 Guys, welcome back to School Of Cards saying it's question and secession number two. I'm here with self-titled question master, Jaco. And since the first Q&A team they have been flooding in the questions. Overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. But a lot of the questions about sore hands, we'll get onto that in a bit. But actually the first, we've got three for you, but the first one that isn't an official question was someone was wondering whether how many pairs of those red t-shirts we had, because they were worried about them getting a little bit of overkill, so we're rocking the Oakley today. Two pairs, I've got two t-shirts without a chance. And a washing machine as well. We've got some new kits coming from a quite exciting new partnership with a clothing company, so look out for that soon. So the first question comes from, it was an Instagram live that we did after the workshop in Liverpool on Saturday, and it was a question around how to build muscle using calisthenics as opposed to weights. And Tim if you'd like to kick us off with that one. Jacko, this is a hot topic for Jacko actually, because it relates back to some of the stuff we talked about in the last Q&A around understanding what resistance is, and the body's, the central nervous system's perception of resistance, it really doesn't matter what we're using. So body weight is as effective as building muscle as some other forms of using barbells or dumbbells or whatever. It's just that calisthenics kind of lends itself more to, it's more sort of like complete movement patterns, a little bit more total muscle activation as opposed to an isolated bicep curl or something. So there's something for me around like, again it depends what you want from your training, it is totally possible to build some muscle, you need to have the right rep ranges, you need to be using the right tempos, and those are sorts of things which are going to maximize your opportunity, and I'll come on to that in a second, but just it's, again if you want to build specific body parts or you're looking for more bodybuilding program, it's just more effective to do that using dumbbells, barbells and whatever else, but not to say it's not possible, I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, so if you want to, like Tim says, depending on what you want out of your training, if you want to look like a bodybuilder, then you need to train like a bodybuilder, but if you want to be fit, healthy, active, have a way of training that you don't need much equipment and you can do that at home, for example like calisthenics is great for that, like neither of us use weights particularly now at all, certainly for zipper body stuff. So it depends, it really depends what you have to, but in terms of building muscle, if we're going to, we want to be hitting rep ranges and rest ranges and tempos, like Tim said, that put us in a hypertrophy, meaning building muscle sort of phase or state, so just go into that for them, Tim, so that we can... Yeah, so if we break it down, broadly speaking, we've got two different types of hypertrophy, we talk about hypertrophy, we're talking about increase in muscle mass, so we can have a mechanical hypertrophy or metabolic hypertrophy, and a mechanical size when we're going to use rep ranges is probably our optimum between 6 and 10, we extend the eccentric tempo, so we're going to lower it down a little bit slower, so if we're doing a pull-up, it might be 6 to 10 pull-ups, lowering down slowly for four seconds, and what that eccentric does is it places a little bit more stress on the muscle, causes a little bit more trauma effectively, and then the benefit of that being that we start to increase the contractile component of the muscle, so we're breaking down that the sarcomeres, we then put more sarcomeres into the muscle, the muscle gets bigger as a result of getting improved its ability to be able to produce more force. Now the other side of the metabolic... That's one that we are interested in, because I think it's going to be able to produce more force. Yeah, that one is functional hypertrophy, let's put it that way, you're going to get stronger and bigger, which is good because I don't think anybody really wants to be big and weak, particularly I don't anyway, because then you look like, yeah, it looks fake. So the other side of it is the metabolic side, it's actually working in rep ranges, maybe between 12 and 20, and then you just start to increase the plasma volume in the muscle, you're pumping it up effectively, but you're not actually making it that much stronger. Now there is some research out there that we're sort of aware of, it's quite current around, increasing hypertrophy by elevating lactate levels in the muscle, you can get that by doing these larger set ranges, but my argument in that would be really that it doesn't fit that well with calisthenics, that's really where people are going to be doing knee extensions or bicep curls, you're smashing up the volume a little bit, but you're not actually getting that much stronger. Now there's probably people in the bodybuilding world that may disagree with me, it's not a specialist area, it's a hard word to say, it's not a specialist area of mine, we understand the principles of what we're trying to do, but I come from a strength and conditioning background, I never need to get an athlete big for the sake of being big, we're always looking to improve from forced production, so that's kind of where we would advise you to go six to ten, work hard, work slow on that eccentric, rest periods 60 to 90 seconds, you've got to bash out some work in these sets. And then volume-wise, total number of sets? Yeah, like three to five, six sets, that would be put through per exercise, and you need to do it quite consistently, you need to be starting to hit some decent breadth of exercises across the week, so whether it's three, four days of specific work, takes time, and another thing Jack, what do you think about nutrition in that sort of side of conversation? Yeah, if we're trying to increase muscle mass and we need to be in a calorie surplus, so that we're actually, we need to be eating more total calories, as well as increasing your protein intake to help with that growth and repair, but you'll need to be taking on carbohydrates to fuel those sessions, so the sessions can be effective, and part of that recovery, it's not just about protein, and we try to make sure that, or advocates of eating, if you call it clean eating, or natural or healthy, that we're trying to eat complete foods, stuff that we're cooking ourselves at home, so we know what's going in it, making sure you've got plenty of veg on your plate, if you're thinking of plate sizes or something, half veg, quarter protein, quarter carbohydrate, but coming from good sources so you know what they are like, rice or potatoes for your veg, I'm a massive fan of oats, I'm quite well known in our gym for bringing me big bowl of oats in the Oats. They've been bringing like a Tupperware, just brings a bowl, we're just spooing the side of it. You're originally doing a Tupperware, but it's just easier just to bring it in the bowl and just crack on with it, but Oats are a great carbohydrate source, carbohydrates get a bad name, and everyone doesn't want to take them, because they think they're worried that it's going to make them fat, but it's about the quantity and the quality of the stuff you're eating, but Jet, if you're going to try to increase your mass and the total amount of muscle that you're building, what you're eating needs to supplement that. If you're going to work your ass off in the gym, you need to make sure you're eating well and correctly and healthily. I think that my last point on this is just around how you're going to stretch your training, so my advice with the calisthenics would not be so obsessed about using calisthenics to get big. If you kind of stick to those rep ranges that I talked about and you start to use exercises which are difficult, you're training hard, so you get into the end of an eight rep set, and that is literally your last rep. You need to get to that point where you're pushing that on. Get plenty of exercises in your program. I've actually, to be fair, from my own perspective, started to do a little bit more of that kind of work. The last 12 to 18 months for me worked while I was just being rough, and I feel like I've dropped off. So my program at the moment, it's supersets. It's simple exercises, it's just volume, but I'm not over obsessing about the eccentric component of the exercises, because ultimately, my calisthenics training and what my physique is able to do, it's got to go somewhere else. So I'm just enjoying it and not drilling it too strictly. See what happens, and again, you'll respond differently to us. You might respond really well to a 10 rep range. Jaco responds quite well to go in lower reps. So you've got to play around a little bit. I always look at gymnasts. It's a great example. Look at a gymnast. They're not training specifically for bulk. They train a lot. They train high tension movements. They train well, and they eat well, and they look good. Yeah, I wish you remember the Olympics. And the American gymnastics team, different level shows and biceps. I'd take that over any bodybuilder in the world. They look the business. And just on that, the sort of the fluffy side of things, the thing that we push that's totally, we 100% believe in it, in that if I'm training for a movement, a thing that I'm trying to achieve, whether it's just as simple as a frog stand, or whether it's as complex as a flag, you're training to achieve something that when you do that and achieve that, like we define that impossible. One, it feels amazing, but two, you'll get fitter, you'll get stronger, you'll build muscle. As a result of being able to do that thing, that you feel awesome that once you can do it, but you're not obsessing about looking in the mirror what you look like, that will just grow organically change as you work hard towards achieving those things. So from a more holistic viewpoint, flipping your training around rather than to look good or just lose body fat or whatever it is, that actually train to do something, and then just see how your body changes and reacts to you training towards that thing. That's a big thing for me. The second question is about head position in push-ups and what sort of alignment should we have our head in and how do we stop our head from restricting our range and most of the coming down, like if your nose touches the floor, but you feel like you've got a bit more range in there. Where we go about, Tim? Yeah, well, I think this came off the back of our challenge Tuesday with number 46, I think, where they've snitched on me. Like, no one likes a class snitch. No, it was you guys. Because he lost. Thank you to everybody that pointed out Tim's incorrect. It was particularly Instagram, actually, a bit of YouTube or Facebook, but I did very well. The thing is about, as an aside, I didn't pick up Dave's poor hamstring range, but what people actually calling me out on is, I've actually got quite tight shoulders. My stress levels of late have been quite high. And when we get stressed, the upper traps get tight, pecs and shoulders a bit tight, because I'm working a lot, I travel quite a bit. We can finally get a bit restricted to this upper body. So you'll see people do the same thing on a bench press. Bar comes down, head goes up to meet the bar and it comes back out. And we're running out of range around the C-spine and the shoulders. So what I actually need to do is just be a little bit more kind of relaxed in that position. I've got a little bit of mobilization work to do and I actually asked Physio about this and the cue that they gave me was to think about taking some of the tension out of my neck and shoulders. But when I'm doing a push-up, I'm going to try and stay neutral with my chin tucked in, but then keeping my jaw relaxed and with my tongue just that gently press against the roof of my mouth. So when I come down, and it's actually now a conscious thing that I'm going to have to think about, because when I come down, especially if I'm trying to beat Dave's, it goes fast as I can. Like I'm trying to rep out, but I just need to go back, build a little bit of technique and form. And it happens, the best of it is when things fall apart a little bit and we've got other stuff going on. So that's my kind of thoughts about it. So the key is staying neutral, so not extending the neck out. And then that's a really nice cue from Tim there, saying you're just going to push your tongue, not like crazily, but just push your tongue towards the top of your mouth. I've had someone say to me once before about trying to make yourself feel like you're making yourself have a double chin, just to keep that neck nicely in neutral. At least not the shoulders, getting all this sort of business. These, particularly some of the stuff around here, like it's quite difficult to get into, but it's still in a cloud of mastoid, this guy runs down here. That sort of stuff gets tight and plays around the neck. So a little bit of like, check out a bit of like neck mobilization and gentle neck stretching stuff can help. And like Tim was saying, a lot of it comes from what we're doing day to day, like driving or sitting in front of a computer and really stretching that neck forward. Stressing. So trying to be a bit more aware of when you're doing your day to day stuff, like what sort of positions are you putting yourself in for long periods? Always trying to train up to me guys, so alignment is a key thing. Postural control at all times, even we fall apart as you guys will do. So just check yourself, go back to basics and rebuild when you need to. So question master. Yes. Enlighten me with question number three. Question three is, comes twice because we were like, so flooded with ease about, about sore hands. So both on Instagram, so Tracy said she did her first frog stand today and she was very impressed. Not on Tracy. It's still face planted a little bit at the end. We've all been there. Standard. So managing 10 second eccentric pull-ups and isometrics, but our hands are developing big calluses and can we recommend anything to protect the hands at all? And then also met Sims on Instagram said, can we recommend anything for sore hands? It feels often that on exercises he's giving up from fatigue of his hands aching so much. She's been training just under six months for calisthenics and hands are slowly getting tougher and stronger. Do we recommend gloves, gardening gloves, chalk or powder or anything else? So I will kick off this one Tim, just to give you a little bit more time to process that. And I'm just going to hone in on the gardening gloves. That would very much depend on whether you're planning on doing any gardening whilst you're doing calisthenics. I'm not sure that gardening gloves have got any specific benefits of calisthenics over a set of weightlifting gloves. They might be cheaper actually. It is something easy to be fair, like joking aside, like people will wear gloves for like better grip and more comfort. Some of the gardening gloves you get have like, they're almost like rubbery and that actually gives you a decent amount of grip to be fair. I'm an advocate of, I'd be lying if I said I hadn't once, probably about three years ago, bought these like mitten glove things, matchy-matchy for me and Tim to wear but... They were like, right string. It didn't last long. I need to bring them back actually. Come on then. But my thing about those was to serve a specific purpose of hanging, trying to do a flag off a chicken wire fence. Yes. Which actually was quite sore. But generally, like you need the calluses will build up and I've ripped one before and occasionally see people, they like post a picture of it ripped when they're like, but it's not nice. I wouldn't go, I wouldn't be, I personally wouldn't be showing off about ripping a callus off my hand. But it is something that your hands do get more used to. I don't ever wear or do anything with them now. It's almost like it's a, you've got to go through a little bit of a difficult phase to get to somewhere better and unfortunately, calluses on the hands for the girls. I know it's not that pretty. And I actually would think that I've got my wife, when she does any more body weight stuff, like she'll tend to want to get some gloves on or something because she doesn't want dirty calluses on the hands. Whereas from my perspective as a bloke, I'm not really that bothered. So I think it's probably, maybe in that sort of situation, if you want to keep your hands looking fresh, then that's cool. If not from a bloke's perspective, it actually helps not having the gloves on. Like I think just in terms of working the grip, so actually having to hold the bar maximally, so you'd be getting the benefits of grip strength training at the same time and all the great stuff that that does for the shoulders. I think as well, just the, I don't like the idea when we move into like, everything in this kind of day and age can become a little bit sort of watered down. I just think like, my granddad was a farmer and I think my granddad had great hands, like, because he was just farmer's hand. Yeah, it wasn't. It was just sort of, I just think we should be embracing that side of the training and ultimately when you build up that resistance, you're going to, it's going to help you along the training. It's like a guitar player, they'll get cursed on the fingertips, but that's just, it's just a product of, they can't play guitar and gloves, so you're staying on, aren't you? And just to touch on some, a good point you made like about the benefit of working on your grip and the benefit that has on your shoulder strength and your tater cuff, that also if your grip is the weakest part of your, of the training, that's something they need to, need to, need to work and train on, like when, when I was back playing rugby, we weren't allowed to use any straps or anything for, for gripping bars, deadlifting. And if, if we'd say to the coach, oh, I could, I could probably do more, but it's my grip that's going, he'd say, well, then work your flipping grip because that's the weakest part of the chain. And if that is for you, like on your pull-ups, for instance, the weakest part of your chain, then to get better, then you are going to, it is a good thing to work on that. If they get sore, and then they're not torn, like Jack has said, I've done that before. Terrible. Took one off and, when they get to the, like if you get calluses and they get to a bit of point where they actually need ribbon down, a pumice stone or something, just to get the top off and actually does help quite a bit. But if they're sore, then you're going to have to give them a bit of time to heal up. They will get stronger, they will recover, but training on the sore hands and, yeah, it's almost, I'm not going to say right of passage because it makes it sound like you've got to go through some terrible trauma to be a calisthenics, let's call it athlete or to train calisthenics. It is literally just something that comes with the territory. Like a pumice stone to ribbon down, I pick them a little bit, but just, yeah, not letting them build up too much. Not like you don't want them to rip off, that's for sure. Yeah, jacket shoes them. Okay, so, thanks for watching. If you have questions, please comment below and we will answer them in our next Q&A. So comment below or you can message us on any of our social medias, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. If you haven't yet subscribed, make sure you click subscribe here. If you haven't downloaded our Free Beginners Guide, that's for you and that is down there. You can click that for the website. It's free. It's actually really good. It is really good. I definitely get it again. And then if you haven't seen the previous Q&A, then click up by Tim's head up there and you will get that video. We look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for your questions guys. Class dismissed.