It became relegated to a “fitness” method, or for a warm-up, prior to the weights. Worse still, it was viewed as a means for “light toning”. (Puke now, ye who have the buckets readied.)

Recent conditioning icons have shattered this illusion, and are actually bringing intelligent athletes round to the notion that you can break any bodyweight exercise into progressive chunks—all the way from easy rehab work, up to the hardest strength exercises know to mankind. I’m talking about revolutionary books like Al Kavadlo’s Pushing the Limits! and Raising the Bar; Brooks Kubik’s wonderful Dinosaur Bodyweight Training; and Pavel’s breakthrough Naked Warrior.

Bodyweight can’t build total-body strength? Give me a break!
Bodyweight can’t build total-body strength?
Give me a break!

This is the idea at the very heart of the modern bodyweight revolution. If you can use external weights progressively—in hard sessions designed to build load over time—why can’t you do the same using your body’s own weight? The answer is, of course, you can. You don’t need to treat bodyweight as a gymnastics or sports skill, or as a warm-up, or as a simple endurance discipline. You can do it progressively, just like weight-training. All you need is a solid understanding of the science of bodyweight progressions. And this is why the Progressive Calisthenics Certification (PCC) organization was born, to catalog and disseminate this traditional knowledge to anyone in the fitness world who wants it.

A lot of athletes—specially those already in the bodybuilding or powerlifting world—have taken this breakdown in the barriers between regular lifting and bodyweight training approach real literally. Hell, why not apply regular lifting templates to bodyweight training? This is what many have tried to do; and in this article I’ll discuss some ways of doing it. I’ll also show you a good alternative used by my own teacher, Joe Hartigen.

The CC-Style Template

When it comes to sets and reps, I generally prefer a real simple, old school, American-style double progression. You warm up with some fairly easy exercises, then hit your major technique hard for two-to-three sets. When you hit your rep goal, you move to a tougher exercise. Don’t go to failure—always leave a little energy left in your limbs to complete an exercise safely, or in case you need to defend yourself. That’s the Convict Conditioning approach—and trust me, it works just as well for weight-training as it does for calisthenics. Many old school bodybuilders and strength athletes have used this kind of program with great success—it’s not a million miles away from the sort of training performed by old school strength marvels like Doug Hepburn, or modern-day bodybuilding champions like Dorian Yates.

Dorian Hepburn
Hepburn—like all the ultra-strong old-timers—used bodyweight training alongside his lifting. He also trained infrequently, going all-out with low sets. Sound familiar?

Popular Strength/Mass Templates

Of course, there are other rep/set formats than the CC approach. Dozens. Here’s a roll-call of a few well-known ones:

  • The 5×5 system
  • Pyramid training
  • Ladders
  • Heavy singles

All of these popular weight-training approaches can be used with bodyweight—in fact, they are being used right now. But no method is perfect, and there are problems when applying these methods.

Using singles is a good example. A heavy singles workout might consist of, say 10 sets of 1 rep, using 85% of your max. This is pretty easy to accomplish if you are working with your bench press; but it’s a lot tougher to translate it to your bodyweight pushups. For a start, how do you define “85%” of effort accurately? Which pushup progression do you select? With the bench press, you can add a tiny increment, maybe 2lbs to the bar every so often. How do you add such microscopic increments to your pushup form? How do you maintain this system, long-term with such fuzzy variables? You are kinda pissing in the wind here.

A bigger problem with most training systems is that they waste the athlete’s precious energy. A really great rule of thumb in muscle and strength work is that the degree to which your body adapts is proportionate to the stress you put it through. But what athletes constantly forget is that the muscle-building and strength stimulus is based on your best set, it’s not spread over your other sets! As I’ve said elsewhere:

Paul_Blog4To put that shit simply, if you want to get diesel, you need to do a lot of work in a single, relatively brief set. Your peak set! Trouble is, a lot of athletes are in the habit of exhausting themselves before they reach that peak set.

Bodybuilding is possibly to blame for this. Back in the seventies and eighties, it was all about “pyramiding”; you would typically warm up with 15, 12, 10 and 8 reps before knocking out a few peak sets of 6-8—then you would reverse the process. (You go up in weight, then down, hence the term “pyramid”.) The problem with this was that by the time you had done the first four sets you were too shot to do very much in your peak sets! Then you would repeat all those lighter, higher-rep sets again, just adding more volume to eat into an already overloaded recovery system.

The same problem is true of the popular “ladders” method of training. With ladders, you start with one rep—say, a pullup—then take a short break, and do two pullups. Break, then three. All the way up to your peak set, of, say, five reps. Then you take a short breather, do four reps, then break, then three, and so on down to one rep. See the problem with this? If your peak/best set here is the five rep set, you will have already done TEN reps of that exercise before you reach it! If the five reps really represent your best, then doing ten reps of the same beforehand is definitely going to adversely affect your performance in the five. In essence, ladders are a good way of doing a lot of work, but a pretty imperfect way of doing high quality sets.

5×5 is a more traditional method—it was used by Arnold’s hero, Reg Park, back in the fifties.

Big Reg Park
Bodyweight back work: Big Reg Park
rocking some behind-the-neck pullups.

Park’s method was to use two warm-up sets of five, then three sets of five with the heaviest weight you can handle for a particular exercise. Once you can hit the 3×5, you go up in weight.

It’s a simple (and pretty effective) idea. The problem—in terms of hitting one great, “peak” set—is that it makes you hold yourself back. You are inevitably (even if only subconsciously) holding yourself back from giving your all on the first hard set, in order to get the five reps on the final two sets. You need to do this, because if you really gave your all grinding out five reps on the first heavy set, you would be pretty unlikely to be able to repeat that twice. So with 5×5 you never have the motivation to really give your all and hit that one peak set.

Enter the Mentor: Joe Hartigen

One template which doesn’t contain any of these problems was taught to me in the 1980’s by my mentor, Joe Hartigen. Joe was a bona-fide calisthenics master, and although he was in his seventies when I met him, he was much more powerful than me, and remained incredibly strong in pulling movements right up to the final year of his life. Joe had forgotten more about training methods and the history of physical culture than I will ever know, and I learned virtually all the progressions in Convict Conditioning from him.

Despite the fact that Joe was an icon to me—and several others in San Quentin—we didn’t train in exactly the same way. We had different backgrounds, for one thing. I came from a “new school” calisthenics approach, one based on building up high reps in squats, sit-ups, pullups and (especially) pushups. In fact I would often return to these high-rep workouts—often ultra-endurance bodyweight work—throughout my time inside, particularly in Angola. (Think “thousand pushup days” and you got the idea.)

Joe was very much a man who favored lower, more intense, higher quality reps. He typically shook his head when he looked at my training journals, and—likewise—I must admit that when I was younger and dumber, I possibly looked down on his methods as a bit old-fashioned. Like a cool photograph, but colored in sepia. In later years, I realized he was right on the money, and although I modified my own training to better match his thinking, our workout styles were never quite the same.

The Hartigen Method

When it came to sets and reps, Joe had a pretty fixed method for working out. I’ve never heard a name for this scheme, so I’m gonna call it The Hartigen Method (although there’s no way he was the first to use it). This approach is simple to apply, allows for the use of real hard exercises, and is progressive—so I thought I’d put it out there for any ex-lifters or strength athletes looking for a new way to work with bodyweight exercises.

Here’s how it works:

1. Pick the hardest exercise you can do for 5 reps in good form.

2. Warm up, and perform a 5 rep set.

3. Rest approximately 1 minute. Shake your muscles loose as you rest.

4. Perform 4 reps of the same exercise.

5. Rest approximately 1 minute. Shake your muscles loose as you rest.

6. Perform 3 reps of the same exercise.

7. Repeat this procedure until you have performed a single rep.

That’s it! In essence, Joe picked an exercise he could do five good, strict reps with, and did 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

It’s that simple. Joe’s theory was that if you could bust out five reps of an exercise you were working on, then after a minute’s rest, you should be able to do four reps. After another minute, you should be able to do three, and so on. Joe felt this rep scheme offered low reps for strength and muscle, but also enough reps—fifteen total—to give an athlete plenty of hard practice on an exercise, but without burning out.

Plus, using this method you can hit an exercise hard in under ten minutes. Even if you were working with four exercises in a workout (two or three would be better!) you could be done in half an hour. Joe’s method works great with weights, too—kettlebell presses and rows would be a wonderful superset, if you’re that way inclined. (5 presses, a minute’s rest, 5 rows, a minute’s rest, 4 presses, etc.) You could superset pushup and pullup exercises the same way.

Making progress
Progression couldn’t be simpler with this method. When you can do all 15 reps—that is, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—for three workouts in a row, you move to a slightly harder version of the exercise. As with all bodyweight strength, having an extensive toolbox of progressions is key to moving forward; it’s also why the PCC Instructors’ Manual includes hundreds of progressive exercises.

There will be times you don’t get 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You may only get 5, 3, 2, 1, 1. That’s fine, and to be embraced. When you don’t get the full 15, use these principles to move forward:

Try to add a rep (or two) next time; shoot for 5, 4, 2, 1, 1, then 5, 4, 3, 1, 1, and so on.

Whatever you get, always push yourself hard on the first set—that’s your peak set.

Adding reps on the earlier sets is more valuable than adding reps on the final sets.

Never do more reps than you are aiming for; stick with 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Aim to perform ALL five sets, even if those sets are very low rep; e.g., 3, 2, 1, 1, 1.

Exercises, post-set work and warm-ups

Joe often performed more exercises than I stuck to. Most people today would probably call his routine imbalanced. In particular, he loved hanging exercises, and would do all kinds of weird variations of pullups, leg raises, levers, holds and hangs. Strangely, despite being such an aficionado of hanging work, he would typically do only three exercises for the rest of his body—one-leg squats, flat one-arm pushups, and some kind of inversion; handstands, but often headstands (I rarely saw him do inverse pressing, these were typically static). I have watched Joe do bridges, and do them easily, but like the man himself, these were an exception rather than a rule.

Whatever his last exercise of the session was, Joe would often make his very final set harder by completing a ten second dynamic-tension isometric at the top position of that very last rep. He’d follow this with a slow negative of about ten seconds. He claimed that this little “trick” for finishing his workout told his body that the session was over, and increased his hormonal profile. I’m not sure that’s true, but if Joe’s physique—at over seven decades—was testament, then he knew what he was talking about.

Al Kavadlo Push-Up
No matter what exercise you finish with,
you can squeeze it at the top for an isometric benefit.

What about a warm-up? Interestingly—like Reg Park—Joe never went over five reps on his warm-up sets. He would typically do two or three warm-up sets of five reps, and he always applied Charles Atlas-style dynamic tension during his warm-ups. If he was doing an exercise like one-arm pullups, he would perform an exercise about half as tough on his warm-ups—two-arm pullups. Always five reps. Why not more? Joe felt that you should always train to meet your goals. His peak sets were always five reps, so he thought if he did more in his warm-ups, his body would get confused and start adapting to higher reps instead! I’m not certain I agree with that, but it gives you some food for thought, eh?

I often advocate using progressive exercises when warming up—maybe start with a real easy exercise for high reps, then follow with a slightly harder exercise for less reps. But Joe only ever used one exercise technique in his warm-ups, no matter how many warm-up sets he did. I used to wonder why, for example, he’d perform two sets of regular pullups before his one-arm work; why not one set of regular two-arms, then something harder, like assisted pullups? I asked him once. Because I can make the two-arms as hard as assisted pullups, dumbass! he replied. And it was true. His capacity to tense his muscles during training—dynamic tension—was so profound, he could make seemingly easy exercises as seem as hard as advanced ones. He was able to adjust the intensity of any exercise by 100% or 1%, just using the power of his mind.

That was how profound his body wisdom was. Not many athletes could aspire to this level, although it’s possible with time and patience. I still admire the man to this day!

Lights Out!

Well, that’s it from me. Thanks again for reading—it means a lot to this dopey fella that you guys and gals still take the time to read my weathered musings. I hope this article has given you a new idea to play with. Looking for a lower-rep strength and mass routine that fits well with bodyweight? Give The Hartigen Method a try…tonight!

Oh, and if you liked hearing about Joe’s attitude to training, check this article out. I wrote it for my good buddy Neil Bednar.

You could do a lot worse than modeling your training around old Joe’s philosophy. That brother was something else!

***

Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, bodyweight exercise, calisthenics, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, Paul Wade, PCC, PCC Workshop, Progressive Calisthenics Certification Workshop, pull-ups, push-ups, Raising the Bar, squats, strength training

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass: Part II

October 22, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 210 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part II

10comm1Part I of this article can be found here.

COMMANDMENT V: Focus on Progress—and Utilize a Training Journal!

Believe it or not, there are some folks who focus on the previous four Commandments—they exhaust their muscles, work hard, use the best exercises and put all their energy into a small number of sets—and still make very little in the way of meaningful gains. This is true even if they train year-to-year. Maybe this is you—I’m sure you know folks like this.

Why does this travesty happen?

Is it genetics? Is it the fact that they train without steroids? Is it because their balls haven’t dropped? Is it the fact that their gym doesn’t sell the latest superbolictastic high-sugar/high toxicity supps, bro?!

None of the above, Jim. To discover the true reason, read the following excerpt from the Convict Conditioning Ultimate Bodyweight Log:

If making progress in training is so simple, why do so few wannabe athletes ever achieve a good level of strength and muscle—let alone a great level?

The answer is that few trainees take advantage of the windows of opportunity their training presents to them. You see, when you work out, your body adapts to cope with the stress, but it only adapts a tiny little bit; this is especially true once you get beyond the beginner stages of training. Improvements are small—maybe you add a rep here; you improve your form there; you increase your recovery time somewhere else. Over months and years, however, these small increases eventually add up to very big increases. This is how seemingly “inhuman” athletes double and triple their strength, add inches of solid muscle, and transform themselves into superior physical beings.

Sadly, since most trainees aren’t paying attention to those tiny changes, they never build on them the way they should. These little weekly changes are actually windows of opportunity. If you could increase your strength by just 1% every week, you could more than double your strength in just two years. But most trainees never get anywhere close to doubling their strength, because they aren’t keeping track of their training accurately. They fail to recognize that 1% adaptation—the rep here, the improved form there. If you miss these little improvements, how can you build on them to make big improvements?

1% is actually a pretty small target to hit. When you rely on memory, instinct or feeling—as so many trainers do—to hit this target, it becomes very fuzzy. (Which is the last thing you want from small target, right?) Writing your progress down in a log makes this small target clear and easy to see. It makes it quantifiable. Athletes who begin writing simple log entries of their workouts find they suddenly know what they need to do to progress every single time they work out. They never miss that tiny 1%.

There you have it. In reality, the previous four Commandments are worthless unless you harness them all to make progress—week to week, month to month, year to year. It doesn’t matter how seemingly insignificant these improvements are. Over the months and years they add up. In a nutshell, the “secret” to drug-free muscle and strength gain is to become acutely aware of the tiny improvements in your performance, and build on them on a regular basis. The best way to make this happen is to keep a training journal.

10comm2Small changes in physical conditioning can add up to big changes over time—but only if you recognize them and build on them.

Anyone who is familiar with my writings knows that I am a huge believer in keeping a training log to determine progress—especially where muscle-building is the goal. It always amazes me that folks will pay hundreds of bucks on worthless supplements, but won’t take a few minutes to keep a log of their training. It’s ironic, coz a simple training log, used correctly, will do more for your physique than any over-the-counter supplement on the planet. I could write a whole article on the benefits of keeping a log…monitoring progress, contemplating feedback, mastering training science, improving workout mindfulness…the list goes on!

I put together the CC training log because a lot of athletes complained to me that most commercial logs weren’t geared towards bodyweight. The log means a lot to me, and I put a ton of advice and cool photos in there. I’m real proud of the journal for many reasons, but I’m honestly not trying to sell you anything here. You don’t have to buy this log to keep a journal…the beauty of calisthenics is that you don’t have to buy anything!

Just get your hands on a cheap notepad, or use your computer. But please, do it. Do it for old Coach!

COMMANDMENT VI: You Grow When You Rest. So Rest!

Again—the issue of rest (“training frequency” for you guys with a better vocabulary than me) immediately follows on from the previous idea of progress.

Let me ask you a simple question. If you really wanted to improve on your last workout—add that rep, tighten up your form—how would you want to approach that workout?

Would you want to be tired, weary, beat-up?

No! That’s nuts! Obviously you’d want to be as well-rested, as fresh as possible, to tear into your workout with as much energy as you could get, to break some records, increase your reps, improve your personal best!

10comm3To build mass, you must keep beating your previous performances—but it’s virtually impossible to be at your best unless you are rested. (Athletics legend Sir Roger Bannister rested for a full five days before breaking the four minute mile record!) Al Kavadlo demonstrates perfect close pushups.

It sounds like a dumb question. Of course you’d want to be as fresh, as rested as possible if you really wanted to give your all and maximize your muscle-growth stimulation, right?

Yet this is exactly the opposite of what most wannabe bodybuilders do. Being brainwashed by the muscle rags—typically by trying to copy the programs of drugged-up steroid junkies, who can get away with training like pussies and working out seven times a day—they desperately try to deplete any mental and hormonal energy they have by training more and more often. Some of these guys are training the body hard four times a week…then they wonder why they aren’t improving!

You don’t need to be Kojak to know why they aren’t improving. You don’t need a PhD in molecular myology to know why they aren’t improving. They are tired. Their muscles haven’t had a chance to rest and heal, let alone recover and increase their size and strength. I admire the willpower of folks who are constantly working out, even when they are spinning their wheels—I’ve done it too. Some of it comes down to the glamor of training; we become so seduced by the idea of the exercises, we forget that we are tearing our muscles down when we train. We have forgotten that one simple, ancient muscle-building fact—your muscles grow when you rest, not when you train.

How much rest you need for optimal performance depends on your age, your constitution, your training experience, your other activities, etc. But I can give you a few general pointers:

  • Working any muscle more than twice a week is usually a mistake if you want to gain size.
  • How often you train doesn’t matter a s***—how often you make progress is what matters.
  • Old school bodybuilders like Steve Reeves and Reg Park became huge by training—hard—only three days per week. To this day, many of the most massive powerlifters only train three days per week. The idea that you need to train every day (or several times per day) to maximize your potential is bullshit.
  • Working a muscle hard once a week—and actually making progress—is better than working it four times per week and going backwards.
  • Never train any muscle hard two days in a row.
  • Bigger muscles typically take longer to recover than smaller muscles.
  • If a muscle group is sore, don’t train it!
  • Muscular training also depletes the hormonal and energy systems. If you feel low, tired or lacking energy, add another day or two of rest into your program—even if your muscles feel good.
  • Always take at least two days off per week, for maximum muscle gain—unless you are performing very low volume workouts. Even then, three or four days off per week is probably better.
  • The ultimate arbiter of a bodybuilding program is progress—in muscle size, but also in performance. If you are working hard but your reps aren’t increasing, add another rest day.

The bottom line: to build extra muscle you must continue to improve your performance by cranking out a greater workload over a small number of sets. To do this, your muscles (and your body) need to be rested. Rest is a bigger piece of the puzzle than most athletes ever realize—as a result, they never even come close to their full potential.

COMMANDMENT VII: Quit Eating “Clean” the Whole Time!

Ah, we’re on to nutrition now, boys and girls. My views on nutrition are so far from the norm that I even get snubbed at a George Zimmerman fundraiser. I can feel panties bunching with hatred and rage even as I write this. It’s a great feeling—so let’s keep going, huh?

Read a copy of any of the muscle or fitness based rags on the newsstands, and you’d think the perfect muscle meal was chicken breast with some broccoli—and hey, don’t forget some supplements thrown in on the side. Washed down with plenty of water.

Crock. Of. S**t.

If you are trying to pack on some muscle, eating junk now and again is not only okay, it’s positively anabolic. In Convict Conditioning 2, I wrote about the prison diet, and described how some very muscular, very strong athletes maintained incredible physiques on diets that—to the mainstream fitness world—would be considered totally inadequate, on many counts. Let me tell you, if those guys could get their hands on a little junk every day, they would bite your arms off for it! They knew it fuelled the fires of growth.

One of the biggest sensations in the modern bodybuilding world is a guy who—these days, anyhow—is known as Kali Muscle. Kali is 5’10” and weighs over 250lbs—with abs. Despite his bodyweight, Kali learned his trade in San Quentin, a prison culture surrounded by calisthenics athletes, and he can still perform impressive bodyweight feats like muscle-ups and the human flag. Kali says that he really began growing when he was in jail and began filling his body with “dirty” high-carb foods like Dunkin’ Stix, Honey Buns, ramen and tuna spread. He says the effect these high calorie “junk” foods had on his skinny body was so profound, that he rejected offers of steroids during his prison years. He didn’t need them.

Kali isn’t crazy. His words are the truth. This idea—that the odd “junk” item is good for your training—is not a new one. Many of the old-time strongmen thrived on food that is considered crap today. The Saxon brothers ate cakes and drank beer as a daily staple of their diet. John Grimek used to drive around with oversized Hershey bars in his glove box, for emergencies.

10comm4I love how folks pay over the odds for quick-acting protein, like “hydrolyzed” whey powder, but they avoid quick-acting carbs like the plague. Fast energy to recover from a depleting workout is way more useful than fast protein, which is probably worse than useless.

And throw some fatty stuff in there too, willya? Quit avoiding real “muscle foods” like red meat, egg yolks, ham, cheese and sausage. I have to laugh when I see skinny guys throwing thousands of bucks of amino acids and whey shakes down their necks, in a hopeless effort to get big. What the supplement companies (and their bitches, the fitness magazines) will never tell you is a basic fact known by every endocrinologist on the planet—testosterone (remember that? The muscle-building hormone?) is synthesized from cholesterol. That’s right…without taking in enough cholesterol from high-fat foods, your body cannot create testosterone, and it cannot build muscle.

Vegans are always moaning that meat is full of pathogens and the like, but—far from killing us off—recent studies show that red meat might be what’s responsible for our species’ abnormally long life-spans. Our hungry ancestors literally adapted to slabs of meat, building super-immunity in the process.

I’m not saying you should act like a fat pig and eat junk all day (although maybe you should if you can’t gain weight). If you want to get big you should eat a balanced, regulated diet. But eating “clean” the whole time will only hurt your gains. Throw in a little “junk” every day if you expect to get swole.

Go have that burger and a Twinkie. A couple hours later, you’ll have the best workout of your life. You might even grow.

COMMANDMENT IIX: Sleep More

Since Convict Conditioning first came out, I’ve been deluged by a lot of questions about prison athletes. It’s a subject folks—especially dudes—really seem interested in. How is it that prison athletes seem to gain and maintain so much dense muscle, when guys on the outside—who are taking supplements and working out in super-equipped gyms—can rarely gain muscle at all?

I could give you lots of reasons. Routine in eating and working is one. The motivation to train hard is one more. Absence of distractions is yet another. But there’s a bigger reason. I have been asked on many occasions if there’s a natural alternative for steroids—and I always answer the same: there is, but you can’t buy it from a drugstore. It’s called sleep. During sleep, your brain essentially orders your body to produce its own performance-enhancing drugs.

Inmates sleep like kings. I’m not saying that s***’s right, but there it is. Behind bars, when it’s time for Lights Out, you go to sleep. The time is always the same in the same institution—regular as clockwork. This is, essentially, how our ancestors lived—the sun goes down (Lights Out) and the brain and nervous system switch off for a well-deserved supercharge. Many convicts get ten hours per night—often with daily naps thrown in for good measure.

On the outside, it’s totally different. Folks can control their own artificial sunlight, using bulbs, lamps, LCD TVs, laptops and phones. They can go out and drink, or party, or watch Netflix all night, if they want. As a result, the sleeping patterns of most people today—especially young people—are chaos. And they wonder why they are plagued with insomnia and sleep problems…their brains don’t have a f***in clue what’s going on! There is no routine at all, and they definitely don’t get enough sleep—the average modern American gets well under seven hours, often much less than that.

10comm5If you want to build mass and blowtorch your bodyfat like Danny Kavadlo, skip the supplements and focus on getting more sleep!

Many training writers lump “rest and sleep” together under the same category. This is a mistake. Sleep is a unique physiological condition. Ten minutes of resting does not equate to ten minutes of sleep…or twenty minutes of sleep…or an hour of sleep. Sleep does everything rest does for the body and brain, but the opposite ain’t true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of programmed rest (see Commandment VI), but no amount of simple rest can give you what sleep is capable of. When you sleep:

  • Your brain produces Growth Hormone (GH)—dangerous, expensive and illegal on the streets, but healthy and free if you take a nap.
  • The brain generates natural melatonin—possibly the most powerful immunity and healing compound known to science. (As well as helping muscles heal, high melatonin levels may even ward off cancer. This stuff is magic!)
  • When you sleep, you brain produces Luteinizing Hormone (LH), which (in dudes) strongly stimulates the interstitial cells of your cojones to produce testosterone—the number-one bodybuilding chemical powerhouse.

And that’s just a taster of what sleep does for a bodybuilder. Sleep is the cornerstone of muscle growth—and if that doesn’t persuade you to try and get more sleep at night (daily naps are great, too), then how about this: extra sleep can make you ripped.

It’s not something most people understand, but your sleep-wake cycles even regulate your eating patterns. Back when our species was evolving, the annual fruiting season occurred during late summer—when the days were at their longest. During this time, our ancestors went crazy trying to gobble up all the carb-heavy fruit they could find, to build thick bodyfat stores to protect us from the harsh, hungry winter round the corner.

These days, most everyone (outside jails) artificially prolongs their daylight time to ridiculous lengths using the bright electric lights in their home, not to mention the flickering boob tube, video games, etc. As a result, their Paleolithic brains still think they’re stuck in late summer—all year round. So they react accordingly, continually pumping out neurotransmitters and hormones programmed to make them guzzle down all the carbs we can find. No wonder folks can’t stick to diets. Their brains are trying to make them eat to survive winter!

Get to bed early, and your internal calendar won’t be tricked into thinking it’s fruiting season—you’ll find you’re suddenly not craving carbs like a maniac. It works.

Sleep also causes your fat cells to express leptin—sometimes called the “lean hormone”. Leptin regulates bodyfat expenditure and sparks up the release of energy from your fatty tissue. Go have a nap before you read the next Commandment, Jack. You might have a six-pack when you wake up.

COMMANDMENT IX: Train the Mind Along With the Body

This is a truism. The role of the mind in training is so fundamental that many books fail to even discuss it. The bodybuilders of the classical era sure understood it however, and they understood it well. Vince Gironda—“Iron Guru” and the real “Trainer of Champions”, including first Mr Olympia, Larry Scott—was once asked what he thought was the ultimate supplement. This was his answer:

…no supplement company has come up with a pill or powder as powerful as the mind. Conversely, the mind can equal and surpass any food supplement…if that is what you want from the mind.

Those weights never did anything for me. They never whispered in my ear. They never said, “curl me. Do this four times, or that for so many weeks.” I can dictate to the weights. I can dictate to my body. OK? Do I need to say any more on that?

The Wild Physique (Column), Musclemag no. 132

10comm6The mind is your number-one weapon in building your body. No supplement ever made you struggle through that final set of pullups.

Isaac Newton taught us that an arrow will fly straight and true forever—unless external forces (like friction, gravity, etc.) drag it to a standstill. I strongly believe that the human mind is like this. It goes in the right direction just fine—until negative influences drag it down. These negative influences are destructive ideas and damaging thought-patterns. As far as bodyweight training goes, there are six major classes of these ideas which screw with our training—or make us quit altogether.

Combating and defeating these six groups of negative ideas—I call them training demons—is at the heart of successful training. The topic is too deep to discuss in a blog post, but those of you who are interested can find more in chapter 21 of Convict Conditioning 2—The Mind: Escaping the True Prison.

If you want me to go further into this topic (you want this gold for free? Damn, son!), let me know in the comments and I’ll try and cover it in a future blog.

COMMANDMENT X: Get Strong!

If you want a quick summary of this article, it’s this: strength is built quickest by training the nervous system. Mass is built quickest by training the muscles. Over the last 9 Commandments, I’ve shown you the best, most powerful strategies you can use to train your muscles.

Does that mean that I’m telling you to permanently steer clear of strength training, if your only goal is to get bigger? No—and here’s why.

The relationship between the nervous system and the muscular system is a bit like the relation between an electrical circuit (the nervous system) and a light bulb (the muscles). The higher you turn the wattage on the circuit, the brighter the bulb will glow. Likewise, the higher you amp up the nervous system (through improved motor unit recruitment and neural facilitation), the harder your muscles will contract and the stronger you are.

A bodybuilder primarily trains his (or her) muscles—they are constantly buying bigger light bulbs. A pure strength athlete primarily trains his (or her) nervous system—they keep their small light bulb, and simply turn up the wattage on the circuit. You can have very powerful bulbs that are only tiny, just as there exist superhumanly strong athletes with relatively small muscles.

Here’s the thing—from a certain point of view, both these athletes want the same thing; more “light”, which, in our analogy, means more work output from the muscles. Athletes who truly want maximum strength also train their muscles—they buy bigger bulbs. You see this in powerlifting, weightlifting and similar strength events; as athletes grow in strength, they also increase in mass, often competing in several higher weight classes through their careers. A strong, big athlete is always stronger than a strong, small one.

From the opposite end, bodybuilders want more “light” (more capacity for muscular work output) because it allows them to use harder exercises and lift more, to direct a greater stimulus to their muscles for greater adaptation—higher and higher levels of mass gains. Everyone understands this—the larger and larger a bodybuilder becomes, the greater the weight they have to lift to retain their gains and keep making progress.

10comm7Al Kavadlo generates full-body tension and builds coordinated strength with an elbow plank. An athlete who trains for strength and size will ironically get bigger than an athlete who only ever trains for size. Get strong!

In other words; if you wish to gain as much muscle as your genetic potential will allow, just training your muscles won’t cut it. You need to train your nervous system too—at least some of the time.

Have you ever noticed that guys who begin bodybuilding make progress and build size for 3-6 moths, then it grinds to a halt? This is why. They have literally run out of strength. How hard you can train your muscles—how much stress you can put them through—partially depends on how strong you are. If that novice then committed 3-6 months to training their nervous systems instead of their muscles and building up their pure strength, they would find they could subsequently return to their bodybuilding-style training, and they’d experience another big spurt of growth.

Classic bodybuilders all understood this relationship between size and strength. Many of them devoted 3-6 months per year working full bore to train their nervous system, to get as insanely strong as they could, unworried about their muscle size during that time. Others performed pure strength work alongside their bodybuilding, either during different sessions or mixed and matched. Successful bodybuilders today do the same—they mix “hypertrophy” (growth) work with “strength” work. They understand that just one won’t work too well without the other.

The take-home message of this? Simple. Muscular training is what builds size, but without added strength your progress only lasts so long. You’ll get better gains if you cycle (or mix in) pure bodyweight strength training—where you train your nervous system—with your bodyweight bodybuilding.

The next question is—how do you train your nervous system for pure strength, using bodyweight techniques?

That would require a completely different article. But you’re in luck, beautiful. The PCC Lead Instructor and world famous calisthenics coach Al Kavadlo has written that article for you. It’s arriving right here, hot and sizzling, in just seven days time!

Don’t say we don’t do nothin’ for ya, huh? Now go out and build some beef, dammit. If you still have questions, hit me up in the comments section, below. I never ignore a genuine question and I will give my all to help you if I can.

*** The models for most of these great photos are the awesome Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! You have my thanks!

***

Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, Convict Conditioning, Convict Conditioning Logbook, Danny Kavadlo, Kavadlo brothers, muscle mass, Paul Wade

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass

October 15, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 150 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part I

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Finally the tide is starting to turn.

Young and old athletes (and wannabe athletes) are switching over to calisthenics in their droves. There is a growing consensus that if you want a coordinated, supple, mobile, functional body, the best way to get it is using your body’s own weight. Rubber bands, plastic gadgets, cables, machines and infomercial ab gimmicks are out. The floor and the horizontal bar are in. We’re going old school, baby!

But what a lot of athletes (and coaches) still don’t realize is that bodyweight is also an awesome tool for packing on slabs of dense muscle mass.

Yes, you can see a lot of incredibly powerful bodyweight athletes with fairly low levels of muscle mass performing ridiculously impressive feats like muscle-ups, the human flag, one-arm handstands and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that bodyweight training doesn’t increase muscle mass—it can (and much more effectively than current bodybuilding methods).

cal2
Lionel Ng is built more like a karate master than a bodybuilder. But he has trained himself to perform impressive feats of total-body strength—like the one-arm elbow lever and the human flag—using calisthenics. (Many thanks to the awesome Basic Training Academy, Singapore for the use of the image.)

What it means is that there are a lot of athletes out there who use bodyweight in a specific way to develop movement strength, and skill, while deliberately maintaining their body mass at lean n’ mean levels to keep them lithe and sleek—after all, if performance is what you’re lookin’ for, the lighter you are, the easier bodyweight techniques will be, right? For these guys, extra pounds of muscle is nothing but drag, inertia. They don’t want it.

However…not everyone wants to be a clean-burnin’, high-voltage, low-weight, gazelle. Some of us want to be bulls. Big, beefy, scary-looking muthas with bulging arms, plate-armor pecs, thick, wide lats and dangerous delts. The good news is that bodyweight training can give this to you—and it can give it to you while keeping you mobile and supple, and protecting your joints.

But if extra inches of muscle are what you yearn for, you can’t train the way the gazelles train—inspiring as they are. If you want to bulk up to your maximum potential, you need to follow a different set of rules, stud. You need to religiously observe your own mass-building Commandments.

What Commandments, you ask..? Read on, future champ.

COMMANDMENT I: Embrace reps!

These days, low reps, high sets and low fatigue are the “in” methodology. Why low reps with low fatigue? Coz it’s great for building skill. If you want to get really good at a movement—be it a handstand or an elbow lever—the key is to train your nervous system. That means performing an exercise perfectly plenty of times, to beat the ideal movement pattern into your “neural map”. The best way to achieve this is to do a few low reps—not hard or long enough to burn out or get too tired—then rest for a bit and try again. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is typically how very lean, low-weight bodyweight guys train to get hugely strong but without adding too much muscle. It’s a phenomenal way to drill efficient motion-pathways into your nervous system, while keeping fresh. Like I say, it’s ideal for training a skill.

But for stacks of jacked up muscle? Sorry, this method just won’t cut it. Muscle isn’t built by training the nervous system. It’s built by training the MUSCLE! And for this, you need reps, kiddo. Lovely, lovely, reps.

cal3

To be big, you must first become weak—pay your dues with some serious reps.

To cut a long story short, you build big muscles by draining the chemical energy in your muscle cells. Over time, your body responds to this threat by accumulating greater and greater stores of chemical energy in the cells. This makes them swell, and voila—bigger muscles. But to trigger this extra storage, you gotta exhaust the chemical energy in those cells. This can only be done by hard, sustained work. Gentle work won’t do it—if the exercise is too low in intensity, the energy will come from fatty acids and other stores, rather than the precious muscle cells. Intermittent work—low reps, rest, repeat—won’t do it either, because the chemical energy in the cells rapidly regenerates when you rest, meaning stores never get dangerously low enough for the body to say “uh-oh—better stockpile bigger banks of this energy!”

The best way to exhaust the energy in your muscles is through tough, grit-yer-teeth, continuous reps. Learn to love ‘em. For huge gains, temporarily drop the single, double, and triple reps. Definitely start looking at reps over five. Six to eight is great. Double figures are even better. Twelve to fifteen is another muscle-building range. I’ve met very strong guys training with low reps for years who couldn’t build a quarter inch on their arms. They switched to performing horizontal pulls for sets of twenty reps, and gained two inches per arm in a single month! These kind of gains aren’t uncommon on Convict Conditioning, due to the insistence that you pay your dues with higher reps. They work!

COMMANDMENT II: Work Hard!

This Commandment directly follows from the last one. Using low reps, keeping fresh, and taking lots of rest between sets is a fairly easy way to train. But pushing through continuous rep after rep on hard exercises is much, much tougher. The higher the reps, the harder it gets.

Your muscles will burn and scream at you to quit. (That “burning” is your chemical energy stores being incinerated for fuel, which is exactly what you want!) Your heart-rate will shoot through the roof; you will tremble, sweat, and feel systemic stress. You may even feel nauseous.

Good! You are doing something right!

Cal4

Whatever modern coaches may say, don’t be afraid of pushing yourself.

Like I say, the current trend is towards easy sets, keeping fresh, working on skill. These days you don’t “work out”, you practice. “Working ” and “pushing yourself”….these are filthy terms in gyms today. They are considered old-fashioned, from outta the seventies and eighties. (Remember those decades? When drug-free dudes in the gym actually had some f***ing muscle?) I mean Christ, some coaches take this philosophy so far that you’d think if an athlete went to “failure”, their goddam balls would drop off. Jesus!

Sure, I don’t recommend going to complete failure on bodyweight exercise—at least, most of the time. I’d prefer it if you left a little energy in your body after a set to control your movements, and maybe defend yourself if you have to. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. Damn hard.

Far from destroying you physically, brutal effort—when moderated by plenty of rest and sleep—causes the body to release testosterone, growth hormone, endorphins, and plenty of other goodies Mother Nature always intended to reward Her hunters and warriors with.

So accept the challenge. Balls, wall—together, okay? Don’t ever be afraid to push yourself into new zones of pain and effort if you want to get bigger. I have seen twigs turned into oaks this way, and you can do it too—I believe in you!

COMMANDMENT III: Use Simple, Compound Exercises!

Again, this Commandment is related to the two which have gone before. If you are going to push yourself hard on moderate-to-high reps, the exercises you are doing can’t be complex, high-skill exercises. If handstands and elbow levers cause you to concentrate to balance, you can’t overload using them—your form would collapse (and so would you) before you were pushing yourself hard enough to drain your muscles.

So if you want to work with high-skill exercises, use the low reps/keep fresh/high sets philosophy. But if you want to get swole, you need relatively low skill exercises—this is what I mean by “simple” exercises. “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy”. Doing twenty perfect one-arm pushups is “simple”—it ain’t easy!

Cal5“Simple” means relatively low-skill—it’s not the same as “easy”!

Stick to exercises you can pour a huge amount of muscular effort into, without wasting nervous energy on factors like balance, coordination, gravity, body placement, etc. Dynamic exercises—where you go up and down—are generally far better than static holds, because they typically require less concentration and they drain the muscle cells more rapidly.

The best dynamic exercises are compound exercises, which involve multiple muscle groups at once. Not only are these simpler—the body works as a whole, which is more natural—but you are getting a bigger bang for your buck by working different muscles at the same time. (No weak links for you, Daniel-san.) For example, focus on:

  • Pullups
  • Bodyweight squats, pistols and shrimp squats
  • Pushups
  • Australian pullup variations
  • Dips
  • Bridges
  • Handstand pushups (against a wall—lower skill, more effort)
  • Leg raises

All of these movements can be made increasingly difficult to suit your muscle-building rep range (see Commandment V). There are no excuses for not kicking your own ass, here.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not to say that skill-based techniques—like elbow levers and handstands—don’t have a place in your program. They are valuable exercises and are taught extensively as part of the PCC curriculum. But using them exclusively for muscle gain is definitely a big mistake. Throw in simple, compound moves and watch those muscles sprout like never before!

COMMANDMENT IV: Limit Sets!

This is another pretty controversial suggestion—but, as always, it flows from the previous Commandments perfectly. Why? Well, if you are hitting your body with hard exercises, and pouring that effort into enough reps to completely exhaust the muscles, why would you need to perform lots of sets?

Depleting your muscle cells beyond the point your body is comfortable with is what causes the biological “survival trigger” that tells your body to add more energy (i.e., extra muscle) for next time. That’s all you need to do. Once you have pulled that trigger and told your body to make more muscle…why keep pulling the trigger, again and again? It’s a waste of time and energy—worse in fact, because it damages the muscles further and eats into your recovery time. In the words of infamous exercise ideologist, Mike Mentzer:

“You can take a stick of dynamite and tap it with a pencil all day and it’s not going to go off. But hit it once with a hammer and ‘BANG’—it will go off!”

Many folks disagree with Mentzer’s training philosophy—I don’t agree with all of it—but he certainly nailed it when he said this. The biological switch for muscle growth needs to be triggered with a hammer, not a f***ing pencil. One hard, focused, exhausting set on a compound exercise is worth more than twenty, thirty half-hearted sets.

Cal6
If you keep work sets low, you are much more likely to genuinely give your all when you train. Add sets and you subconsciously pace yourself.

I usually advise folks looking for maximum growth to perform two hard sets per exercise, following a proper warm-up. Growth will happen with one set, but two sets feels like a belt-and-braces approach. I sometimes advise more sets for beginners, but this not for growth—it’s to help them get more experience with a movement. It’s practice, basically. Once you know how to perform an exercise properly, two hard sets is all you need.

Many eager trainees ask me if they should perform more sets. The trouble is, adding sets does not encourage hard, high-performance training— just the opposite. Once you are doing five, six sets, one of two things happens; either you give your all and your last sets are pathetic compared to the first couple of sets, or you pace yourself, making all the sets weaker than they would be otherwise. Neither of these situations will promote extra growth. They just hinder recovery and increase the risk of injury.

Avoid “volume creep”. Training hard is very different from training long—in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. Keep workouts short and sharp and reap the rewards, kemosabe!

For Paul “Coach” Wade’s Bodyweight Muscle Commandments 5-10, tune in next week for part 2 of this article.

***
The models for most of these photos are the incredible Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! As ever, thanks you guys. The image of the one-arm elbow lever was provided by my buddy Jay Ding over at the Basic Training Academy. Check their site—they are doing some amazing bodyweight training, Singapore style!

***

Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: bodyweight, calisthenics, Kavadlo brothers, muscle mass, Paul Wade

The Tao of PCC by Paul Wade

March 12, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 57 Comments

I am the man who wrote the book, Convict Conditioning. I am not a perfect man, and my book is not a perfect book; but I hope that when people judge the book, they will say that it got much more right than it got wrong.

They certainly couldn’t say that about the man.

Without improving, evolving, moving forwards, we are nothing. There is no standing still in life—you are either moving forward, or you are losing ground. That’s why I was so excited to be able to contribute to PCC. There is no doubt in my mind that PCC will do for bodyweight training what the RKC has done for kettlebells. And that would be incredible.

A lot of folks have asked me how PCC will be different from Convict Conditioning. I can sum that up in one word: KAVADLO. Al Kavadlo is, for my money, the greatest progressive bodyweight training coach on earth. PCC, as a total system, is much bigger than Convict Conditioning alone because it has been expanded by Al’s methods, tools and tactics. His “new-school” has met my “old-school”, and PCC is the result. PCC is as much Al’s baby as mine—maybe more so. It is flat out false to assume that the PCC is just a “Convict Conditioning cert”. People who love Convict Conditioning will love PCC, because Convict Conditioning forms just a part of PCC. But PCC is more than just Convict Conditioning.

Much more!

PCC: A Black Belt in Bodyweight

Perhaps the most important difference between PCC and Convict Conditioning is the fact that PCC is about principles, not techniques. Convict Conditioning is very easy for athletes to pick up and understand, because it presents six groups of ten techniques. PCC goes deeper than this. Anyone who has ever studied a martial art knows that they need to learn scores of techniques to achieve a black belt; but the closer you get to true mastery, the more you come to understand that it’s not the techniques that matter—nobody can remember a hundred techniques in a fight. What matters are the principles you absorb.

PCC is like this; you will drill and explore dozens of key techniques at the cert workshop; and the PCC Instructor’s Manual analyzes and illustrates over one-hundred and fifty exercises! But at the heart of PCC are the principles of bodyweight progression. Once you grasp these principles, you can make any calisthenics exercise progressive: from a rehab level, right up to epic Bruce Lee-level bad-assery. This is what it’s all about. Some people have accused Convict Conditioning of being too dogmatic; too rigid. Nobody could say the same about PCC, because it’s based on principles, not set exercises paired with progression standards. There is so much more flexibility built in.

(By Giga Paitchadze - Creative Commons License)

(By Giga Paitchadze – Creative Commons License)

Though they play an important role in the early stage, the techniques should not be too mechanical, complex or restrictive. If we cling blindly to them, we shall eventually become bound by their limitations. —Bruce Lee

 The punches and kicks—the 14 chains

A martial artist seeks to absorb principles, but he or she can only absorb the general by accumulating the specific—lots and lots of individual punches, kicks, throws, etc. The road to calisthenics mastery ain’t no different. Bodyweight athletes still need to learn individual techniques. They still need to learn about chains—i.e., technical progression sequences. It’s important to note that the fundamental movement-types in Convict Conditioning are all still present in the PCC system; however they have been expanded and added to. The seven fundamental movement chains in PCC are:

1. Push-ups—building to—one-arm push-ups

2. Pull-ups—building to—one-arm pull-ups

3. Handstand push-ups—building to—full handstand push-ups (between chairs)

4. Horizontal pull-ups—building to—“torquers” (one-arm, one-leg Australian pull-ups)

5. Dips—building up to—strict muscle-ups

6. Leg-raises—building to—strict rollovers

7. Squats—building to—wushu pistols

Anyone who knows Convict Conditioning well will see that all the major movements are here (save bridges, which I’ll address in a sec). Two new movement chains have been added to the system; the first is the horizontal pull-up. The basic form of this exercise will be well (and painfully) known by Convict Conditioning exponents, but here the progressions have been jacked up to an advanced level to add more symmetry to upper-body work (the vertical handstand push-ups and vertical pull-ups are antagonistic opposites; now the horizontal push-up has an antagonistic “buddy” in the horizontal pull-up). Complete dip progressions—missing from CC—have also been included, with these culminating in one of the most popular of Al’s bar moves: the uber-cool muscle-up (known as a sentry pull-up to CCers).

al_blacknwhite

 The muscle-up—part pull-up, part dip—is an advanced technique in the PCC dipping chain.

Where CC progressions can still be found in the PCC system, they are often approached differently, thanks to Al’s input. For example hanging straight leg raises are real popular in jails: but we got the feedback from athletes on the outside that they were just too easy. So we have expanded and advanced the progressions, making the advanced techniques much, much harder. One-leg squats have also been made harder. Everything is at a higher turn of the spiral. More progression options have been included for pull-ups and push-ups. Extra handstand pushups variations have been included.

As I have said, the PCC system is much larger than Convict Conditioning. Convict Conditioning is really about building raw muscle and motive power by utilizing fairly basic, fairly brutal, pulling, pushing and leg movements. But bodyweight strength training is about more than that—static holds, for example. Whereas Convict Conditioning didn’t include full progressions for static holds, PCC does. The system includes 7 static chains:

1. Press holds—building to—the elbow lever

2. Midsection holds—building to—the L-hold

3. Bridge holds—building to—the gecko bridge

4. Handstands—building to—the frog-press handstand

5. The back lever—building to—the full back lever

6. The front lever—building to—the full front lever

7. The side lever—building to—the press flag

That’s a pretty damn impressive roll-call of techniques: and very few men or women outside of professional gymnastics could complete all seven. Fewer still could assimilate or teach chains for all seven. But this knowledge is part of the PCC system thanks to Al’s know-how, and has been integrated into PCC because I’ve been asked so often about these holds; athletes want to learn about old school hand-balancing, flags, elbow levers, and so on. Fans of bridges wanted to know how I would include them as a form of static hold. All this is contained in the PCC system. This doesn’t mean you can’t begin using these “holds” as “moves”—levering up from a bridge into a handstand, for example. Remember, everything is about principles, not dogma. Once you understand how to work with the techniques, you can expand; you can explore. You learn the form, you absorb the form, you discard the form.

 

al_blacknwhite_2

 A bodyweight powerhouse, Al Kavadlo is no stranger to static holds. Perfection!

 The PCC Instructor’s Manual will cover all 14 chains in-depth (it’s over 600 pages), but it will only be available to athletes who attend the PCC event. The certification workshop itself cannot cover all 14 chains—over 150 exercises—but it has been painstakingly designed to cover the key techniques, training methods, and the principles behind progression.

The eleven training modules and two seminars over the three-day workshop will revolutionize you: no matter what your level of development. Sure, you may not come away able to perform expert hand-balancing, elbow levers, front-levers, one-arm pull-ups and human flags, but I promise you this: you WILL come away knowing exactly how to get there—or get someone else there—in the best way possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson—the great Patriot, and possibly the greatest essayist of all time—said this:

As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Come and join us in the PCC community. The principles you need to maximize your bodyweight potential are waiting here for you.

 —

Paul Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics Tagged With: Al Kavadlo, bodyweight, Convict Conditioning, Kavadlo brothers, Martial Arts, Paul Wade, PCC, PCC Workshop, progressive calisthenics

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Dragon Door Publications / The author(s) and publisher of this material are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any injury that may occur through following the instructions or opinions contained in this material. The activities, physical and otherwise, described herein for informational purposes only, may be too strenuous or dangerous for some people, and the reader(s) should consult a physician before engaging in them.