Tag: slamball

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Early in the pandemic I bought a set of gymnastic rings, started training with them, and got great results. They have a few downsides, though: Since I hang them up outdoors it’s no fun to us them when its cold or wet or windy. Also, the easiest place to hang them up (the basketball court) is kind of out in public. I don’t really mind people watching me workout, but occasionally it’s a little awkward.

Me at the top of an inverted row using gymnastic rings
I neglected to get a photo today, but this is pretty much what I looked like.

Especially during the winter, I’ve largely switched to steel club exercises. I can do them in my study, they’re a similarly good workout. Besides that, they add an element of rotation which I find useful to support my fencing.

One downside of club (and kettlebell) exercises is that they’re really not practical to do to failure.

Exercise machines are great to do to failure. With little or no risk of injury, you can know that you’ve gotten the maximum stimulus to strength and hypertrophy. With kettlebells or clubs, training to failure means that a big steel weight goes flying out of your hands and into whatever happens to be in the vicinity—a terrible idea.

The rings are closer to weight machines. I use them almost exclusively for three different exercises: inverted rows, dips, and pull ups. Do any of them to failure and all that happens is you don’t finish a rep. I suppose actual gymnasts do various sorts of inversions and such, where it might be dangerous to fail a rep. That’s not an issue for me.

Anyway, this morning I got my rings out, put them up at the basketball court, and did a version of the same circuit I did many times over the past five years. I did three rounds of:

Jump rope

This was mainly just to get/keep me warmed up for the rest of the round. I did sets of 100 jumps, and was pleased to find that I could still do them with just one or two misses in a set.

Inverted rows

These are a way to work the lats. I’ll hope I can do pull ups again soon, but even then I’ll probably stick to inverted rows for half my lat exercises. I did sets of 8 rows to failure, which is exactly what I was going for.

Slamball hunter squats

This exercise comes from Mark Wildman’s slamball program. You powerclean a slamball, do a double-pivot to turn 90 degrees to one side, which leaves you in a stagger stance. Then you drop down to a hunter squat (about mid-way between a squat and a lunge), holding the slamball in front of you. Then you stand back up, double-pivot again to face forward, and drop the slamball. Then you repeat, pivoting the opposite direction.

I was doing it with a 15 lb slamball, which isn’t terribly heavy, but I was too lazy to carry my heavier slamball out to the basketball court.

I did sets of 6 to 8 reps (3 or 4 each direction), which isn’t enough to reach failure on my legs. I either need to do more reps or else bite the bullet and bring out the 30 lb slamball.

Dips

Somewhat to my surprise, I actually manage to do 1 dip! That was all I managed though, so I satisfied myself with doing negative dips for the rest of my reps. But if I can do 1 dip, being able to do sets of 3 or even 4 is not far off.

Hollowbody hold

This was easier than I’d expected, I guess due to the Mark Wildman ab exercise program I’d been doing for a few months now. I did a 45-second hold each round.

I did a total of three rounds, which is what I did for most of my rings workouts in years past. It felt like a legit good workout.

I’m thinking two of those workouts per week, plus two club workouts per week, plus two runs per week (a long run and a fast run), would add up to a great, well-rounded exercise routine. Of course, I’ll also want to do a fencing class as well, adding up to seven workouts per week, which is perhaps a bit more than would be wise, but I don’t see any alternative.

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For most of my adult life, trying to use “intuition” to decide on rest days would have been a terrible idea. If I’d let myself say, “Hmm. I don’t really feel like a workout today,” I’d scarcely have worked out at all. Instead, I came up with a schedule, and stuck to it, either well or poorly.

When I stuck to it well, I’d see progress. When I stuck to it poorly, I wouldn’t.

Starting around 5 years ago or so, something changed in my brain: I started really enjoying my workouts.

Partially, it was that they were working well, which is just satisfying. But it was more than that. First, I noticed that I felt better after a workout. Then I started feeling better during a workout. Instead of it being hard to motivate myself to work out, I craved workouts.

People who knew me were mildly disturbed by this. It was unlike me. It was certainly unlike them. I would not be surprised if they began to suspect that I was some sort of pod-person.

Because I wanted to work out nearly every day, I would sometimes wonder if I was over-training (or under-recovering), but that’s not trivially easy to determine in the moment.

I’ve long tracked my workouts, but not really in a consistent way—I’d just write down what I did that day. Sometimes I could look back and say, “Wow. That looks like a serious workout,” and other times I’d look back and say, “Was that really a workout?” But often times it wasn’t clear either way.

Just lately though, I’ve been doing the Mark Wildman workout programs that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That gives me a pretty consistent metric. I’m doing three different programs, each of which has 4 to 7 different levels, each of which can be done with an almost infinite range of weights, but they all have a consistency in design: start with a light weight, work up in complexity, then bump up the weight but go back down in complexity. If you’re consciously attempting to make progress, then it’s pretty easy to make each workout “count” as a workout, while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout.

Me in a hunter's squat holding a 40 lb slamball

But while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout is good, it is possible to do that, and yet get over-trained, simply by doing too many workouts with inadequate recovery.

So, today I went back over my past 3 months’ training log entries. For my first cut at this, I’m just counting rest days. I figure that I want to work out either 5 or 6 days a week, which makes any week where I have either 1 or 2 rest days a “good” week.

In the past 13 weeks I’ve had 1 week with 0 rest days, 1 week with 3 rest days, and 1 week with 4 rest days. All the rest were “good” weeks with either 1 or 2 rest days.

That’s just about perfect. The usual advice is to take a “deload” week every 4 to 6 weeks, so 2 weeks out of 13 being weeks with extra rest just about hits the nail on the head. The one week with 0 rest days was probably just an artifact of rest days falling outside of one calendar week—not a big deal, as long as it’s rare.

Anyway, the intuitive rest days seem to be working well. I’m getting in my workouts, and I’m getting in adequate rest. I guess I can stick with it for a while.

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If I’m serious about training to get better at everything—and I am—then I need to think seriously about how to fit in, and recover from, all that training. This post is my first cut at documenting some of my early thinking on how I might do that.

A plan to fit in everything needs to start with eliminating having whole days devoted to just one particular kind of exercise: strength days, running days, etc. Instead, most days will have to have at least two (hopefully complimentary) exercise activities.

I had already started work on thinking about the best ways to combine exercise activities in ways that would reinforce one another, based on the ideas of Adam Sinicki (aka The Bioneer). But more recently the work of Mark Wildman has provided what may be the solution: What he calls “the Tetris of training.” (That’s a link to the first of a series of videos where he talks about program design in those terms.)

The basic idea here is that you divide your workout into pieces: Maybe a kettlebell squat piece, or a single-arm club-swinging piece, maybe a running piece, etc. Then structure each piece as a specific block that can be done in a specific amount of time, and organize those those blocks into a sequence to make a workout that can be done in 30, 60, or 90 minutes (including a warmup at the beginning and a cooldown at the end), and lay those workouts out on a weekly timeline, with appropriate rest days.

Another key part of the idea is that each of those pieces should be its own progressive program, running on its own schedule, but arranged with the others so that they’re not all progressing upward at the same rate.

Me swinging an Adex adjustable club (adjusted to 10 lbs). Here I’ve just caught after an outside circle and have rotated back to center to prepare for the next swing.

This can (and probably should) get pretty fancy, because there are all kinds of considerations. You want to:

  • Cover all the basic movement patterns (walk, run, crawl, lift & carry, climb, throw & catch, etc.)
  • Hit all the large muscles in your body (glutes, quads, hamstrings, pecs, lats, traps, etc.)
  • Work all the basic directions of movement (Roll, Pitch, Yaw, Heave, Sway, Surge)
  • Avoid working the same muscle patterns two days in a row (to allow for recovery)
  • Make sure the important muscle patterns get hit at least twice a week

Besides all that stuff, I particularly want to include some “skills” training, where I’ll work on things like parkour, HEMA, rock climbing, fencing, etc.

I roughed out a plan along these lines, and gave it a try last week and this week. I have a couple of external constraints that I’m working around. One is that I want to be able to join my tai chi group in our Monday/Wednesday/Friday practice sessions. Another is that I want to include time each week for both a long run, and a long hike with Jackie—and both of those activities require flexibility related to the weather. Last week I ditched two of the tai chi sessions, but got in both a hike with Jackie and a long trail run. This week I couldn’t do one tai chi session because of rain, plus I had to take two unscheduled rest days because I tweaked something in my hip.

Today my hip seems to be recovered. I’ve done my heavy club swinging for the day, and I’ve gotten in a long run. Now I need to look at my draft schedule and see how to restart my workout plan, given all my many constraints.

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For some time now I’ve been groping toward more “functional” workouts, focused on developing actual useful capabilities—walking & running, crawling, lifting & carrying, balancing, climbing, jumping, throwing, catching, etc. (This in contrast to workouts that focus on capabilities that enable those things, such as pull-ups and dips which help enable climbing.)

This introduces certain complexities into my workouts. Skills-based activities need to be practiced at the start of a workout, when I’m fresh enough to do them with the sort of attention that lets me improve my skills. Likewise, any exercise that involves heavy weights, and any exercise that involves complex multi-joint motions, also needs to be done at the start, to minimize the risk of injury. That’s all well and good, but you can only put so much of a workout at the start before you inevitably find yourself in the middle. And then, what do you put at the end?

Well, one thing you can fairly safely put at the end is MetCon (metabolic conditioning) activity. Today I tried out such a MetCon circuit, with an eye toward doing something similar after my more skills-based workouts.

Kettlebell, jump rope, slamball

The workout was circuits of:

  • Kettlebell swings (53 lb) x 25 swings
  • Weighted jump rope (½ lb) x 60 jumps
  • Slamball slams (15 lb) x 15 slams

I’ve done something similar in the past with 45″ work followed by 15″ rest (and then 2–3 minutes rest between rounds). Today I didn’t feel like fiddling with the timer; I picked those rep counts to hit about the same 45″ duration for each set.

I repeated that circuit for 4 rounds, which took just over 22 minutes. I followed it up with a short suitcase carry of the kettlebell—just one circuit of my patio slab with the kettlebell on one side, and then again with the kettlebell on the other side.

It was a good workout.

Now the question is, can I first do a more skills-based workout and then follow it up with a MetCon circuit, without exhausting myself? If I can make that work, I’ll be a little closer to designing the functional training program that I’m working on.