 All the calisthenics for another lesson. If you haven't yet, click subscribe for Tim Tells what today's lesson is. Today's lesson is an exciting one. We're going to talk about how to get dead strong. So today we're going to talk about how to get dead strong. What that means is that there's certain movements in calisthenics where we've got to transition from something where we haven't got any movement, any momentum, a very still position into producing force. So there's a number of different practicalities of that, but we have to train it quite specifically. We can't just assume it's going to happen. So Jaco's going to give us some examples. So like say for instance, you're struggling to get out of that frog stand position or transitioning from that frog stand into your handstand. Yet you've been working on your wall handstand push-ups where you go up and down, up and down. You can bust maybe five, six, seven, eight, even 10 of those out. But every time you're going down and coming back up you're actually using momentum from the rep on the way down to help you get back up. And this idea of what Tim's going to go through in terms of starting from dead positions, static positions, that's what you've got to do with that frog to handstand transition. You're there in that frog stand. You've got no momentum, nothing's moving and you've got to be able to create starting strength or that force at the beginning from that static position to get yourself up. It's the same for your muscle up, the starting position of your muscle up, you're hanging there, you've got no momentum. It's difficult to get that static strength to go up. You'll often find that your second rep when you come back down is easier for your muscle up because you come back down and use a little bit of momentum from the last rep to get yourself back up. And Tim's going to go through some of the science behind why that momentum helps and what the body is actually doing. To the graphic of the stretched shortening cycle to put it into context a little bit, eccentric phase is when the muscle is going to load, it's going to start to store that energy into our concentric, but it all revolves around this bit here, the amortization phase. A word you've probably never heard before, but it basically means the transition between the eccentric and the concentric. Now, the longer that is, the more energy we lose, the faster it is, the more we store and therefore convert. So if we're going to try and train for a dead strength position, what we need to do is extend this bit. So if we're going to work into our handstand pushup example, it might be going down onto the ground, holding that dead position or getting the head on the ground for sort of two, three seconds, killing the movement and then producing force out. That's how it's going to apply in some of the positions. And it explains why that second, as was that example, we gave that second rep of your muscle up where you come down fast and you spring out of that bottom position where that is as minimal as possible. That explains why that second rep feels better. And then we're going to go through some examples for you where we can do it on some of the simpler things, even just as simple as our pushup, how we can elongate or lengthen that phase there with that pull so we can start to build up that dead strength that we're going to be putting in. I think you can feel that. If you come down a second rep of muscle up, you literally feel that spring bringing you back out of it. And this is all about understanding how to train for what you, to get the benefit that you want. Like if you want to do some more kind of rep those out and get the benefit of this, sometimes you use our elastic response because it helps. Other times you might find that actually you can't do something and then you need to switch your training strategy up and this is one of those things that you might have in your locker to pull out and go right. And it's going to go and train some dead strength for the next block of work. So let's get some practicals and we'll put this into interaction and see how it all fits in. We're going to have a look at this stretch shortness cycle in action using the handstand pushup. So I'm going to get a jacket, just a bantical reps out. You're going to see the difference in how easy it is. So he goes down, he stores that elastic energy and he pops straight back out of that bottom position. The difference comes if I ask him to drop in, pause that bottom position for a couple of seconds and then try and produce a force. I'm going to get him to kill it completely. So head's going to go on the floor pretty much. Take all the tension out and he's going to drop in. So we're going to go one, two and then you now he's got to try and drive out of that. You can see the speed that he's coming out of that movement. He's not making it up for the purpose of the video. It's genuinely a more difficult thing to do to actually start to get strength and produce force in a dead position as opposed to using that elastic stored energy that we talked about with the stretch shortness cycle. Woo! That's hot. That bottom position, that amortization phase there, two or three seconds long, makes a big difference. So if you want to just rip that out to kind of put some strength in the shoulders, then you can just go for eight reps of the bounce. But if you're working towards a more specific transition or something which requires you to move from nothing to something, then this kind of practice is going to be really useful in your training. Yeah, I think it comes in in that, those that are trying to work on that frog stand, getting round and up into that handstand, that starting position of your frog is a static position. And then when you want to eventually be able to do handstand push-ups, even though now free standing handstand push-up, you can come down and come up. You're going so slowly because you're going to lose your balance if you go fast that it really is a dead position that you're trying to come out of. You're not able to use that stretch shortening cycle by coming in and bouncing out when you're doing free standing handstand push-up. So it's really, really relevant for that. And you can see it's hard like I'm out of breath and I'm in two of them. So we probably dropped the reps down for that. It becomes more like a maximum strength type exercise for a lot of people. And again, you can use progressions within this. But you might be working rather than going eight to 10, you might be working five reps of those. Just go down, hold that position and drive out. And then that will have a great transfer back into these positions that we're talking about. We're going to try and get that transition from nothing to something. So we'll also look at the muscle up now. And then Tim's going to give us a demonstration of starting from that dead position having the strength to come out of there and then seeing the difference it is or how hard it is compared to when he does his second rep when he's going to come back down and actually use that stretch shortening cycle to come back up. Okay, so Tim's going to jump on. You see it starts in his that completely dead position. So now he's got to create all of that strength, that tension himself. And you see it's not easy at all. But now when he comes back down, he's going to come in, hits that position and springs back out. The second rep is an awful lot easier because he's using that stretch shortening cycle. Thanks for the demonstration, Tim. But he's using that stretch shortening cycle. So if you want to get better at your, your muscle ups are getting out of that position. First thing is when you're doing your pull-ups and you're practicing your work, make sure we're getting into that deep position. We're actually going to that full range of the bomb. Don't stop sort of half a quarter or even a couple of inches off the bottom. But then work from that dead position and it links into the stuff we did on the previous muscle-up. Why you can't muscle-up yet to do with the speed of when you're doing those high pulls, get to that bottom position, kill your rep and then drive up and see how hard you can get. So Tim, just give us a demonstration. Let's say he's going to be on the bar. He's not going to do his actual muscle. He's just going to go for his high pull but he's dead in that position and then he's going to create all of that tension. Bang, gets the bar below his chest and he stops again and he's dead before he goes and then does that second rep. Perfect. Yeah, so keep working on those. Dead hang, straight up, fast, nice and high for those muscle-ups. If that's difficult for you, you can put a band on like we showed you before. We can start to work the strength out of this dead position. We can apply that principle of starting from dead positions or going down and killing it before we push back out to any of the exercises you want to do. Something from me, if you're going to be working on your frog stands and getting out of that frog stand, something that would be great to do that on would be pike push-ups, so having your feet up, coming down, pausing at the bottom, nose just brushing the floor and once there's no momentum and then driving back up after like a two, three second pause, you can do it as simply as in just normal push-ups. I bet if you can do 10, you're a beginner, you can do 10 push-ups up and down, up and down, up and down. How many can you do if you go down, stop, wait for two seconds, three seconds and then push back up. You might want to be able to do five or six. It's one of those ideas of just starting to look at your training and to develop strength in a lot of different positions. Calisthenics is you're going to move from one to the next, you're going to find all of this when you hit a stumbling block and if you're kind of not quite there where you're thinking about tiger bend push-ups or anything like that, it's a good time just to start to put something into your program, see how you are at it, see if you're any good at it and if there's a little bit of work there to do, then just get into it. I think it's a great little addition to training a program, adds a different stimulus to it. Yeah, if you haven't done this before pausing, you're going to notice that it makes it flipping 10 times harder and without having to find a different progression that's harder or add a weighted vest on, this is going to keep you progressing because all of a sudden you go from being able to do 10 or something to be able to do three of them and then you can build up your strength that way. You can also impress your friends by saying that you are just going to extend the amortization phase today. Yeah. Science boring, but it's just my approach. Just how we roll. Drop that into your conversation if you can, get your bonus points for that. If you can pronounce amortization then you're doing well as well. If you haven't yet subscribed, click there. If you haven't got a free beginner's guide, that's down there. And then if you have one, want to have a look at some of our other high twos, that's up by Tim Zed. Until next time. Class dismissed.