Other/Mixed OS: Super Simple Strength

[3letterslong]

You know, since this thread was started, i've been thinking a lot about daily hanging and daily handstands (unrelated to this thread). They've both been highly recommended for the fantastic effect they have on your body. However, I don't think my shoulders can handle handstands right now, so I've decided to do daily hanging and daily leopard crawls, trying to work up to 10 minutes of each.

I'm planning on doing it in two phases, switching to the harder exercises of phase 2 with phase 1 becomes easy.

Phase 1:

dead hangs with legs resting on ground

backwards leopard crawls

Phase 2

dead hangs

backwards leopard crawls up stairs

I plan to advance super slowly and see where I am in a year's time.

 

[bluejeff]

You know, since this thread was started, i've been thinking a lot about daily hanging and daily handstands (unrelated to this thread). They've both been highly recommended for the fantastic effect they have on your body. However, I don't think my shoulders can handle handstands right now, so I've decided to do daily hanging and daily leopard crawls, trying to work up to 10 minutes of each.

I'm planning on doing it in two phases, switching to the harder exercises of phase 2 with phase 1 becomes easy.

Phase 1:

dead hangs with legs resting on ground

backwards leopard crawls

Phase 2

dead hangs

backwards leopard crawls up stairs

I plan to advance super slowly and see where I am in a year's time.

Hanging and handstands would be great if the shoulders are ready for it

Just a thought: a good intermediate between backwards crawls and handstands would be partial wall walks, or even slow and controlled pushes up into down dog from the leopard crawl position. I say “pushes” because a lot of folks just use the hips and legs to get into down dog and then lean into a shoulder “stretch.” Focusing on pushing up into it will probably strengthen the shoulders a lot better. The push will likely aid mobility through increasing active ROM.

 

[3letterslong]

Hanging and handstands would be great if the shoulders are ready for it

Just a thought: a good intermediate between backwards crawls and handstands would be partial wall walks, or even slow and controlled pushes up into down dog from the leopard crawl position. I say “pushes” because a lot of folks just use the hips and legs to get into down dog and then lean into a shoulder “stretch.” Focusing on pushing up into it will probably strengthen the shoulders a lot better. The push will likely aid mobility through increasing active ROM.

You know what, partial wall walks sound like a great idea and it's not something I would have thought of. My left shoulder has been causing me pain when it's in the fully extended position. It's new and awful and I'm pretty sure I did it to myself trying to figure out how my scapula worked. I might retool my plan to put wall walks in there. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

[Stefan Olsson]

Bumping this. Anyone doing the program? @SUOMI-PUKU did you fall off the wagon?

 

[SUOMI-PUKU]

I have still been crawling and doing calisthenics but haven’t organised it in this fashion yet, kept struggling to find a ten minute block during work so instead I just do 3-5 ‘hard’ sets of a couple movements each workout day which is much easier to fit in for me.

 

[Stefan Olsson]

I have still been crawling and doing calisthenics but haven’t organised it in this fashion yet, kept struggling to find a ten minute block during work so instead I just do 3-5 ‘hard’ sets of a couple movements each workout day which is much easier to fit in for me.

Tailoring it to your own needs. Wise man!

 

[Geoff Neupert]

Hello @Geoff Neupert

Thanks, yes it helps.

I usually recover well from high volume cals but not necessarily programme them. I tend to do some kind of 'prison training', meaning I work everyday all the patterns (push pull squat hinge core) with basic moves. Nonetheless, I vary the stance or placement to avoid injury

How would you pair it with crawling ?

Kind regards,

Pet'

Alternate sets of one then the other.

Pay attention to which crawling pattern matches the best with which cal and adjust accordingly.

For example, for me, any backwards crawl works well with Pistols.

Hope this helps.

 

[3letterslong]

Bumping this. Anyone doing the program? @SUOMI-PUKU did you fall off the wagon?

I've been hanging and crawling every day, working up to wall walks as per @bluejeff 's great suggestion.

I'd love to say I'm seeing some magical transformations from this, but I'm not (yet), I'm just getting stronger.

However, I am seeing a magical transformation from the OS warm-up I'm doing every day. The days I skip it, all my problem areas get in the way of perfect movement. The days I do the warm-up properly, my body is a high-functioning machine.

After doing OS as a warm-up every day (sometimes twice) has been incredible for my body.

 

[Training for Life]

Interesting blog article on the OS blog about maintaining nasal breathing while training: Reflexive Tension or Cognitive Tension? | Original Strength

What do you think?

 

[Nacho]

I’m currently doing S&S swings (and gs’s) 2-3 times a week. But instead of S&S get ups, I’m doing lot of OS type stuff. Crawling, carries, marching. Always for 10 minutes each, 2-3 movements per session. I also do some lighter get ups once a week. Have to say I’m doing better than ever. OS is lot of fun variety and swings just rule.

 

[bluejeff]

Interesting blog article on the OS blog about maintaining nasal breathing while training: Reflexive Tension or Cognitive Tension? | Original Strength

What do you think?

Nasal "reflexive" breathing is what treats my body better, for the way I like to train. I prefer to train in a way that lets me feel like I could do my exercises at any time of the day or week, so I rarely go very hard. I have dealt with a slew of excess tension and body compensations that led to chronic aches and pains, and so I now prefer to train in a less amped-up state.

I think that power breathing has its place, though, specifically in power exercises, where the goal is to perform the exercise as powerfully as possible. There's also breathing behind that shield, which is what I think you might use for closer-to-maximal weights.

All that being said, my preference is to train at an intensity where I can nasal breath. How my body feels when things are going the way I would like is difficult to describe: I can feel the appropriate muscles contracting, but I don't feel "tense." My face and neck, in particular, have to be relaxed when I train, or I risk breathing pattern compensations and neck pain, headaches. I think some people (maybe those prone to sympathetic dominance) risk bringing tension used while training into everyday life.

It's a complex subject. I would be happy to expand my thoughts if you wanted to start a thread about it. I believe another member had a thread about power breathing issues a short while back.

 

[Walker]

A few years ago I breathed regularly through my mouth during sports and even during faster walking in the chest. Tim Andersons Idea of doing your work / training while breathing throu your nose into the belly sounded right to me. It took a few month to change my breathing habits. In my case breathing quality seems to correlate with general life quality. I am glad I stumbled over this. A very primal and basic reset. Meanwhile, during (sub)max strength efforts tend to I forget to exhale through the mouth, which gives me headaches afterwards.

 

[3letterslong]

Interesting blog article on the OS blog about maintaining nasal breathing while training: Reflexive Tension or Cognitive Tension? | Original Strength

What do you think?

This is very interesting to me, thanks for posting it. The more I throw myself into Original Strength, the more I think reflexive strength training is very natural to me. I recently made a huge breakthrough in the "force pool" style of mastering tension that Pavel talks about and I am blown away that I have been doing something completely different my entire life, even when I thought I was practising tension. I'm more like a horse: I make my best strength and mass gains when you put weight on me and just let me do athletic things. Now that I've felt what the skill of strength is, it's completely alien to me.

However, the method of strength training that's natural to me has resulted in my strong areas becoming super strong, taking over everything, and my weak areas becoming super weak. I need to figure out a way to apply reflexive strength training to moves that my full musculature takes part in.

I've learned a lot about my body's needs in the last six months. Some major breakthroughs in things I've always struggled with.

 

[bluejeff]

However, the method of strength training that's natural to me has resulted in my strong areas becoming super strong, taking over everything, and my weak areas becoming super weak. I need to figure out a way to apply reflexive strength training to moves that my full musculature takes part in

This is where OS shines. There's no "high tension techniques" (HTT). While I think HTTs have their place, disproportionally implementing them in training, I hypothesize, may lead to exactly what you describe. When we think "squeeze" the brain might end up squeezing what it knows how to squeeze, and the more it does that, the more it solidifies those neural pathways. The more one does this, the more the brain may be down-regulating pathways to other muscles and/or movement patterns.

I have written before how I have 90% rehabilitated from the movement disorder focal dystonia (in my right hand). That was ALL about inhibiting the overactive muscles and learning to feel the underactive muscles again.

One thing that has helped me over the years is to take a very light load/weight and do a movement as relaxed as possible. This, I find, shows you straight away what muscles should be the prime movers and what muscles are trying to compensate. Ultimately, your muscles are respoding to the position your joints are in, and your joints tend to orient based on where your center of gravity/mass lies. The entire system is respoding to the effect of gravity. If you move as relaxed as possible (this will obviously be different for different movements and positions/postures) gravity will show you what needs to be active and what needs to be quiet. The trick is to do things with a light enough load (at first) such that you can feel where you are holding unwanted/unneccesary tension and try to let it go. This is why I am an advocate for less conscious bracing during crawls.

 

[Training for Life]

Just want to say there’s some super interesting food for thought here. Thanks for the comments!

 

[3letterslong]

This is where OS shines. There's no "high tension techniques" (HTT). While I think HTTs have their place, disproportionally implementing them in training, I hypothesize, may lead to exactly what you describe. When we think "squeeze" the brain might end up squeezing what it knows how to squeeze, and the more it does that, the more it solidifies those neural pathways. The more one does this, the more the brain may be down-regulating pathways to other muscles and/or movement patterns.

I have written before how I have 90% rehabilitated from the movement disorder focal dystonia (in my right hand). That was ALL about inhibiting the overactive muscles and learning to feel the underactive muscles again.

One thing that has helped me over the years is to take a very light load/weight and do a movement as relaxed as possible. This, I find, shows you straight away what muscles should be the prime movers and what muscles are trying to compensate. Ultimately, your muscles are respoding to the position your joints are in, and your joints tend to orient based on where your center of gravity/mass lies. The entire system is respoding to the effect of gravity. If you move as relaxed as possible (this will obviously be different for different movements and positions/postures) gravity will show you what needs to be active and what needs to be quiet. The trick is to do things with a light enough load (at first) such that you can feel where you are holding unwanted/unneccesary tension and try to let it go. This is why I am an advocate for less conscious bracing during crawls.

Interesting take, but my experience was the opposite: my natural (reflexive) style of training led to crazy imbalances, but I suspect that consciously activating all my muscles through tension techniques might help correct them. I'm currently experimenting with this.

You're absolutely on the money, in my experience, about teaching your muscles how to turn back on with light movements. For a very long time, I was baffled that I could do 10 pseudo-planche push-ups (really hard) to failure or 20 vertical wall push-ups (ridiculously easy) to failure. Now I realize that my unused muscles were only kicking in on the light work -- and only when I figured out what postural positions turned them on again.

I feel like OS's rocks, crawls, and floor work are helping my unused muscles come to life again. I really am trying to do everything I can keep progressing in reflexive strength work without leaving my weak muscles behind. The Dr. Yessis 1x20 workout was working really well for me in activating and strengthening the weaker muscles. So now I'm doing OS to tie my body together and then I'll try 1x20 again.

I'll probably wind up doing something like Louie Simmon's Westside or Dikul's rehab workout, except I'd be doing extremely difficult crawls for strength work and then following it up with 1x20 work to strengthen all my joints and work out imbalances.

 

[3letterslong]

This is where OS shines. There's no "high tension techniques" (HTT). While I think HTTs have their place, disproportionally implementing them in training, I hypothesize, may lead to exactly what you describe. When we think "squeeze" the brain might end up squeezing what it knows how to squeeze, and the more it does that, the more it solidifies those neural pathways. The more one does this, the more the brain may be down-regulating pathways to other muscles and/or movement patterns.

I have written before how I have 90% rehabilitated from the movement disorder focal dystonia (in my right hand). That was ALL about inhibiting the overactive muscles and learning to feel the underactive muscles again.

One thing that has helped me over the years is to take a very light load/weight and do a movement as relaxed as possible. This, I find, shows you straight away what muscles should be the prime movers and what muscles are trying to compensate. Ultimately, your muscles are respoding to the position your joints are in, and your joints tend to orient based on where your center of gravity/mass lies. The entire system is respoding to the effect of gravity. If you move as relaxed as possible (this will obviously be different for different movements and positions/postures) gravity will show you what needs to be active and what needs to be quiet. The trick is to do things with a light enough load (at first) such that you can feel where you are holding unwanted/unneccesary tension and try to let it go. This is why I am an advocate for less conscious bracing during crawls.

Hmmn. I'm unsatisfied with my last reply to you, but I'm unsure of how to explain myself better. I can't tell if it sounds like I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you and I'm definitely not disagreeing with you.

OS seems like a double-edged sword. On one hand, the light work has been amazing in terms of lighting up my body and teaching it how to activate itself (in a way nothing else has, including physio). But, on the other hand, I'm still at the point where I need to hold things in place in order to get that full activation. I think that if I'm not careful with how I apply OS, it'll just exacerbate this gap between weak and strong muscles.

However, when I read that article about reflexive strength, it describes perfectly how I built this dysfunctional body in the first place, with some muscles being phenomenally strong and others being non-existent. I'd love to get to a place where my entire body is working as a unit and I can return to that reflexive sort of training that I gravitate to.

 

[Training for Life]

Maybe it's matter of combining both cognitive and reflexive practices instead of viewing either as the sole solution. This, at least for me, makes sense on many levels. Like Yin and Yang, in some situations it's you who needs to tell the body what to contract more and what less, and sometimes your body needs to tell you.

 

[3letterslong]

Maybe it's matter of combining both cognitive and reflexive practices instead of viewing either as the sole solution. This, at least for me, makes sense on many levels. Like Yin and Yang, in some situations it's you who needs to tell the body what to contract more and what less, and sometimes your body needs to tell you.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do now. I feel like the muscles that are used to pack my left shoulder are weak and there aren't a lot of ways to train them. Once I get those muscles sorted out, i should be able to concentrate less and just move more.

 

[bluejeff]

Hmmn. I'm unsatisfied with my last reply to you, but I'm unsure of how to explain myself better. I can't tell if it sounds like I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you and I'm definitely not disagreeing with you.

OS seems like a double-edged sword. On one hand, the light work has been amazing in terms of lighting up my body and teaching it how to activate itself (in a way nothing else has, including physio). But, on the other hand, I'm still at the point where I need to hold things in place in order to get that full activation. I think that if I'm not careful with how I apply OS, it'll just exacerbate this gap between weak and strong muscles.

However, when I read that article about reflexive strength, it describes perfectly how I built this dysfunctional body in the first place, with some muscles being phenomenally strong and others being non-existent. I'd love to get to a place where my entire body is working as a unit and I can return to that reflexive sort of training that I gravitate to.

No worries. I can't recall off the top of my head if it was in this very thread, but I commented somewhere about how even though the goal of OS is reflexive strength, that won't help as much if you're doing your practice locked into certain postures. If the brain doesn't sense a posture, it can't sense the muscles the way it needs to in order to gets things working more effectively. So you are also right that you might have to be conscious of getting things in the right place to get to where you need to be. I am also in a similar boat, where I need to be extra conscious of my left side for it to work optimally. The end goal, however, remains for things to be more "automatic," at least for me.

Where I have gotten things to "meet in the middle" is the hands and feet sensing the ground. When standing, walking, running, etc your feet are literally the only thing connecting you to the world around you. When you crawl or do pushups or something, your hands take on that role as well. I find that when I sense the ground evenly between both feet and/or hands, most thing upstream tend to activate more reflexively.

When I crawl or do pushups, for instance, instead of thinking about shoulder position as much (sometimes I have to more or less at different times) I think more about feeling the ground and pushing both the heel of my palm, and just as importantly, the spot just below my index finger, into the floor. When I push into the floor, focusing on that, my shoulders just seem to do their things more effectively and naturally. There seems to be some connection between external rotation of the shoulder and pronation of the hand.

That may not be a magic fix for you, of course, but maybe it sheds some insight. The brain needs the right sensory input in order to find and use underactive muscles. Sometimes finding the right movements or drills or whatever to make that happen can be tricky.