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WOD - 2/4 - Skills

“Girls only want guys who have skills!” - so said Napoleon Dynamite, and he was right!

Napoleon’s observation goes deeper, though. Everything you do, every day, is a skill. Most people have forgotten this, or don’t really stop to consider it, but it’s true. Every habit you have, good or bad, is a skill you’ve acquired through repetitious practice. The part that makes it a “habit” is that the skill now occurs without conscious thought on your behalf.

Bagua is a skill, and we have to practice a lot to get better at it. But so is physical training a skill, and your body will remember what you do and adapt to it accordingly. That’s why we have to be so careful when we choose what type of stimulus we give our bodies.

That being said, today, focus on some skills you may not have done in a while. Here’s my recommendation for a good workout:

10 pushups

10 forward somersaults or rolls

10 burpees

10 backward somersaults or rolls

10 pullups

10 steps on your hands, forward or backward

10 falls, from whatever height you’re comfortable with, and in whatever manner you’re used to falling

10 ploughs - this is a “yoga move” where you lie on your back and bring your legs straight up and back, overhead, to where your toes touch the ground

Repeat as many times as you please! Feel free to change the number of repetitions of any of the exercises to suit you. However, try to get really comfortable doing the tumbling portion of this workout. Tumbling used to be a daily staple in strongman workouts and routines. In fact, the original “muscle beach” in Venice, CA (check out the photo at the bottom of this page - http://www.pbs.org/weekendexplorer/destinations/california/santamonica/fitness.htm)…strange that the bodybuilders of the 60’s and 70’s lost that habit.

This entry was posted on November 23, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “WOD - 2/4 - Skills”

  1. george says:
    November 26, 2007 at 10:33 am

    Interesting about the tumbling. I wonder how many strongmen were trying out for jobs at the circus?

    Someday I hope to get a studio space with some padding on the floors, it would be great to include things like rolls and falls as a warm-up on a consistent basis. That’s something that I think is incredibly useful to learn in martial arts. The ability to roll safely and spontaneously has probably saved me from more serious injury on a number of occasions - you don’t get on a motorcycle or scooter in Taiwan without the understanding that you are going to get in accidents and fall down. Rolling definitely saved me from serious injury. That’s real world self-defense!

    All good stuff as always Josh!

    I think I will try to put up some of my views on training and how I feel conditioning type movement should relate to baguazhang training. Nothing special, nothing new, just think I should probably try to flesh out more my thoughts on it. And I would love your more professional assistance and ideas on the subject as always!

    Geo

  2. jleeger says:
    November 26, 2007 at 1:24 pm

    That would be great! Thanks George!

    Yes, I was practicing falls/rolls the other day and I realized that the old-timers used to do that stuff all the time. The real “strongmen” of the 1800’s were usually either wrestlers (catch-as-catch-can) or circus performers, like you said.

    It wasn’t until Eugene Sandow that “bodybuilding” in and of itself came about. But he still did stuff like have people sit on him in a back-bridge, or balancing on chairs, etc. And even then, it was seen as sort of a “perversion” by most people, even through the early days of the sport of bodybuilding in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s.

    The historical source of the modern craze is good to know, so you can understand why people are infatuated with big biceps. Old gyms looked more like a crossfit gym does today (check this out - http://www.oliverphotocollection.com/gym.html). But the term “gym” comes from “gymnasium,” which was the Ancient Greek word for the physical education schools of their day.

    More and more people wanted to sell their gadgets. When Nautilus first came out with their machines, they were based on machines used for rehabilitation of injuries. Bodybuilders recognized the ability to isolate certain muscle groups, and started to use them (though they still relied on the standard barbell and dumbbell exercises for the most part).

    Gym owners of the 80’s saw the Nautilus as a way to fill the gym with easy-to-use (no explanation necessary, since the instructions were printed on the machine) equipment, that would also lower their liability costs, since the machines don’t really allow you to do anything really dangerous.

    Exercise science at this point was still in sort of an infant stage, since the lessons from the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries hadn’t made it into mainstream thought.

    Basically, the “skill” portion of physical conditioning got weeded out, leaving only muscular development. Even true strength development wasn’t a focus by the early 1990’s.

    Finally, we have crossfit gyms, which look like gyms of the 1800’s or earlier (maybe even Ancient Greek gyms, though those also had wrestling pits…).

    You and I have discussed the future evolution of exercise…and I think it’s around the corner.

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