 Welcome back to the Scorecast and it's Tim and Jekka here. We are doing today part one of a three-part series we're gonna do on how to and when to progress. So if you're not subscribed already, click the button below and then we're gonna get into this week's how-to. Okay, so we're gonna use the example of the frog stand where for progressions around that moving into a handstand is our sort of example and applying these principles of using a couple of tools in the locker, but also we're gonna talk about this frog stand is an isometric or a static hold and you can apply this to any of your other holds that you're gonna do like front levers, back levers and look at how long we need to hold these positions before we move on and progress so we'll get into that in a minute. Let's just give you a bit of information about the locker guys. One of the things that makes our training approach so effective for people, why people can learn movement so quickly is you've got this set of tools and every good score's got a locker, right? So we know they're different, we've got a locker but rather than books being our locker and pens, we've got some tools which are really gonna help anybody to jump in to calisthenics. At any point and make an exercise easier to progress it or to make it, sorry, to regress it or to make it more difficult to progress it. So if we can do those things effectively, anybody can train any movement at any time. So the different tools that we use, we have isometrics, eccentric, levers and angles, we've got stability and we've got assistance and those are the different things that we're gonna cover in this three part series but today we're gonna look at the frog stand as Jaco says and our focus is gonna be on levers and angles and on isometric contractions and how we're gonna look at those two different tools in enabling us to progress or regress and making sure that we can actually create adaptation which means we move forward to more difficult progressions of that movement. So today we're gonna have a look at the frog stand and using that to explore the isometric tools and isometric movement and we're gonna start to have a play around with understanding what's happening in an isometric and how we can maximize it. So we can use isometrics and other movements where we're pulling and pushing pull-ups or whatever but the frog stand is a perfect example of this. Basically an isometric movement is where there's no change in muscle length so it's a static hold position. Now these are important for calisthenics because a lot of what we do is an isometric exercise in itself. So Dave just holds his frog stand there and what we're looking for there is to be able to sustain that for a certain amount of time and that's where the question comes about when are you ready to move to next progression? Yeah, so there's no real magic numbers with isometrics but there is some key principles you need to understand it's about, one thing is it's about creating tension the time and the tension. If we're not creating an adaptation so if we're not creating tension you're not going to create an adaptation. So someone's used a phrase with me before that I quite like is no one ever got strong falling over. So your legs aren't gonna get strong if you just fall over. The same with your frog stand. Your frog stand isn't gonna get strong if as soon as you go into that position you fall out of it after half a second or one second. So but they're being saying that there isn't, there's no magic number but we'd like to say somewhere between like five or 10 seconds really is a nice guideline for you. What's really important in that is that you know when you're ready to progress you've got to earn that right to progress and when you feel comfortable in that progression and that's gonna be around somewhere around 10 seconds but if you feel comfortable after eight like you're ready to go then and you're soon gonna find out when you try the next progression whether you've built up enough strength or not because you go to the next progression and you just fall down and you're gonna need to use some of these tools to show you in a second to help bridge those gaps. So the jacket shows the next progression which is gonna be knee off and then we're gonna show you two ways is that we can use the tools in the locker to be able to play around with this and go backwards and forwards, regress or progress. So normally our frog stand progression will be here so we're nice, we stay, we can hold that for say 10 seconds or so. We feel that we've got control of the movement. The next thing to do is for jacket to take a knee off. Now this takes a little bit more preparation. We have to get ready to move that leg. We have to fire the shoulders up, create some stability in the chain because effectively we're reducing the amount of support that the body's being provided so we have to recreate that somewhere else because we're not able to just rest on that leg anymore. So to use the tools from the locker, this is an isometric in itself but we're gonna use an assistance tool as well and what I'm gonna get Jacko to do is go into that same position. When he takes that leg off, he can just use that one foot to dab the toe on the ground to give himself a little bit of support. So it's less weight than having the knee just hanging free off the ground but it's still a progression moving forwards using that assistance tool of making it a little bit more difficult and moving in a direction. So right he shows that. So you can see a little bit. So it goes back into a frog stand, hips are nice and high. This leg's gonna come off and then he's just gonna start to dab that toe on the floor a little bit on the left leg as this knee comes into that hanging position. You can just play around with how much force you're putting down to that stance leg or the left leg on this case as to how difficult or how easy you wanna make this but it starts into give you a feel if you can just literally just dab that down super gently of where you're gonna have to recreate that base of support when you take the knee off the elbow. I think a couple of things that are really important to make sure you don't do on this just to highlight is the reason would be if I take this leg off and my hip drops down and I just fall, you know that that's just too difficult for me. I've not created any tension, I'm just falling down. The other thing is then, so you go to put your foot down, when I take this leg off, does my hip stay in the same position or do I put this foot down, rely on it, let that hip drop down, I'm just really come back, actually take my hand off the floor and then put it back on. Then I'm just kidding myself that I'm not actually, I'm using that assistance to all that other foot, way too much so. It's a real key of these progressions for those frog stance. And what Tim's so good at those is it's having those hips set on top of the knee, on top of the elbow, on top of the hand and the wrist stacked and that when you take one of those legs off that hip position doesn't move backwards. We use this phrase about our approach to calisthenics, we're always looking to create a stable foundation from which we can move to next progression. In that frog stand, the stable foundation is the hips staying high. That means that we can then move to the next progression. If we're not stable there and the hips drop down straight away, we've lost that base, that stable foundation and we're kind of like, we're really going to find it quite difficult to progress and move forwards. So that's a great example of the assistance tool, just using the toe to move forwards. Again, there's no magic number, it really comes down to where you feel comfortable and confident to start to move around. But you want to feel like you've nailed that frog stand down for a decent amount of time first. And it is a really nice one for bridging that gap between. I've got comes from a frog stand now and maybe I can move around a bit but when I take that leg off or I can't even take that leg off or when I do it just falls straight back down. That's a quite a common one because it's a progression if you've got a certain amount of strength but it can be quite a big step sometimes people. So just using that toe down, just dabbing it just really helps bridge that gap for a lot of people. The last thing in all of these of the frog stands you've got to keep pushing. Don't forget that we're doing an isometric movement in itself and that requires us to be providing or producing maximum force into the ground. We don't want to be resting on the hands. Even with all of these progressions you should be literally pushing down as hard as you can for the duration. That's going to mean that it's a bit short as the amount of time you can do it for but we have to do that if we're going to start to increase the strength development because that's where most people are going to be limited when you start to try and progress. They're just not strong enough in here and we can make sure we're training that by pushing into the ground hard all the time. Let's look at the next one, levers and angles. So if we're going to move, if we're going to change the lever length or the angle that we're training at it's going to make an exercise easier or more difficult. So an example might be a tuck human flag with the knees bent rather than the straight leg fully out on the same with a planche with a frog stand we can apply really nice progression to. If we're struggling to take both knees off shows that Dave. So we might get to the point where you can take one off and you're happy, hips don't move but when you try and take both off we lose it. So we need a halfway house in between there. So we can actually take the single leg variation but rather than having both of the knees tucked in which is actually going to put quite a lot of weight in we can extend the lever length to make one of these legs longer. So Dave's going to just extend one leg out and whilst it actually looks like in some terms making a lever longer would be a progression, make it more difficult but in this case it's actually just distributing force wider over the base of support. So it's lengthening the lever but it's providing a bit more of a see-saw effect which makes the balance easier. Having both of those knees tucked in in a small tuck type but it's offensively like a tuck position puts a low demand on the shoulders because you're having to hold a lot of weight in a very short space. You're holding both legs off your knees whereas on with that one leg out straight yes the lever length challenges you but you've still got one leg on your elbow and so that's what makes it a nice little progression for you to, or a little stepping stone or bridge to being able to take two off. I'm a little bit out of breath if you see this. They're not that easy. So that's a real simple example of our levers and angles. We're changing the lever length to play around with the difficulty to progress and exercise in that case. Again the height that you're going to move that to can affect how difficult it is where it's lowering, more planchial, higher into more of a handstand position. So again, play around with it, see what works for you. You're ultimately trying to find points where you can hold a progression maximally for about 10 seconds. For reps and sets turns if you can start to find that progression where you're about 10 seconds and you can do four to six sets of those you're really starting to rack up some good time on the tension. That's going to be the major kind of nuts and bolts moving forward. The exercise is one thing but the amount of time that you can actually stimulate that maximal tension isometric hold is going to be the key. Yeah, and have making sure you give yourself a decent bit of rest in like a couple of minutes rest in between there's maximal effort and there needs to be maximal effort to create that adaptation that's going to help you build up that sort of really specific or we would call applied strength to support your frogs eventually going to turn those rotating up then into those handstands. Great. So that's it for this week's how to. Yep. They just do this. Yeah, how to is. So that was part one. Keep an eye out for part two and three but if you haven't subscribed click up there by my head. If you haven't got a free guide and there are loads of you follow us but you actually haven't downloaded the free guide yet so make sure you get that there that's actually free video tutorials to help you get started and then if for one of our other how tos check up there. So until next week. Class dismissed.