TWO-A-DAYS

Bdk1786 said:

I am very intrigued as I have been looking to add something more to my routine than just the WODs. This morning I just hit my 3s straddle planche. Not the 5s I want to continue to train the position, but I think a two a day schedule will help bring me out of this stagnant feeling I have felt in my training lately. Just have to come up with an appropriate schedule and routine now.

First off, congrats on the straddle planche! Helpful hints that come to mind:

Definitely, might want to consider training Adv Tuck for the most part and doing 2-3 sets of straddle once a week and 1 single hold another day, like a single hold on tuesday and the 2-3 sets on friday.

Might also consider working one arm, one leg push ups for slow reps (7-10s down, same up) for 2-3 reps per set. Trust me, that's plenty of work. These will help build stabilization in the shoulders if done with a solid core, and that will transfer over to the planche. As you get stronger you can turn these slowly into PPP, 1cm at a time. Be careful to keep control of your scapula! It's easy to lose form, which is the major value in this particular exercise... it builds these weak links. Doesn't take much...

Thats great news Im glad I'm finally getting it, thanks!

To bdk: There are two articles on charles poliquins website if you search two-a-days that are helpful. Basically you want to build it up slowly and he said its not unlikely for people starting to loss progress at first but with persistence you'll see great results. I'm only going to do 2x a day twice a week for now

Bdk: That doesn't look like too much. If there's one thing to consider, it would be to do a little extra trap work on FSP days. Doesn't have to be in the same session or anything, but laying prone holding a slightly hollow body shape with the chin tucked and neck retracted and making sure that ONLY the mid and upper traps are doing the work (lower can kick in too, but the mid and upper should be doing the bulk of the work in this case).

You should feel a whole bunch of new stuff working in the upper back unless you happen to be doing this correctly already. This is actually very difficult at first unless you are already using all of those muscles, which mid-90% of us are not. I have been working on this for 12 weeks or so now and have made pretty substantial progress, but I expect another 6-9 months before my traps and the other muscles involved are truly caught up with the rest. THEN we'll see some very interesting things happen, I think

We were talking recently and Coach made me aware of the chin tucking part of this, and after messing with it I found that this is definitely an important part of correct body shape.

As kids, the gymnasts get taught shape first, so they never go through this particular "rehabilitation" phase because it's done right off the bat. For the rest of us, this is key. I ran into one of our forum members on the train today and we talked for about an hour and I think that it will be really important to put together a tutorial on how to obtain proper body shape. I will have to collaborate with Coach and see how he would like to do this, but I think we can get something out there that will be a great help to us all.