 Three, two, one. Just that road in my toe. Welcome back to the Squall Car Tent. It's Tim and Jaco, and we are looking at part two of How to Progress, where we are looking at combining our locker tools. Before Tim tells you exactly what we're gonna get into today, make sure you click subscribe so you don't miss any more of our content, Tim. So in the last lesson, we looked at the individual tools that we have in the locker, isometrics, eccentrics, weighted, stability, assistance, levers and angles. They're all great. They're all amazing. You can use them by themselves as great tools just to try and help your progression to move along and keep things going in the right direction. But they actually become really effective if you start to think about how you can combine the two together. It opens up loads of different training options and it really helps you to either make an exercise a little bit more difficult or a little bit easier so you can bridge the gap between movements or progressions that you're working on. But the second thing which we talk about loads is that they're really effective at helping you to build general global capacity strength. Getting stronger is a key part of calisthenics. So if we combine these tools, we've got some options, we've got lots of things to play around with to keep us moving forwards. Yeah, we're gonna take you through some examples and we're just gonna show you these through whether it's a handstand, whether it's a back lever, whether it's a human flag, where you can combine one or more tools together, like Tim says, just making that a little bit easier, a little bit harder. And what we want you to do is take those principles that we go through in those examples away and then you can apply them to whatever it is that you're working on. If you need some help along those, you've got any ideas, go comment below and go like, Jacko, Tim, I'm gonna use these two tools for this purpose, this reason, do you think that's gonna work? And we go, yes or no, I'll give you some feedback. So we look forward to hearing from you on those and let's get into these examples. So the first example we're gonna use is the back lever and Tim's gonna show us a combination of tools where we're gonna be lowering down through a different range of the angle. We're gonna be using a different lever length so we're gonna do tucked and single leg. Then also it's gonna be an isometric because we're gonna hold that bottom position. So first one is gonna use the rings for these. You can do this on the bar. He keeps the knees tucked, feet by his bum, knees close to his chest as possible. He's gonna lower down slowly under control. He's trying to make a five second lower and then he's gonna hold this bottom position where the hip is in line with the shoulder and he's nice and flat. I could eat my dinner off that flat back so holds that for five seconds as isometric then pulls back up. If you get good, we can then start to just make this a little bit harder by extending one of those lever lengths out. You're gonna do the same thing. He's gonna lower down through a range, full range of the angle so that lower he starts to get harder and harder and harder. He then keeps that hip in line with the shoulder and the foot holds that for five seconds and then Tim's strong enough to pull himself back up but for you, once you've held that five seconds you might be dropping back down. Like we said with these eccentric works, the portion of the bottom we're gonna hold for a minimum of five seconds, nice controlled lower down there and then we're trying to build up something close to a minute's worth of tension total. You can do the same thing with the human flag where we can go up to the top and then we can lower down in the tuck position, lower again under control, hold that bottom position. If you're good, you can then try and look at taking out some of those lever lengths so we could have one leg out on the human flag and lower down into it. You can even straddle and eventually you can bring those legs together. We're gonna look at active hanging the ways which we can progress this great foundation exercise for all of our pulling. If you're trying to work on muscle ups, if you're trying to work on pull ups for any variations, even if it's you starting out with your calisthenics journey, you need to get into more skin the cap progressions and your back lever, this is the foundation of all of those things. Sometimes we get to a point where it's actually feeling pretty comfortable. I'm gonna get Jako to go dead hang here and then he pulls into active hang. Shoulder blades go down, he's keeping a midsection tight, bums on, but he's basically trying to pull his shoulders away and down from his ears. That's our active position. If we can get that nailed, it might be you can spend a minute or so there so we wanna start to make that a bit more difficult. One of the ways is to just kind of load the single arm position. So this is pretty difficult. You've really gotta work hard not to let your shoulder relax and unwind and lose tension through there. So we're gonna hold that single arm position. That's a great progression for our flag. Now you might be saying that well, I've got both of those sorted, but we can now use the weighted tool to make them a little bit more difficult. And I realized this is a finishing exercise. At the end of a session, you might go right and put 20 kilos on or whatever you think you can manage. I've got to manage them, but yeah, obviously I can. For video purposes. I can do a lot more. And then just hang out there and literally can you go for a minute and active hang? It puts a load of strength development into the middle of traps. The rhomboids, it's great stuff around the back of the shoulder which is retracting and depressing the shoulder blade. And that's what creates a load of stability and the foundation is now pulling. The last one, because we're talking about combining tools is a single arm with the belt creates a load of stability. We let go of the bar. The grip goes a little bit more. With the one hand, sorry, we let go of the one hand. The grip starts to slide, but we're able to work really hard to recreate that tension, keeping the abs tight, shoulders staying super stable to stop it from winding. And there's loads of stuff to play around on that one. So just get these more in your program. It's building the foundations for so many exercises. Now loads of you are enjoying working on your frog to handstand and eventually working on those handstand press-ups. So head of handstands at Scorecast, Tim's gonna give us a nice demo of these. So the tools we're gonna look at is gonna kick up and then we're gonna look at adding an eccentric. So he's gonna lower down under control but we're gonna have the assistance of the wall for the first part. So those two together. So he's gonna use the wall so he doesn't have to worry about the balance so much. He's also gonna add some stability in there. And then he's gonna lower down and control five, four, three, two, one. Making sure that head goes down in front of the hands to make that triangle. On the way back up, he's then gonna dig his heels into the floor and try to help himself back up with his heels to pull almost as well as him driving himself up. So you can see that he's using his foot into the wall to help him with the pushing part of getting back up. He's working some lovely things there. We've got that eccentric on the way down. You could do these separately. You could have the eccentric on the way down on its own, put your feet down and kick back up again. Or we can have, as he did, the eccentric on the way down and nice control and then actually using those feet to try and help claw yourself back up the wall. The nice thing about that as well is as long as you're conscious that you're keeping that body and that nice alignment, the wall's gonna help you to do that. These vertical pushing positions are so important in getting that frog stand to hand stand progression. So if you can find the right progression of this exercise that's appropriate for you, it's an absolute winner. Yeah, so we've got eccentric, we've got assisted, and then you can do those on their own or you can do them together. So with that frog stand to hand stand, one of the things we need to work on is strength out of real deep positions in your hand stand push-up. So having your hands on the floor and taking your head down to the floor sometimes isn't quite good enough because you just don't get deep. So what we can do is you can put your hands up on a box to actually raise the height of the floor, but then you can take your head past that position. So you go into a deep position, hands are almost coming towards the shoulders and then having the strength to drive out of there. It might be that you can't push out of that position so you just use the eccentric part of that elevated position, put your feet back down and then kick back up. We're gonna look at the planche now, really popular exercise, but one that's really difficult to build up to the specific or applied strength that you need for it. So Tim's first thing we're gonna do is looking at this planche lean and we've shown you a video before with a planche lean for a beginner's planche work. But now we're gonna elevate the box, the feet up with the box. So the box now puts Tim's body, you see his shoulders, hip and feet on a nice straight line horizontal sort of parallel to the floor. If his feet were down, his body would be at an angle. So now we're raising it up, just that initially makes it a little bit harder. The box is also a nice stable base. That actually makes it a little bit more comfortable or it's not challenging his, but it's a stable base for him to apply force from his feet. He's gonna now then go into that lean position where he rolls over on those toes so he's not really using his feet at all. He's pushing the shoulder blades up and he's pushing that core, trying to keep that in that sort of hollow body position but getting that hip, shoulder and ankle all in a nice straight line. He holds that there as an isometric. So we've got the elevated position, the levers and angles. We've got the isometric aspects of it and we've got a little bit of extra stability from the box because it's not gonna move around. We can make this exercise just a tiny bit harder and just adjust the difficulty of it by taking away the box, which was nice and stable and replacing it by a stability ball. So we have the height of the ball, which is gonna be the same as the box, keeping then the body in that nice straight line position. But what's nice about the ball is it allows him to be able to roll backwards and forward to find a more difficult position as that ball gets further away from his center point. It's gonna make it more difficult. It also has a stability challenge because that ball, as you can see, it's gonna start moving about and then he can actually make it harder for himself by going onto one leg rather than having both leg on there. So now, not only we elevated and holding that isometric position, we're really challenging the stability of the whole exercise because the point of contact he's got with his foot is gonna be moving about and therefore he's got to create that stability and that's what we see. So I'm a little bit of shaking from the upper body because that stability challenge has increased. Same exercise as with the box, but change that tool of adding more of a stability challenge or taking away the stability from the feet and all of a sudden that exercise becomes a lot more difficult. So with planche training, once you've got that planche lean sorted, you really have to get into the position where you're able to hold a tucked position and that's when your planche training really starts and that can be a difficult step to take. So we can use the band to help your hips in that position. So getting into a tucked position, knees tucked, shoulders forward, but the band just helping to keep those hips in line with those shoulders before you can work on being able to take away that band. That then really gives you hopefully some really good principles around combining tools together and just one little point for me to finish off with, a lot of those tools that I'm adding onto either an eccentric or an isometric and the key bit that I need you to remember about them is we need to create tension. You don't get strong just by falling down our position. So five seconds for those eccentrics as a minimum, five seconds for those isometrics as a minimum and you've got to be in control and creating tension. That's my take home message, Tim. I like that one. You know the thing is to be humble enough to make sure you're right. Oh, I love that. Make sure that the progressions that you pick, if you constantly try and do something too hard, leave the ego at the door. Let's just build it back in so you can actually get an opportunity to train with great technique, great form and just the long-term benefits of that are gonna be way more significant. And the last point for me is just to go back to remember, you can combine these tools. Your objectives are to bridge the gap between two movements, so smaller progressions are making something easier, all a bit more difficult. And the second thing is to just think about getting that capacity strength in the system. You've got to get strong if you're gonna progress forwards with calisthenics and these are great tools to make that process even more effective. Cool, so if you haven't yet subscribed, click up by Tim's head. If you haven't got our free beginners guide, that one's down there. And there's a little bit about that planche work in there. So if you've missed out on our beginners planche video, that one is down there. So until next time. Class dismissed.