NerdStrong Gym - It's All About The Core

Today's workout board looked alot different from all of the other boards as this one had a lot of words and very little exercises.

For today's workout we continue our handstand prep work, but first we had a pretty hefty warm up. We started with 25x Jumping Jacks, then Arm Circles, Wrist Stretches and 5x Inch Worm Inversions. We then moved on to the second half of the warm up with some Shoulder/Scapula work 3x :03 second hold on Elbows, Knees then full Push Ups. It was a good warm up and definitely got my heart pumping.

Now for the actual workout we did Handstand Drills. First was Hollow Hold Progressions, we did :30 drill then :30 second rest. We started with Knees Bent, Arms Only, then Feet Off Ground at 90 degrees, then Feet Off Ground at 45 degrees, then Feet Off Ground, Arms at side before finally doing a full Hollow Hold.

This took alot of core work and towards the end there is was getting tough. If you couldn't hold any one of those you were to stop there and keep practicing. I'm happy to say that I made it all the way through to the full hollow hold.

The next drill we did was Walking Lunge Progression. We started with Lunge, Arms Overhead, then Walking Lever to T, then Walking Lever, Hands Down to Ground and finally Walking Lever to a Split Kick.

This was more difficult for me as I already have my Handstand down so I had to hold back from actually doing a handstand. Coach Christy had to tell me to pull it back, that these are just drills and even though you can do the full handstand just go as far as the drill says. On the second round I did a much better job at controlling my movement.

And to finish off the drills we did a TABATA (:20 seconds of work, :10 seconds of rest) of Lemon Squeezers. These aren't difficult but can get tiring after a while but for me my biggest issue is when I pull my legs in to my chest I crush my testicles, which is not fun. So ever round I kept trying to readjust so I as crushing anything but no matter how I did them I crushed them. I had coach Seely and coach Christy telling me to keep my knees closer together when squeezing and I would try but I finally gestured to coach Christy that I couldn't do what she was asking as I was crushing things and she got the point and let me be. I finally gave up completely and just did butterfly sit ups and all was well with my junk.

I went to coach David afterwards and asked if this is common and he said, of course guys have to deal with things like this but it's basically the way your hips and anatomy are built. So I guess the next time we do Lemon Squeezers I'll just go right to sit up and above any actual squeezing.