Monday 24.3: Push press, gymnastics

Monday. Strength, push press 5-5-5-5-5 (max 80kg). Gymnastics for 30min.

Different kind of day. I liked it a lot! Some strength for starters and that gymnastics part was extremely cool. I felt like a power monkey indeed. Tried some new cool stuff, implemented purely on bodyweight. I got the inspiration from a guy called Joel who's been working on some bodyweight movements lately. We talked about these last week and today was a great chance to work with him. I felt like a little kiddo =)

Strength.

• Push press 5-5-5-5-5 (70, 80, 80, 75, 75kg)

I've been thinking about would it be beneficial to throw some weight in the air in the near future a bit more than I've lately done. Push presses, push jerks and split jerks. To build up stronger upper body in order to ease pretty much all movements. There was a time when I used to do a lot of presses, that was in my early cf career when I didn't practically have any shoulder strength at all. It helped a lot and strength was gained.

Today I did push press 5's for a total of 5 sets. Started at 70kg, built up to 80kg for 2 sets and then finished it off with 2 sets @ 75kg. This 75-80kg was a good weight for me on push press 5's. I was able to do 2-3 reps in one continuous movement before I had to rest on the front rack, reload myself again and finish the set.

The weight was quite heavy even though I had no doubt in my mind about nailing those sets. I took it safe anyway with the last 2 sets dropping 5kg off the max weight today. After this strength portion I'm sure we're gonna see more of this stuff in the future.

Gymnastics.

• Handstand push-ups
• Planche progressions / holds
• Handstand
• L-sit to handstand press

It was like 20 years was curt off my age as we played around different types of bodyweight stuff! It was great! Various holds, plank holds, planche progressions and the last movement was pretty sick: from L-sit to handstand press. Or something like that. I'm not sure about the terms on these gymnastics moves =) I piled 3-4 plates under both arms, then did L-sit. From there I brought my legs back and did some sort of plank hold and focused on keeping a straight torso. Not all the way to handstand but kind of a plank hold.

Difficult to explain all the stuff we did but the main thing was it was so much fun and I enjoyed it every minute. I'm glad Joel was instantly ready to go when I suggested he'd tag along. It's cool to have a training buddy, no matter if it's crossfit stuff, pure strength or gymnastics like this. He also suggested we did handstand there. I've always thought handstand is impossible at this gym because there's not enough space. Now I understand that's just an excuse, there was plenty of space to practice this skill. Definitely going to work on this at home gym too!

Thanks Juha for this video tip, I've seen this once before, it's pretty awesome. Sick moves by Dave Durante and Dan Bailey.