We’ve warmed up, we’ve worked on improving some of our existing skills, now we want to tackle learning new ones. Learning a new skill is an exhilarating, fun and rewarding experience. One we’d like to have as much as possible. It’s essentially crack.
What’s the best way to be able to learn new material consistently and safely?
You, in your busy 21st-century modern life, have a finite amount of time to spend on training. So you’d better use your time wisely.
Let’s look at how to structure your training to get the most out of it, to make it so efficient that Japanese Toyota employees would look at it and say “あなたは本当に行って翻訳をチェックしましたか”. Translation? “God damn that’s efficient’. In the next few articles, we’re going to break up training into four chunks: warm up, existing skill refinement, new skill acquisition, and conditioning.
Mythconceptions is a word I have officially made up. It is part myth, part mis-conception. It’s a mythconception. And there are two I see in handstands all the time.
The first; that every element of the handstand is perfectly vertical in a perfectly vertical handstand. The idea of ‘finding your stack’.
The second; is the thought that the shoulder in a handstand is ‘open’. Or the idea that the solution to the problems you’re seeing in your handstand is ‘you just need to open your shoulders more’. Typically what they’re seeing is a lack of scapula elevation that’s masquerading as a shoulder angle issue, and a more appropriate cue would be ‘push up’ / ‘push tall’.
