 Welcome back to the ScoreCast. It is a Q&A Christmas Calisthenics special. Does this one get a number or not? No, it's a special. That's the number, a number special. Number special. And it is Christmas Eve. It should be if I've put this out. It isn't right actually Christmas Eve when we're recording it. But it will be Christmas Eve. Hopefully if I upload it to the podcast and to YouTube. Yeah. On Christmas Eve right there. So hopefully it is. I'm glad you clarified that because actually if it was Christmas Eve and we were doing this, I'd be potentially thinking that there might be more important things that I should be doing on Christmas Eve. Like wrapping presents. And spending time with family. That's the one. Going for a nice beverage at the local. So if you're listening to this now on Christmas Eve, what Tim's saying is, you need to turn it off because it's the time of your family. Honestly. And then listen to it in the new year. Yeah, there's nothing that we're going to say that it can't wait until after Christmas. Well possibly that's not possible. Unless you're planning on training tomorrow on Christmas Day, which I won't be. No. I'm planning on eating quite a bit of Christmas. My first question actually to Tim is, coming onto that, I'm planning on, let's call it a bulk of Christmas. But it means that I'm just going to eat a lot of food. I probably won't even train that much, but I'm just okay with that. If you know what I mean. You're generally okay with that though. That doesn't stress you out at all really. Yeah, it tends not to. Because there's like Christmas as well, I want to enjoy. And we enjoy Christmas. And he was also naughty because he would pretend that he's not bothered about a bulk, but he's actually doing a huge amount of secret cardio that he doesn't tell me about. I'm not doing secret cardio. I did part run on Saturday. And I'll do a run, we'll do a 10K run, either Christmas Day or Boxing Day up at my wife's house. So that will go in the locker. I won't want to do it. But I'll probably eat a selection box for breakfast. I was going to ask you that. Christmas Day. I thought it was chocolate orange. Well, if I get a chocolate orange, but if I just get a selection box, and what sort of percentage of cacao would you accept on Christmas Day? Are you strict on that? Or would you literally go for a boost at a Turkish delight? Well, the disappointment these days, you get short changes on a selection box from Cadbury's and other... Just a finger of fudge. Is that what you get? Well, you'll get a fudge, you might get a curly whirl, some of the classics. But it tends to not be like, back in the day, you used to get a full Mars bar, a full Twix, and you'd be, you know, you'd feel really sick before lunch. Do you know what I said? This is not at all what you're planning on talking about. But chocolate is a good part of Christmas. I was in the garage of the day, and I don't eat a lot of chocolate, but I saw a topic, a great chocolate bar. I don't think I've ever... A topic, to me, is a bit like a double decker. I'm scared of them. I don't... I've never tried it. Obviously Snickers is the king of chocolate bars. What has a Snickers not got that you would want in a chocolate bar? I'm not going to have a protein one. No. I'm going to just have it. Actually, just have a Snickers and enjoy it for what it is. Don't try and get protein through your Snickers. Get protein from food. Well, I'm not going to do this early, but because we've gone on to chocolate, I've got a little surprise for you. Something that's going to be a little bit more for the visual audience than the podcast one. But I can talk about it as we go through it. Are we exchanging gifts today, Dave? Yeah, this Merry Christmas to him. This is... Let's call it an after eight, but obviously I've been to Aldi, and other stores are available, but they're... and it isn't four, because I've been tucking into this a little bit. I want to see what you like. Think of it as like a challenge Tuesday. I knew this was going to happen. I saw you do this to the day. You're trying to get it from a forehead, aren't you? So it goes on the forehead, but if you do it that fast, you've got to wiggle your head, the after eight, so you come down to the nose, and then you get it down to the side, and then you get it in your mouth. We've just lost all of our podcast listeners. There you go. Don't worry, enjoy it. For those that aren't listening, I'm now eating that after eight. Well, I think it's called a chakur from Aldi, but it's that type of thing. I'm not doing it because it's a visual thing, Dave, and we've got a list of the custom reply. I will enjoy your mint thin, which is slash after eight, but let's talk Christmas and questions. What's your favourite thing about Christmas dinner? That was mine. What is your favourite thing about Christmas dinner? What's your favourite and worst thing about Christmas dinner? My favourite thing about Christmas dinner is stepping outside of what is conventionally provided for Christmas dinner. I'm not a massive turkey fan, if I'm honest. I like cooking. I'm cooking at home this Christmas, but it's a bit... We're actually having turkey, but out of necessity because a number of people are coming as opposed to anything else. Last year I cooked pheasant. Last year's beef went into the year before it was pheasant, so I'm a bit of a nonconformist when it comes to Christmas dinner. Are you cooking Christmas dinner this year? We're having beef rib on Christmas Eve and we're having beef stuffing. Talked to me about looking like Gordon Ramsay. Basically got the same skills. Although I've actually cooked Gordon Ramsay's beef wellington. This is a tip. If you're cooking beef wellington tomorrow, pin your ears back because this is where I made a mistake last year. It's not just calisthenics we cover. I love cooking. I took a sharp knife, normal straight bladed sharp knife, and then tried to cook my beef wellington. But when I cut it, what happens is the sharp knife actually tears the pastry slightly. So it's good for cooking the beef, but not the wellington. I don't know if that's a technical term for the pastry. But what you want to do is actually take a serrated knife, cut the pastry, and then swap blades so you then go for the normal carving knife to cook cut the beef. I didn't know that. You do now. When you were saying wellington, I was thinking of boot. Boot wellington. Different. That's what I was getting. You stitched with the wellington box. The more advanced culinary techniques to Gordon Ramsay's lookalike. A bit more available for bookings if anyone's got a budget. We'll be on the side. I've got a few questions come in that are nice end of year type of questions that I wanted to delve into. And it is from, it was on an e-mail from his name is Stephen. He's on board with the whole I'll just read you the first beginning bit of his very long e-mail. Hi Dave, I trust you and Tim are well. We are. He's just discovered the stuff on Instagram. He says it's been amazing looking back at the challenges. And he's been really enjoying his calisthenics journey trying to redefine it as impossible. Good on you Stephen. Welcome on board. We've got a number of questions. I want to summarize some of them but I want to start off with asking Tim what's your sort of like at the end of the year and we're getting close there I like to reflect back on what's previously happened. So like for you in terms of your your own personal calisthenics training what's been like one of the because I can think of a couple of things for you actually be interested in what you come up with what's been your like highlight or what's something that you feel like has really like it's just been hard. I know you're not going to say like everything's improved but there's two really good things that you've improved on this year. You'll reflect back on your training what feels like it's gone well. I've touched on this one of the podcasts and Q&As this year but this year's been hard because my little boy was born on the 5th of February so everything from that point onwards has been fairly well disrupted. So I haven't really got much consistency and I'm not if I'm honest at the end of the year approaches I'm not feeling great physical condition. Now that is like less than number one of the podcasts. Just like keep the questions on this. So yeah I'm not feeling great Nick at the moment and it has been tough. So I'm approaching next year with a sense of trying to get back to a bit more structural training. However things have gone well I've dialled in a little bit around my planche training. Yes that was one I was going to have him for you. So I haven't got a full planche yet, my straddle planche I can do push ups in a straddle planche position now and when we started four years ago if you'd have seen that and said oh in four years time you'll be doing that you just had no chance. Yeah literally when I first tried to put my hands into that position to do a planche I was like how do you even ever think about doing that. But it's getting there I need to do a bit more specific time on that and I feel like the planche then I worry with the planche is investing time in it is I'm not sure it's going to be one of those things that sticks around easily without some maintenance work. I think the straddle planche I've got in the locker I did a lovely one earlier today even. Yes I did. Just messing about. However the full planche I'm not sure I'm not sure if it's going to be something like a handstand I can go and do a handstand any day of the week. The planche I'm not sure so that's going to be an interesting thing for me and I think later on because we were launching strength and play our new e-book soon that I should actually hopefully be out by the time this goes you should be able to buy it available on our website and hopefully in the future good books. Then it just means we've had a few difficulties in the way before and it will soon soon soon be out. But check that out because and that has actually helped to encourage me to take a slightly different approach to some of my training because it's brought back this sense of we've probably got fairly well and it's a word that I use in the e-book about entrenched down a road of looking for a specific movement so just hammering things like working towards front leavers and planche and all this other sort of stuff whereas actually strength and play writing that book has encouraged me to start thinking about tack writer pull ups and various other things which I'm having fun with and bringing a sense back of one volume in my program and two just challenges play with things that are less difficult so that it becomes less stressful because I'm tired and I'm necessarily going into a session thinking I've been in great conditions today to smash perfect muscle ups. Actually winding it back and just starting to pick out some other challenges that aren't as hard as that has probably given me a little bit of encouragement in a fairly difficult year of training but I'm not keen to think about this. My other thing I've got for you was and maybe you're not thinking about it because it's dropped in and out depending on how tired you are and how much training but your handstand to tiger bend and back up to handstand that's been a good journey for you this year. I still don't feel that necessarily I've got that quite as reliably as I have. Only just because sometimes there's been times where I've seen you do it and just it looks just like ridiculous. The interesting thing about that is sometimes when you see that it feels like that and the next day I can come in or a couple of days later and be like it's just not clicking and I've worked out recently what it is that I do wrong but it's sometimes sort of stuff around fatigue I don't know, it's one of those variables but it is probably one of the most fun things that I do in Calisthenics because it's just the sort of thing you look at and go it's just ridiculous. You shouldn't actually be able to do that. But it's a real nice challenge with that hand balance and control. That was a nice question actually. Let's do it, let's return there. I feel like I had a difficult year I've had a few niggles, elbow, shoulder niggles that's lasted like a ton of time. Your elbow, when did you do it? Spring? Before we filmed? I was feeling a little felt. I was doing some front lever to muscle up on the bar on the high bar up at the gym and then just one time when I've transitioned over just pinged and said that was back in June or maybe the end of May so a long, long time saw a physio and he reckoned ten days I'd be alright and I was like sending a message about two months ago four months what's the news on that ten day niggle that I had in my tricep it was like the tricep tendon but anyway so that sort of I don't necessarily I've just tried to polish off my hand balancing what I don't feel like I don't feel like I've done anything particularly new this year it's just tried to make a few things a bit better You've invested a ton of time in front lever training yet to come to full fruition but making progress in January so I'll move on this is going to move on nicely to my next question is like next year from the beginning of the year my front lever is going to look nice and what's the sort of New Year's resident and it ties in with Steven's question I had a nice question about like what do you look for for inspiration and I want to tie that type of question in like where do you look for inspiration or 2018 what would you like to try and stick in your locker that's a good question that's why I'm question master you actually got better at question master over the year I think started off badly maybe that's the thing that I've improved on the most you never see Michael Parkinson's phone ringing do you in the middle of an interview you probably haven't got a mobile probably not where do I start with that one inspiration I'm going to be a real gnaws yeah I am sat here it's Seth I've never really been much like a fangirl kind of person so like I see people doing stuff whatever sometimes girls keep it stay away from that one because I look at people I think maybe I've learned over the years that I'm just doing my thing now and if I look at other people for inspiration I just find it fairly depressing so I know because I'm like your life isn't my life and your background isn't my background I'm not saying that's right or wrong it's just that I'm doing my thing and you need to do yours and if you're better than me then great that's cool for you but we've got other stuff going on so I guess I try and I know what's out there and I'm now pursuing the things that I find fun and enjoyable so I like the idea of doing a planche way more than investing the time and doing a front lever so I'll put it out there that I still can't do a front lever I've said it now Dave I don't know because it's been a long time but the reality is I've been saying that that I'm going to do a front lever probably for the last 2-3 years it's something and this year's been a bad example because the train has been disrupted and I might do a bit and that's one of the things about trying to learn something new which is as hard as a front lever it has to put some consistency together so I might do some work and then it might drop off for whatever reason so I've kind of learnt that to try and chase these movements is sometimes out of my control especially when you're working on hard things so the planche for example is something I can do at home so that fits a little bit more into where I want to be because I'm trying to put some more structure in so recently what I'm looking forward to next year is hopefully starting to nail down 3 sessions a week anything more than that as a bonus but I'll share what my schedule is going to look like and we've seen a little bit of research which has helped to guide this so my focus what I want to put a lot like next year is consistency and I want to get some real decent base level back and I might actually just be quite like to just try and put a little bit of weight back on because I think I've lost about a kilo and a half recently so and again that's just from a number of different things but one session is legs and levers so working low body and focusing on isometric holds and that includes front levers and planche progressions and also that means my core stuff so dragon flags and that kind of thing that's been that session and then I have two push and pull combined days one is I've got muscle ups in there but after that I'm going to go hard push easier pull and then the other one is hard pull easier push and that's how I'm going to so I'm training upper body push and pull muscle musculature twice a week I've got my legs and my static holds in there anything on top of that is bonus and I need to try and get some cardio stuff in but that's just really difficult for me I'm going to do a part of the run with me boring and also I'll be the guy do you see anybody else running with a push chair and a dog that is generally my dog weighs 36 kilos a guy with a push chair ran past me once and he didn't have a goal to retrieve it the dog regularly runs past me my dog when he puts the anchors on because he wants to piss on something it's 36 kilos it's dead stop I've got history of dislocating shoulders the next addition to that could be oh yeah my golden retriever decided I don't want to run park run anymore because he was bored your shoulders in our bulletproof they can probably handle that to be a good challenge for it so that's a long winded answer around actually there's quite a lot of stuff going on but I just want to get some consistency back down and I'm just going to take it as it comes what's nice is that you've got a plan you've got a few things on that list and that you're going to work towards them I'm Lucy Goosey but not being like precious over and just putting too much like having goals with an end point and a time frame and they're specific and all those types of things in terms of goal setting is great but sometimes we just end up putting too much pressure on ourselves to try and like if we're chasing a goal it's different to like actually progressively working towards it I think that's the difference with calisthenics like chasing something is not necessarily the right way to go about redefining an impossible maybe it is if you can get to the gym 5-6 times a week every week but the chance of overtraining that then it goes to go to time but I think the thing is maybe I don't know whether it is or not maybe it's just admitting defeat because there's been on my goal list for the last few years and I've missed it so I've got the appointment actually put it on the goal list and they're not achieving it for the last couple of years it's relatively depressing so I'm actually just going to back off it a little bit and it'll happen when it happens the other thing is I know now I think we've died down and let's just touch on this a bit because we've seen a lot of stuff around a front lever and I'm going to ask you the same question about what you want to do but one of the best videos I've ever seen for front lever and I'm being sarcastic so just bear that in mind is when there's like we see people go this I do a front lever the first category of video we see is I can't do a front lever but these are the steps that you need to do that's one thing in itself and then there's all this other stuff where some people go this I do a front lever but he didn't use any of these exercises he did these ones instead and also these are some others that are supposed to work nobody seems to be presenting a particularly good recipe for people who don't have a gymnastic background haven't done a lot of that kind of work before a structured progression towards a front lever and that's why we haven't, now we have got four years of mistakes to refine that and now we actually have got a pretty good idea about what's working because they're feeling the gains and the improvements together, tutorials that outline what we feel like is the most efficient way to go about that and we've got some stuff around the science bit that you're talking about in terms of shoulder positioning and where we can create the most amount of force and that's one of the key things that we've been exploring recently that's making the biggest amount of improvement I've always known that from when I came into class pulling was my weakness I was quite good at pushing and still that is where my strengths are the hand balancing whereas you're actually much better at pulling than I am and you're further on that route so again it's just I came into class with my training background you came in with your everybody people that listen to this would have done the same they'll have their own stuff so like if pulling is just not a strength for you then you're going to find it hard I reckon until you get into single arm pull ups the front lever I almost think a single arm pull up is going to be an easier journey than a single arm than a front lever because I just think there's less things starting to have to work literally going to be yes to some shoulder stability but it's brute force I think some good message for the people at home is like as you said we've both got different strengths and weaknesses depending on what your previous training background is like and including that depending on what type of injuries and things that you've had two shoulder surgeries that's not conducive to a front lever but then pushing strength is where your strength like so your hands down push ups and planche and straddle planche work tenfold further along than where I've got to you can see down the difference the size of our triceps so my so my goal for 2018 is increase the size of my triceps I think that should be the number one goal in life brute the size of my chest triceps first and then work with the chest I got called pancake tits once by someone it hasn't affected me and I haven't remembered it forever I never use it sometimes because it makes me feel better about myself Dave is the only person I know who's abs is bigger than his chest solid turtle at birth it's a curse and a gift so go on anything else apart from the triceps that was like joking but I am going to do I want to dial back some of my pushing and just go back to a bit of basics on that in terms of my vertical pushing and just put a real block in for I want to put a good couple of them so January, February I'm going to try and dial back where I struggled with try and dial back away from loads of hard stuff and do a bit more baseline work a little bit more baseline work like I said front lever that's going to come early I'm just going to go hard at that because I feel like I'm on the edge of that right position frustratingly for me and then try and stay injury free my number one goal of 2018 is not to pick up any niggles because that will have the biggest effect on my improvement across whatever it is I decide to try and work with that's a huge thing actually I'm going to flip this into a serious conversation but in the performance support environment we talk about that a lot of increasing athlete availability so athlete health the English Institute of Sport is a whole department with full management structure and practitioners and blah blah blah they put a huge amount of emphasis on that because if we can increase the number of days an athlete is available to train in we can increase performance it's so super simple we've got all this other stuff that we like to play around we can tweak this little one percent half a percent actually just rock up to training so when we talk about taking deloads and rest days and delo weeks that's so important so if you can just get to the point where you're comfortable taking rest you're comfortable with some regeneration strategies whether it be soft tissue release or whatever works for you and you don't pick up injuries happy days you're going to get better way quicker than overloading that training program by trying to spin more plates and sort of take home message for me around that trying to stay injury free is like particularly something I need to be better and more aware of we've talked a lot about the injuries we started calisthenics with from rugby and I'm going to just be clear about that rather than necessarily getting injured doing calisthenics I haven't actually really been injured since I started calisthenics I've come I've got a few things that are never going to change so like I broken shoulder pain that isn't repaired I never had an operation that is just separated broken hand snapped tendon in my finger that has never been repaired because I chose not to have it done because I remember the doctor saying well I can play next week if you just tape it up and then or you can have an operation and it will take you'll be out for three months and I was like what for my finger? just leave it but it's just all open to my elbow and it's not connected and a broken hand on this side when I'm doing things now there's a certain level of compensation on the floor that is going to have an effect further of the chain and my I'm starting with I try to do all this stuff but my body isn't perfect because there's been a number of breaks in the chain literally broken bones and snapped tendons that haven't been repaired surgically whilst when I was playing rugby we just sort of strapped it up and got on with it but it's left me with something that I need to not ignore and actually just try to manage as I do these other things in calisthenics and I think for people at home if you have got some injury history and that sort of thing you get an exploring into some calisthenics don't ignore them try to manage them effectively and if something doesn't feel right then you need to back off and not push through because staying injury free is going to be the best way for you to progress even if you're not doing the greatest progressions in the world you could have the greatest progressions in the world but if you start over-training and injured you stop progressing I feel like we've shared some vulnerability to that that's just a fact there which I've been harboring but remember it is a Christmas special people won't even be listening because you told them at the beginning to stop listening and go and spend time on the family but if you made it all the way to the end well done enjoy Christmas Day tomorrow I've got a Christmas message that the Korean says ok let me finish mine try to enjoy Christmas Day try to have a day off training is my recommendation don't stress about it and eat a sprouts no one wants to eat them but you just eat them it depends how you cook them Dave you can receive good energy junior my little takeaway message from this year guys is we'll be back in January but I just want to say a massive thank you to everybody who's supported us who's engaged with us we literally set this up because people said to us right at the beginning after we had embarrassed ourselves largely in front of the most members of our gym can you the people started saying can you teach us how to do some of the stuff that you're doing so that is where the school of calisthenics was birthed we never really kind of set out to get to a point where we've got the community that we have supporting us I don't want to sound cliche but it's literally our passion about sharing this information with you guys is why we do it and we massively appreciate the fact that you guys support us and we get so many messages that are just encouraging us to do that Dave and I if you're looking for a book over Christmas you want to understand you're better half more there's a book called Love Languages and our love language according to my wife is Words of Affirmation that is why if you send pairs of compliments you get on the podcast it's for us it's nice for us others are quality time but anyway basically we're quite insecure and we like it when people say something nice exactly so what I'm trying to say guys there's a massive thank you from all of us from Harvey, from Seth, from Lani, from the headmaster Tomo we massively appreciate it guys and stick with us we've got some exciting projects coming out definitely got some exciting projects coming out that you need to know about when we announce them in January you're going to be excited and if you have any questions whether it's related to how to cook your Christmas Wellington boot like Tim comment below whether it's about training comment below and we will ask them in our next coming up Q&As but until next week or next time have a holiday it's Christmas time class dismissed