static holds

I am currently training hspu, pistols and the planche & front lever progressions. I'm wondering weather it's necessairy to do both isometric holds and dynamic work(e.g. planche pushups & lever pullups)? Or can you train til you got both the planche and front lever and then start adding the push and pull-up movement? Or does working both the static holds and push and pull-ups at the same time produce faster results? Right now I'm training both planche and front lever through negatives, which I've been told is the best and fastest way to gain strength in these moves.

thx in advance.

Hi twan,

In my opinion you'll probably get better results training both isometric holds and dynamic work. Just watch you don't overdo it on the volume front, and instead of adding more to each workout maybe split it up a little. This will help with strength gains, as it's best to train at high intensity while you are as fresh as possible. You could consider alternate static and dynamic workouts, or pair them off one static with one dynamic:

Matched pairing

workout A: planche, front-lever (both static)

workout B: planche push-ups, lever-pulls (both dynamic)

or

Mixed pairing

workout A: planche, lever-pulls (mixed movement)

workout B: front-lever, planche push-ups (mixed movement)

...in both cases adding your HSPU and Pistol work in at the end, unless they are of more primary importance to you. In terms of scheduling, you might go with: Mon (A), Tue (B), Thu (A), Fri (B), and take it from there. If you're not recovering, ease off to something like: Mon (A), Wed (B), Fri (A) one week, and Mon (B), Wed (A), Fri (B) the next.

Be careful that doing a lot of negative work can place considerable strain on your body in terms of recovery, as usually you're handling loads that are heavier than you can handle concentrically. Adding the dynamic work will help with easing that a little as you'll do negatives less often. Best and fast is great ...as long as you don't get injured!

Hope that helps?

Cheers,

George.

Thanks for the tips. But I have one more question. Why do negatives put more strain on your body??? I've heard this before but I don't know exactly why this is.

Because of the higher loads used, negatives damage the muscle more than other methods which then needs more time than normal to repair itself. If you keep doing negatives on a regular basis then the muscle doesn't fully repair and overtraining can set in.

Paul.

On a basic level: you can lower more weight than you can hold, and you can hold more weight than you can lift:

1) You might start out being able to lower through a tuck front-lever under control.

2) With training you will become strong enough to actually hold the tuck front-lever for a time.

3) After yet more training you will be able to pull back out again as well.

As Paul said, negatives are generally used to train with loads you can barely handle, and because of this the intensity is such that you can make fast gains ...but only if you recover properly!

George.

But I personally train every other day and try to avoid failure every time. As long as I'm not feeling sore from the previous training, this should be fine right. I'll guess it will show if I'm training to hard by causing overal fatigue etc.

thx for the answers

Hi twan,

You're welcome.

Possible signs of overtraining include: No gains (or loss) in strength, general fatigue, higher resting heart rate, feeling irritable, loss of appetite, persistent coughs and colds, aches and pains, etc. There are probably a whole load more... :shock:

Have a search round for some of the posts on cycling training (underload, load and overload, etc) for more ways to recover, and probably make more gains overall while reducing risk of injury. The trouble with going by feeling sore is that if you start to notice soreness in a tendon ...it's been damaged for a while, and will take a lot longer than muscle to heal up. Best to avoid risking it IMO.

Cheers,

George.

twan said:

But I personally train every other day and try to avoid failure every time. As long as I'm not feeling sore from the previous training, this should be fine right. I'll guess it will show if I'm training to hard by causing overal fatigue etc.

thx for the answers

Soreness isn't a guide to anything as far as muscles go. Personally because I train regularly and have done for a long time I never suffer from soreness whether I go really heavy, do negatives, go to failure or do light weight for loads of reps. If you are well trained then you shouldn't get sore. If I do something new then I may get a little soreness but it rarely lasts more than a couple of workouts.

Training every other day is fine but if you were doing negatives every other day then that could be too much as it takes more than a couple of days for the muscle to repair itself from eccentric training. As you say, look for the many signs of overtraining rather than soreness etc.

Paul.

On the topic of sorenes:

I had done a particular workout as a trial for myself at one point. It lasted about a month. I would basically train for 3 hours a day and throw in about 1 of everything. This sounds crazy I know. I enjoyed it every day which kept me going. I had no soreness and things went well for a while. I saw gains in the exercises that I was practicing and I was always training which made me feel good, but I was killing myself. One day I did 3.5 hours of training (I'm talking a lot of rest in between sets btw) and THEN did a cardio class for 45 minutes. I didn't make it to the end.

After about a month I went to my friends house to train with him for a bit. He has a trampoline so I figured we could do a dynamic warmup and then hit the trampoline for a while to practice some flips. We then went up to his drive way to work on handstands and cartwheels. Note, we hadn't actually been "working out" at this point, just warming up still. Here is the kicker. I went to go do a cartwheel and had a strange pull in my neck, even though I spent 30 minutes just on warmup and not including the trampoline work. after about 5 seconds my neck FROZE UP. Pain. It was AMAZING. I couldn't move my neck for 5 days after doing a regular cartwheel without extreme pain. I was so angry >_<

I guess my point is our perspectives can be skewed sometimes even when we have been training forever. There are so many factors that go into how much, how often, and what kind of load to use that it can lead to a bit of overload. I always try to make sure I feel BETTER after I workout rather than worn out.

I don't know if this helps at all.