F1/H1- Add Stretch Courses?

Does anyone add the stretch courses to F1/H1?  If so, how?  If I'm reading correctly, there are 3 courses, each designed to be done once per week for 45 minutes.  Do you do all three?  Start with one?  Or should I just stick with F1/H1 for awhile....?

Thanks,

Mark

All three once a week is ideal. They will mesh well with your other work and accelerate your progress.

Mark, great question.

I would suggest starting with one, once a week. See if you can be consistent with your schedule for at least two weeks. Then introduce a second one when you're, at least, 80% confident that you can commit to doing one new thing and repeat.

Insuring success early on is more important than how much/how soon you cover and will allow you to make more progress in a sustainable manner. 

I know this might sound like heresy, but I'd prioritize the stretch courses over F1 & H1.

Here's why:

1. Depending on what your starting point is you may be so tight in so many areas of your body, particularly the hips and shoulders, that you'll probably stall at a few integrated mobility exercises. (Common culprits are shoulder extensions [H1/PE2>iM], swivel hips [sPL/PE1>iM] and a few others.)

2. The connective tissue takes much longer to adapt to exercises than does muscular tissue, and the improvements come very slowly, albeit steadily, so the stretching courses are an absolute must for us to progress on the strength exercises.

3. The Thoracic Bridge stretch course is also great for H1 and prepping the shoulder girdle for press handstand.

4. This is how I'm now training. If I'm really pressed for time I'd rather blow off the strength exercises and do the stretching series. I figure I can always "make up" the missed strength sessions, but the mobility cannot be easily made up. There has to be more consistency there for anyone to get real gains. 

Thanks for all the replies.  I'm pretty tight.  I can do swivel hips, but my shoulder extensions (H1/PE2) suck.  And while the courses are kinda expensive, I've got faith in Coach's progressions so I figure I may make better progress by just adding these as opposed to figuring it out on my own or going to other sources.   

I'm taking Eva's advice. I bought the thoracic bridge series and will work that once a week for a while before adding another. 

Here is the problem I find with Gymnastic Bodies:

Each series is really beneficial and there are not enough hours in a day or days in a week to do everything I want to do.

Typically everyone breaks things down into weeks.  "Do this X number of times per week".

If you don't think you can fit everything into a week, why not fit it all into 10 days?

I am finding it hard to do everything I want in a week.  Instead of leaving things out I am going to extended my "workout weeks" from 7 days to 10 days.  It will allow me to do everything I want, just over 10 days cycles rather than 7 day cycles.

Kevin,

Wouldn't it be awesome to all be independently wealthy and just train all day!? Yeah, I get what you're saying.  I'm doing F1/H1 4X/week.  I have really good recovery so I was looking to add something.  I think the best bang for my buck is the thoracic stretching as my shoulders and thoracic area might as well be cement (my legs are reasonably flexible-- at least compared to the rest). So adding a full workout of stretching makes sense for where I am now instead of increasing volume.  I recently heard on a podcast a discussion about how world class lifters/athletes are stretching so much, with the message being if they're doing it, why aren't you? (That could have been coach Sommer on Tim Ferris, but I don't recall).

Further to your point, there is no "magic" in a 7 day cycle other than it fits in with a normal work week and weekends.  The only thing I might consider if I were you is breaking things into training blocks (i.e., weeks/months) where you concentrate on fewer things but do them with enough frequency that you always recover.  Then at the end of a block you can add/delete a series.  I'll defer to those that know more about Gymnasticbodies to opine on whether that would be a good idea.  It's a concept I followed in power lifting for a long time that worked really well. 

Thanks again, all!

Mark