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Silvio Bauer

PCC Holland: A Gathering of Awesomeness

September 15, 2015 By Silvio Bauer 9 Comments

Danny Silvio Al Kavaldo Holland PCC 2015

I’m still hung over. Not from having one too many—mind you other than maybe one too many muscle-ups.

This whole past weekend, I was on a constant dopamine rush. I took a little trip to the beautiful city of Haarlem, which is a half hour bus ride away from Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

From the time I stepped onto the airplane up until this moment, I’ve been maintaining a sheepish grin on my face.

All this happiness bursting out of me came from attending the Holland PCC . Not only was it a thrill to meet the PCC team for this workshop (Lead Instructor Al Kavadlo, Master Instructor Danny Kavadlo, and Instructor Grace Kavadlo) but also to be around so many like-minded fitness freaks.

Pull Ups At Holland PCC 2015

Once the whole crew and attendees gathered in a circle to introduce themselves, you could almost feel the room vibrating with all the positive energy everybody brought with them. With the first of many of Al’s signature “HEY, hey, heys” of this weekend, the group started to become a little family of fitness weirdos.

It was a blast to see everybody bringing their unique expertise to the table. I met attendees from all over the world (one person came all the way from Taiwan)! We had engineers, IT professionals, personal trainers, physical therapists, CEOs, martial artists, Street Workout World Cup participants, and many more. This is the kind of group you can’t replicate, which is part of the reason why this PCC workshop was such a unique experience.

Al and Danny Demo Shrimp Squats Holland 2015

No matter where you come from, or your occupation, I can basically guarantee you’ll hit several PRs during a weekend like this. If it’s a new move that you’re trying for the first time, or one you’ve worked on for a while and now finally “get it”, you will push your physical limit on a weekend like this.

My own favorite PR was the mighty muscle-up. I’ve worked on this one for quite some time. But up until this weekend, the muscle-up was an elusive skill for me. I could do it on a good day when I was fresh but it wasn’t pretty when I got over the bar most of the time. After some cues from Al and Danny, it finally “clicked” with me. I got over the bar every single time I tried it. Afterwards, I had the urge to do muscle-ups throughout the weekend just to make sure I hadn’t lost it!

A video posted by Silvio (@neatstrength) on Sep 11, 2015 at 8:10am PDT

Not only did Al, Danny, and Grace do a fantastic job by providing helpful cues and tips, they managed to add significant value to everybody’s life just by sharing their humble and simplistic approach to calisthenics. You know these guys know their trade the moment they start to speak to a group. They are attentive speakers and involve everybody during a talk or a demonstration. I was more than impressed by how they skillfully managed to simultaneously tame and energize this group of fitness enthusiasts.

Special thanks goes to John Du Cane for making these events possible and to our host Martijn Bos and his wicked crew from Trainingscentrum Helena for their generous hospitality.

The PCC Instructor Manual, shirt, and certificate made up only a small portion of the things I took home with me. I formed new friendships, gained new insights for training people and I took home a bucket full of new skills and life experiences. I’m absolutely certain that every single one of my co-attendees feels the same way.

PCC Group Photo Holland 2015

I’m grateful to be part of the PCC family and I look forward to welcoming new members to the clan!

-Silvio

Silvio Bauer, PCC Instructor, is an engineer by trade and a passionate minimalist training enthusiast. He writes about his training approach over at his website NeatStrength.com. You can follow him on facebook.com/neatstrength or on instagram.com/neatstrength/.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics, Workshop Experiences Tagged With: Holland PCC, muscle up, Netherlands PCC Workshop, PCC Workshop, PCC Workshop Experience, progressive calisthenics, Progressive Calisthenics Certification Workshop, PRs at PCC, Silvio Bauer, workshop experience

Simplicity and the Pragmatic Practice of Calisthenics

June 16, 2015 By Silvio Bauer 19 Comments

Silvio Bauer Dragon Flag

It is 6 o’clock in the evening. I’ve just come home from work. I slip out of my shoes and take off my backpack. I quickly get into the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water and drink it.

I head to my bedroom to change into a pair of comfortable shorts and a simple t-shirt. On a piece of paper, I briefly note four words: Muscle-ups, dragon flags, shrimp squats and handstands. I get my keys as well as the piece of paper and a pen.

Outside of the house, I start running at a steady pace. At this point, I’m already shaking off the worries of my day. I feel totally liberated, because for the next hour, all I need to focus on is the movement of my own body. Nothing can distract me. As I’m running, I’m getting further and further away from my phone, my digital leash. I soak in the environment.

In about 5 minutes, I stand before two pull-up bars. One of them I can only reach with a slight jump. My heart rate is already elevated from the run. The movements I’m about to practice will work pretty much every major muscle group, so I prepare for it accordingly.

First, I do some joint rotations for shoulders, hips, knees, ankles. I combine this with dynamic stretches like toy soldiers, arm circles and leg swings to prime my muscles.

The exercises I previously scribbled on the piece of paper are the exercises I will put my focus on today. I split them into two groups, muscle-ups + shrimp squats, then dragon flags + handstands.

For the first “super-set”, I get down into a deep squat and simultaneously do wrist circles. I do some push-ups, get up, do side lunges and then I jump up to the bar for some pull-ups. These “easier” exercises get my blood rushing through the muscles I’m going to need for my focus exercises. I never max out on these because I want to retain my strength.

After two rounds I’m warmed up and ready to rock. After a round of muscle-ups and shrimp squats, I shake out my legs and arms. I do a warrior pose to stretch my quads and hip flexors in order to improve my mobility for the next set of shrimp squats, then some shoulder mobility to help my muscle-ups. I count 5 deep breaths. Rinse and repeat.

While I am practicing these two movements, one at a time, my goal is to maximize the precision – not the effort – of each of them. When I feel I lose control over my form, I simply stop. On my piece of paper, I jot down my reps, not to impress anybody, only as a means to record my progress and to recalibrate my focus.

After 5 rounds I go to the nearest park bench. I am more than warmed up from the first two exercises, so I immediately get on the bench and do my dragon flags. After each set, I do a few kick-ups into a handstand, count 5 breaths and repeat.

After 3 sets of dragon flags, I shift my focus solely on debugging my handstand. After 15 more minutes, I call it a day.

To cool down from my practice, I get into a back bridge and counter that stretch with a forward bend. I do this once more and then I take a leisurely walk home.

As I walk, I contemplate over the quality of my workout and what I achieved. Some moves worked well today, with some I struggled a bit more than usual. But I know that this is part of the process. With consistency, I know I will get better over time.

When I approach the front door to our house, my mind gets filled with a rush of anticipation: I am going to enjoy a delicious and nutritious home-cooked meal.

-The End

The Moral of the Tale

Al Kavadlo prayer pushup

This story is not to brag about how Zen my workouts are, but rather to illustrate the key concept of calisthenics: simplicity.

In Convict Conditioning, Paul “Coach” Wade explained how he used advanced bodyweight exercises out of necessity while serving time. There was just no other way to get strong and survive but with his own body.

In our superfluous world with an abundance of options, practicing calisthenics can also enhance our “inner freedom”. By limiting options (not using machines, weights, apps or other equipment), we can liberate our training from being drawn in every direction.

But in order to make progress over time, we have to consistently apply this pragmatic approach to our training. With all the excellent information available about advanced bar calisthenics or bodyweight strength built with nothing but the floor, the variety of calisthenics exercises can be quite seductive to us enthusiasts.

Only by focusing on a few movement patterns at a time, we can ensure sufficient attention to each of these moves.

There is also no need to over-complicate the process of one’s training. Warm-ups are only needed for the specific body parts that come into play in a workout. If you follow an upper/lower body split routine, there is no need to warm up your legs on your upper body day.

The same principle applies to cool-downs. Static stretches are most effectively applied to the muscle groups that were used to generate mechanical tension. Flexibility does not need to be practiced for its own sake. It serves a purpose: making it possible for you to move the way you want to move. If you want to do pistol squats, insufficient ankle mobility will limit your ability to do so. However, if pistols don’t interest you, the necessity of ankle mobility drills is questionable.

The story above most probably differs from your own. It’s not necessarily better or worse than yours, it’s simply the template I found works best for me. It is merely an example of an application of the underlying pragmatic principles that calisthenics have to offer.

Everybody has a different story. What’s yours?

Move freely.

-Silvio

****

Silvio is a full time medical engineer who loves to practise and teach calisthenics in his free time. He enjoys creating workout plans for his friends and spreads the word about PCC over at his blog, neatstrength.com. You can follow him on facebook.com/neatstrength, twitter.com/neatstrength or on instagram.com/neatstrength/.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics, Tutorial Tagged With: calisthenics, calisthenics workout, flexibility, outdoor workout, Silvio Bauer, simple workout, stretching, tutorial

Increasing Frequency: How to Work Out More Without Overtraining

February 5, 2015 By Silvio Bauer 26 Comments

Silvio Blauer Pistol

If you are anything like me (which means people call you crazy, but that’s another story) you love to work out. You cannot go a day without training and you feel itchy when you miss a workout.

I’ve certainly been there while traveling or when I was stretched thin from work and social commitments. I get a bit moody and my feet start trembling. You may call me addicted.

But all this name calling is total nonsense, because there is a sound way to develop the resilience necessary to work out daily. The good news: I’m gonna tell you about it.

Ready? Good, let’s get to it then.

Why Go High Frequency?

So, let’s first consider the why before we delve into the how. There’s a good number of reasons why it’s pretty neat to be able to work out daily.

  • Habit building: People who struggle working out consistently might find it harder to collect enough will power 3 times a week compared to working out daily. But how can working out less often be harder? Because that way, it’s not a habit. When I come home after work, I change into my workout clothes, find a pull-up bar and do my workout. I don’t ponder about this, I just do it. It’s automatic. By working out only 3 times a week, it’s tempting to postpone a workout because every time, it’s a decision that has to be made.
  • More practice time: If your main goal is mere strength, a high frequency (HF) program is what you need. The more often you practice a certain skill, the faster your progress. And if you, like me, have a long wish list of feats of strength you want to accomplish, that additional practice time gives you room to sneak in one or two more moves you can practice.
  • Plateau busting: When you’re stuck with a progression, say, pistol squats, what can you do? Well, do a lot of pistols or pistol regressions. Do them every day. I dare you to not get better at a move by doing this.
  • Toughening up: When you finally buy into the HF training method, you forget about your excuses. It’s not a big deal anymore when you feel a bit stiff or sense a light muscle soreness. You’ll also learn to really listen to your body, how a good warm-up can do wonders and you will enjoy an enhanced ability to recover from your workouts.

If these are not good reasons to train more often, I don’t know what is.

However, here is what an HF program is not:

  • An ideal bodybuilding method: Most of the Monday-Wednesday-Friday routines come from the bodybuilding community. And if all you want is bigger guns, HF training as described here is not your best bet. I’m not saying you cannot build muscle with this (in fact I gained visible mass from doing pistols every day). It just might not be optimal for mass gaining.
  • A very structured routine: I’ll describe this in detail below, but to implement HF, you have to learn to go with the flow. Therefore, I recommend this only for strength trainees who A) know exactly what they want from their training and B) have enough experience to scale their workouts.

Now, if you want everything from the first list and can manage to miss out on the second one, here is what you need to do.

How to Implement High Frequency Training

Silvio Blauer

I came across the idea of HF training first by reading Squat Everyday by Matt Perryman. It’s an awesome read and, though it’s geared towards weightlifters, really useful for every fitness enthusiast because it’s about much more than just squats. It’s about questioning sport’s “science” and challenging your belief system from time to time.

I never thought I could train that often because I got really sore from my workouts. I was a big fan of the High Intensity Training (HIT) Method and therefore destroyed myself with every workout.

Now, my dentist told me that this won’t work if I wanted to work out almost every day. Here’s a diagram that illustrates why this is the case.

FIV_triangle

I call this the FIV triangle (I’m actually not the first person to come up with this diagram. I first saw this in an article by Alex Zinchenko). The orange dot in the middle is metaphorical you. You can be everywhere inside the triangle. The nearer you are to one corner, the more distant you are from the other two.

Now, when you want to work out very often, the first thing you have to do is do lower intensity and lower volume workouts (volume meaning the total number of sets you do each week, for every muscle respectively).

frequency-FIV

This is an extreme case and probably resembles something like working out 2 times a day, every day. If that’s you, I envy you for your spare time.

A useful method to implement higher frequency training would work with two things:

  1. Scale every workout so that the dot does not come near the lower corners of the FIV triangle (intensity and volume).
  2. Skew the FIV triangle so that a higher frequency is possible with intensity and volume being the same.

The skewed triangle below would resemble a good case of strength focused HF training.

high-frequency-FIV

This means we’re doing HF, medium high intensity and low volume.

To produce this kind of training regimen, you need to learn the Art of Going with the Flow and to push through some light discomfort. To elaborate this further, let’s take the pistol as an example.

Say you want to get really good at pistols and you therefore try to do them every day. Depending on your level of strength, the pistol can be a very demanding and therefore intense exercise. So doing 5 sets of 5 pistols (5×5) every day might be too much.

That’s exactly when you need to listen to your body: If you did a few intense sets of pistols on Monday, scale down on Tuesday. Maybe do a couple of sets of light bodyweight squats followed by one good set of pistols.

Maybe Wednesday and Thursday are medium intensity and you feel good to go again on Friday for a higher intensity workout. I plotted an exemplary weekly course of intensity in the diagram below.

intensity_curve

As you see, the intensity (the orange line) throughout the week varies significantly. This is to keep the balance between volume (dark grey area under the curve) and recovery (light grey area between curve and maximum intensity line).

Now we can see why the FIV triangle makes sense: If you keep intensity at maximum every day, there is no recovery. You can go high intensity, but therefore you need to have rest days (so intensity zero).

The low intensity days are nothing more than active recovery. In fact, doing lighter regressions of an exercise helps promote blood flow to your muscles and your joints, which in turn speeds up recovery and prevents injury. Spiffy!

There is no exact method how to scale each and every workout, because everybody is at a different level, both in strength and recovery ability. That’s something you need to experiment with yourself.

The neat thing about adopting this varied intensity scaling and HF training is that it makes you more resilient. You will get sore less often and will enjoy faster recovery. That’s mighty useful if you want to participate in a PCC Workshop, by the way. You won’t be beat up so much after the three days and can take The Century Test like a breeze.

So once you get the hang of taming your inner beast during your workouts, you can work on skewing the FIV triangle so that you can take more frequency with the same intensity and volume.

But do yourself a favor and be deliberate about your workouts. That means, keep a workout log and write out your workout beforehand on that specific day, based on how you feel. You can correct your plan during the workout but try to keep this at a minimum.

For the first few HF weeks, plan out your workouts lighter than you think you can handle. If after a week you think your workouts have been a joke, scale them up a notch.

Maintaining High Frequency Training

Silvio Blauer L-Sit

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when riding the HF horse. Firstly, warm-up properly with dynamic stretches, mobility drills or very light regressions of your target skill. After your workouts, I recommend some good old-fashioned stretching. Specifically stretch the muscles involved in your HF training.

After about 2 weeks of experimenting with pistols every day, I felt that my legs got really tense and stiff. It wasn’t soreness, just a slight tiredness. So I took a day off, did a nice recovery routine, had a couple of beers (I’m German, that’s how I recover 😉 ) and jumped on the pistol wagon again the next day.

So yes, you can take a day off once in a while. Just know that you won’t die from working out with slightly sore muscles. There have been so many times when I felt like I didn’t have enough energy for a productive workout, but after a good warm-up, it usually turned out great.

You also don’t have to implement this for all your skills and moves (but you could, I guess). I did this with pistols to finally master them with ease. But you could incorporate this for just about any skill like one-arm push-ups, elbow levers or dragon flags.

So there it is. All you need to know to toughen up and practice as often as possible without burning out. Happy tricking!

-Silvio

***

Silvio is a full time medical engineer who loves to practice and teach calisthenics in his free time. He enjoys creating workout plans for his friends and spreads the word about PCC over at his blog, NeatStrength.com. He writes about minimalist fitness and can also be reached through his Facebook page: facebook.com/neatstrength.

Filed Under: Progressive Calisthenics, Tutorial Tagged With: high frequency training, high intensity training, how to, neat strength, programming your training, progressive calisthenics, Silvio Bauer, tutorial

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