hey guys my name is Steven Low and I am the author of overcoming gravity and today in the overcoming gravity online series I'll be going over part eight which is in constructing your workout routine part two in the book and chapter 8 covers warm-up and skill work and so I'll be going over all the various stages of the warm-up blood flow mobility and positioning drills and so on and then also skill work which includes sport specific drills balance agility handstands and so on so let's get into things so with the warm-up there are a lot
of different methods to do things this is just my own classification I tend to like using the classification of Mobility blood flow and positioning drills so with blood flow the goal here is to get up your heart rate and oxygenation into the muscles and your nervous system and so on and just be overall ready for exercise one indicator that is particularly useful is working up to maybe a very light sweat generally speaking anything Works in here for the blood flow so things like running maybe jogging for several minutes doing movement exercises like crawling and other
fundamental movements ke rolling around can really be anything in this to get the heart rate up and then also start doing some fundamental movements the second part is mobility and the goal here is to specifically take your muscles through and Joints through the full range of motion and in this case it would be Oliver joints that are involved in the workout so for a full body workout they'll include you know your wrists your elbows your shoulders your scapulas your back hips knees ankles and even other joints such as your neck your toes your hands your
fingers depending on your specific Sport and the specific exercises that you're warming up for body weight specific a lot of the common ones that I mentioned before that are really helpful for building up connective tissue integrity and strength over time where your support holes and your German hangs and skin the cats but also for the upper body in particular for body weight strength training I do usually like some type of wrist and shoulder warm up specifically can be done with bands can be done with body weight or even just going into the Rings or pull
bar and stretching and moving the shoulders around so lots of different ways to do things and you can figure out what works best for you lots of resources on YouTube as well there's like shoulder band routines for warm-up Ido portal I don't know how to say his name or Yuri marmerstein both have very good band warm-ups that you can just search and look for similarly I like doing positional drills in the beginning and these are not to be confused doing exercise exercises to failure so for example going into a hollow position on the floor where
your back is flat against the ground and then into in the hollow position which is your feet off the floor and then your head off head off the floor and holding that position then doing flipping over onto your stomach for an arch position where only your stomach is on the floor and your feet and your head and chest are lifted up on the floor basically learning the arch and Hollow and then also the straight body position and also different core tension movements with like side planks and holding a straight body are very valuable to body
weight strength training namely because a lot of the difficulty with the progressions and good form with the progressions requires that you have maintain the right body position for the specific exercises and so if you're not maintaining the specific right body positions you can have some form issues which can increase your potential for injuries as well as make the exercises easier so like if you're arching or two have your hips up during push-ups that will make the exercise easier and in some cases like with the arching it can put more stresses on particular muscles in your
shoulder which can lead to ovaries injuries so it's important to practice these positions you don't necessarily need to go to failure with them if you're going to failure them you're more aiming for endurance for them usually or potentially building up strength and so they would be a strength exercise or endurance exercise that you would want to do near the end of the workout not necessarily for positional drilling warmth in the positional drills you're just practicing the specific shapes and you don't want to be doing them to failure so that is one of the most important
points here that most people Miss you're not trying to fatigue yourself if you're just trying to work the positions that you're often going to enter during body weight strength training especially to be able to maintain those positions so skill work is often a misunderstood thing as well I'll go over why so most commonly they're related to sports specific skills so you have your ball sports like basketball soccer football baseball and then football slash American football common to have lots of drills for those Sports especially in ball handling and running and Agility with the specific ball
similarly in body control sports like gymnastics I'm climbing parkour wrestling martial arts all of these have specific drills where you learn the techniques and especially in gymnastics you have your handstands which if you're already strong enough and you're working on the balance aspect it is considered a skill so one of the biggest misconceptions in the first edition of overcoming gravity that I included in the second edition is that a lot of people were getting the conception that most of the straight arm movements were skill work and that they should be added into the routine in
that manner so like you would have somebody make a routine that would be like you know do all your warm-up and then in skill you'd have your handstands your front lever your back over your planche work and then in the string section you'd have all the rest of your strength exercises such as your pull-ups dips pull-ups rows and so on so obviously the misconception here is that straight arm movements are not always skill works and sometimes they can be strength work mainly if you're using that specific exercise in order to gain strength so like if
you're doing planches and front lovers and back lovers in order to get stronger to do that specific lever hold then it's not going to be a skill it's going to be a strength and you want to put them in your strength work section and include them as one of your strength exercises and and possibly take out another strength exercise so that you can focus on that specific strength movement and that overdue the amount of strength training that you're doing and get overuse injuries the main misconception here is that handstand for beginners it can be a
strength exercise and so like if somebody who is sedentary and has never strengthened their shoulders over time kicking up to a handstand holding it against the wall can be strength to the shoulders where your shoulders are burning after you know five ten seconds inverted and it's very hard to hold yourself in the correct body positioning upside down so for that type of person a handstand would be strength first it is okay to add it in the skill work section as it will very quickly become skill so you're not doing a little bit too you're not
going to be overdoing it but for most people once they get enough strength with their you know push-ups dips I enhance their work and you're able to hold yourself upside down for you know 30 40 50 60 plus seconds then it becomes skilled because you're not working on the handstand to hold it longer against the wall you're going to be starting to work to balance it away from the wall so if you're this is the wall and this is your handstand you're going to start to work try to balance it with your forearms pushing into
the ground and keeping your body straight and finding the balance with that specific exercise and so obviously if you're getting longer freestanding holes it can be more endurance work for the shoulders at that point with the longer holds but in most cases the handstand will be moved from strength to skill over time as you're learning mostly focusing on the balance and then you're coming down before you get tired with that specific movement so similarly things like one arm handstands if you're not used to holding yourself upside down one arm it can be strength at first
but as you get more reset and gain strength for that then the one arm handstand will similarly become more balanced over time so especially with handstands and gymnastics in particular you're going to want to aim to have only balance related skills in skill work and so like for handstands in general if they're you're mostly focusing on balance they belong in skill work but if you're doing them for like time and holding them for time at the end such as you know handstand endurance holes we're aiming for like 60 70 80 plus seconds to gain endurance
in your shoulders then they're gonna be at the end of your routine and not in the skill work section so for most beginners about five to ten minutes of handstand work at most two to three times a week and build it up over time if you're a professional hand balancer oftentimes you're building up to you know four five six times a week and 30 to 60 Minute sessions and so you can see there's a big disparity in what you know Pros will do compared to beginners so you need to build those things up over time
often the case with the handstand skill work doing too much inverted at once is a high risk of overuse injuries on the wrists mainly because most people have not supported their body on the wrists for their full body weight on their wrists for any amount of time especially if you're sedentary coming in or you had wrist injuries just so be careful with starting with a bit too much usually sometimes wrist routine and backing off for a while will help foreign skill progressions here are some examples of how that would work so in the beginning basic
static handstand holds might be strength but as you get stronger with them you'll want to go to wall handsome progressions after that you can go to free kick up to free standing handstand progressions away from the wall you also going through handstand walking handstand presses and bent arm and straight arm and then over time you can work towards handstand push-ups one arm handstands one arm press handstands and obviously each of these Impressions through the handstands require strength to do the position but they also require balance so if you are strong enough to practice these and
it's mainly working on the bounce then obviously it's going to be more skill and can go into the skill portion of the workout whereas if you're limited by strength it should go into the strength portion of your workout such as your handstand push-ups going close to failure so the important part to remember for these specific ones is basically that the strength can become skill over time and especially if you're practicing skill make sure it's focused on doing things like balance and you're also not doing some of the failure whereas if you're training the specific attribute
like strength then those can be more to failure and in general remember that practice remember that practice does not make perfect but that perfect practice makes perfect so this goes for all types of different skill work such as your sports your ball sports or your other types of sports those things are important to do perfectly and make sure you're getting full practice practice with those and that kind of half doing them or getting frustrated and you know just kicking up with a handstand and getting all going all over the place those can be issues if
you're not practicing fully with the specific thing then it's better just to not practice it and ingrain bad habits
