 Welcome back to the School of Calisthenics, it's Tim and Jaco and today we're looking at how to progress using the tools in our locker. So make sure you tip to subscribe and then we're going to get into the lesson on how to use these six tools. Progressing in calisthenics can be a real challenge because sometimes you're just not strong enough to move to the next more advanced progression. So you've got to find ways in which you can dive it back so you can train at a level which is appropriate to your current level of development. Yeah, there's nothing funny about it Tim so I don't know why you're about to start laughing. In the traditional weight training it can be quite easy. If you're not strong enough to use the ten kilo dumbbells, well you just don't pick those up or you put them back down, you pick up the eights or the sevens. In calisthenics we just have to think outside the box a little bit, use our brain and we're going to help you out how to understand to do that so we can just manipulate the exercise and your body to be able to work to your strength and ability levels. The assistance tool then, this is using something like a rubber band is one example where it's going to help you to assist you or give you some support and some help on the way up in with the example we're going to give now where Tim is going to jump in for the pull-up so he might not be strong enough to do a pull-up yet and then the band is going to help him to have the strength to be able to work all the way to the top with great technique and good control. He could turn that into a muscle-up if he was working on those as well and then the assistance could be like a partner helping you or you could be holding on to a ring whilst you do a pistol squat or again we could use the band to work some back lever progressions to help you with that. Tool number two in the locker is eccentric and then we're going to use eccentric a lot in our training because sometimes you're not strong enough to pull through the full range of movement from for example a bottom position of a pull-up or what we're going to look at in this exercise is a dip so you can't push out of the bottom so just by training the lower phasor movement we can actually build up more global strength in the muscle so Jackal lowers into the bottom portion of the dip he's then going to put his feet down on the floor he stands back up and then starts the movement again ultimately training like this is going to build that basic strength and all after a while what we're going to find is that we can actually push out from the bottom up as a starting point of the movement rather than having to focus on that just that lower phasor we'll be able to complete the whole thing. Eccentrics also work really well for our handstand push-ups up against the wall we can use them for the flag lowers if we're training towards horizontal flag position we can start the top and lower down we've also got great options in the muscle up particularly during that transition phase we can drop down from the high dip position through the transition slowly controlling that as we hit that bottom range the most important thing to remember about all of these is that we're making sure that we're hitting five-second Eccentrics on all of those so it should take you five seconds to complete that movement always under control always with great technique okay so the third tool in the locker is the wet week or the awaited tool or it really is just an increased resistance tool so we're going to use weight to make this harder assume Tim you've got what the 50 kilos is it what have you got that 50 50 50 he can do he could do it just pick the knees one didn't you right so what he's going to do is we're using the weight to to make it harder so he's having to actually produce an awful lot more force than his body weight is needed for so if he's wanting to be able to do muscle ups are a good example of this then he wants to be able to produce force very fast a lot of it so he's going to use the extra additional weight from that to help him build up enough strength for they could be used with a weighted vest you could do the same things with in dips or you could also use a resistance band to provide more resistance in some pushing actions like in a push-up so tool number four in the lockers isometrics and these work really well both in quite specific movements like our lever progressions but also in our basic strength like pull-ups I'm going to get Jacko to give us a quick demo so if you're struggling to pull through the full range on a pull-up one of the things that isometric can help with is to develop strength above and below the point at which we're actually going to real hold that static point out so you can see Jacko's not moving that's the nature of isometric we want to hold that for about 10 seconds and if we can do between four and six sets we're really starting to rack up some nice time on the tension that builds that strength that's going to help us to be able to complete the full movement by ourselves through full range without having to pause at any point the options that we've got on these were as I say work really well for levers we can look at a back lever and progressions in the tuck position in those and also a tuck planche position our great isometric exercises to help you build towards that final movement so the fifth tool in the locker is levers and angles and here Tim's using a body weight row to give us a good illustration of how we can change the angle to make something easier and as a engineering student myself Tim this is one of my favorite tools in the locker I got a first-class in a masters of engine anyway so Tim is normal body weight row position he's working and building up some nice strength there but if he's struggling he want to make it easy for himself all he needs to do is walk his feet further back so the angle is that is now more close to vertical so he's higher up and that's going to require less strength than in that original position we showed you if he wanted to make it harder she starts to get really good he walks his feet much further forward now rather being more vertical he's actually now more horizontal he's nearly parallel to the floor and then the force required here to drive himself up it's going to be an awful lot more we can use angles as well for things like handstand push-ups where we can take our push-up position we can have our hands higher up on a box to make it easier or we can raise our feet up progressively so we can go from that horizontal position in the handstand it becomes more difficult when we get more vertical with the levers point of view we can change the lever length which would be we could bend our knee and our human flag and therefore we'd only have one leg straight so the force required to hold that position it's going to be easier with one leg bent to a number six in the locker is stability and this is one that's maybe lesser known within calisthenics the principle though being is that we can make an exercise more difficult or easier by changing the stability requirements so we make the environment that we're training more stable it becomes easier if we make it less stable there's more of a neurological demand the body has to find ways to stabilize and that makes it more difficult the rings is a great example because they move around there is no real stable point so we have to do all that stability work here in the shoulders and so Jacko jumps up you can create a nice stable position what you might find when you do this first is that the rings want to shake around a little bit and that's part of your the process of your brain starting to understand that unstable environment the alternative to this will be to do them on bars which is more stable and therefore an easier progression so you be able to probably do more reps on the bars then you'll be able to do on the rings this bottom position that Jacko is dipping down to there is a really difficult point as well to hold that stability great progression to play around with the other progressions that we have is we could change the surface that we're hand balancing on so we could use mats or a box to make that less stable we can also look at a wall handstand by using the wall as a point of support with the foot against the wall to be able to create more stable foundations and therefore take out some of the instability you would have if the wall wasn't there and then finally we would have the flag variation and using a stability ball to hold that flag position it's actually really nice movement pattern exercise as well but having the ball to support you gives a load of really good proprioceptive stimulation into the shoulders whilst you perform on your human flag so those are the six tools that we use to change and progress our calisthenics training when we feel like we need to make a smaller step because the next big jump is just a bit too difficult so those work for loads different exercises there's a real creative side of using the locker tools to be able to pick whatever it is that you're working on apply the right tool and find that little stepping stone onto your next progression put those in with some consistency you're not going to be far away from nailing the ultimate goal that you're working towards yeah so sometimes it's you have to think a little bit about it that's not a bad thing so start thinking about your training start using some of these tools if you haven't yet click subscribe make sure you do that that's over there if haven't got a free beginners guide make sure you click that that is down there and if you haven't seen one of our other tutorials about how to progress that's up there until next time that's dismissed