 Welcome back to Scorecard Sense in my humble abode, this is my back garden. What the hell are you saying it's Boudoir? Challenge shoes, what am I on about? Q&A number 6? Yes, well done Tim. That was the first question, crikey, that was precious. That was question number 1. I'm looking, something that I've been reflecting on for the Q&A recently is one of my favourite parts of these is Dave practicing the pronunciation. You said this last time. That's it already. But yeah, it's happened again. I'm looking forward to it again today because you don't rehearse it. A little bit, I'll just ask you about this bit. Anyway, we will kick things off. If you haven't clicked subscribe, make sure you do that so you don't miss out. If you've got any questions, bang them in the comments below so that we can get answering them. Now, Tim's about to friend now on YouTube. I don't know if he poses to my friends. That's this number awkward. We've said before that one surefire way to get your question answered is some sort of compliment beforehand about how great the video was or how much you liked Tim's hair or something, whatever. Anyway, or it can be something like you pepper us constantly until we will answer your question. So apologies for having not done this before, but Dai Sabazes. Clash of Clans. He, for the umpteenth time, that's right. So he says, school of color cynics. So here it is once again. Is it better? It's actually a good decent question to be fair. Is it better to have a certain variety, which means doing one day with the rings and the other day with normal bars and lots of different moves and exercises over the week when trained three times, everybody? Or is it better to focus on the main exercise and should I have my training the same the whole week? So like the question, it rephrased it previously about can he train rings and bars on the same day or should they always be on separate days? So kick us off, Tim. Yes. Next question. Well, so you're saying you can't use the rings and the bar on the same day. No, I was thinking about this question on the way today's back garden, Boudoir. And it's... I'm roasting, by the way. Yes, well, I think I'm getting burnt. It really massively depends. Like, yes, no. Sometimes, sometimes not. Like, people have written old textbooks about programming. It's the real art side of what we do as training conditioning coaches. There isn't a golden ticket, a lucky egg. This is the perfect training program. And it's difficult for us to kind of address some of these sorts of questions that come in because I know absolutely nothing about people's training background, people's lifestyle, people's work commitments, their abilities to train, where they train, what equipment they've got, what they want to achieve and all this sort of stuff. So it just becomes this really difficult thing to answer. And that's why people work with professionals like us who actually write programs and take some of that complication out of them because we've got the skills and experience to put these different components together. But my upshot of this is a lot of people get this question or get this kind of... this idea the wrong way around. It says, can I do this? Well, yeah, you can do it, whatever you want. Like, but what do you want out of it? So rather than starting with what can I do, my response is you need to start with what are you trying to achieve because then that very much determines how you're going to spend time. So if I know what you want to do, say you want to do a ring muscle up, do I think you should be training on a bar? Well, if you've only got one session a week, then no, like just spend time on the rings. If you try to achieve two different things or you try to just get basic strength, can I use bar and rings? Yeah, go for it. Like if it's just global strength, then, yeah, crack on. But I'm sorry if I feel like I'm on my soapbox about this one, but it's a really difficult one for us to answer with that kind of full picture understanding. My last point before I let Dave jump in on this is that is why our framework is so good in that if we start with the focus towards a movement and that could be just capacity strength as part of a muscle up or as part of a back lever. But some of what you're talking about is that is it applied strength which is specific towards a movement. So therefore what you're training for needs to be very closely to match the demands of what the exercise is or is it just global strength? That's our capacity strength kind of stuff. The movement pattern, so you're looking for some skill acquisition. And these are all important parts of learning calisthenics but they fit into a program structure which is what we've done with our framework. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I completely agree with Tim, I guess, obviously. But the answer being like, yeah, you can use rings and bar in the same session or yeah, actually you could use them separately and there'd be reasons and benefits to do in either. What I want to focus on is what Tim touched on is that what's the most important thing is you understand what you're getting out of it and why you want to use rings. What is the difference between doing dips on rings and dips on the bars? Why do you find dips on the rings harder? Because the rings are unstable and your shoulders have got to provide some of that stability. So you start to understand what you're getting out of the exercise rather than just choosing something because you're seeing someone else doing it. You need to know what are your goals, what are you working towards and then what training modality or what exercise am I going to start to use to make sure I get what I want. So if I'm wanting to work like max strength and I'm doing some weighted... I'll use dips as an example that's a good one to use. I'm going to go on the bar and I'm going to go heavy with additional weight around my waist with a weight belt because I know I'm getting like maximal force production and that max strength whereas if I want to work on like my shoulders stability because I feel like in my handstands for instance I just don't feel like quite stable that's quite difficult for me then I choose to do my dips on the rings because I'm getting more shoulder stability I wouldn't be able to do quite as many reps and I might not be able to add any additional weight and it's hard enough for me to do that. And then it starts to link you with the number of reps and sets that I'm going to be doing but knowing what you're training for and why you're training for that is the most important thing rather than are you doing the right things on the right days in my book. I think the other thing is that you'll notice what you put out is a bit different to a lot of calisthenics stuff that's on the internet so we're right in our muscle book which is coming out soon and the way that when you read it the way that you see that we've presented the information is way different like Dave and I have spoken about before what we should put out a 12 week program or a 6 week program but just as a professional from my integrity about the information that we're putting out I find that really difficult to do because it could fall into the hands of anybody who's not geared up and it's not going to work for and we work in Paralympic sport so for the last nearly 10 years what we've done is written specific programs to get a specific adaptation we've never done something which is just I don't know, this program will be right for you if you're 100 meter run and just do this one it doesn't work like that and we just say to an athlete if you want to ask us you could pick any exercise on your program and say why am I doing that and we should have an answer and if we haven't got an answer then take it out or why is it in there why am I doing ring dips today why am I doing X today you should know why you are doing the things you're doing and if you're working on your own question yourself and make sure you've got a reason and a rationale for what you're doing and if you need some help with that then ask us and we'll get in contact with you and that's the thing, that's why the e-books are so different is that we've taken the stance yes we are the school of kind of sense but we genuinely believe in educating people so that you can make your own decisions around training so when you read the information it's put forward in a way which hopefully means that you can understand and learn the principles more so then you can actually the dream for me would be not to provide you a 10-12 week training program is for you to be able to sit down with a blank piece of paper and use the information that we've given you to use a different theory behind why we might do apply strength but versus capacity strength and actually write your own program because if you bought a program from us for 10 weeks and then it runs out and you go okay what do you do now? I'm interested in your long term training, your long term progression kind of thinks as a lifestyle type of training if you want it to be for 20, 30, 40 years but to do that we want to invest in you so that you actually understand why you're doing what you're doing we're in contact and getting in contact with people that do buy some of the e-books and I've had people, not many I offer it but they don't take it open we just say like if you need any help or anything but I had a couple of people actually write out a program send it and say what do you think of this and it's amazing to see that somebody take him what we've done, there was a guy who wrote like himself an eight week block, two four week mezer cycles and they went and he planned out a progressive thing for his handstand training and it was cool to see and it was nice to be able to give him the sort of thumbs up of yes you've got that right now the hard work starts and you're actually going away and actually doing the training in the classroom hosted by a team called Edgify and that's a platform where we can engage with people a bit and genuinely providing interactive coaching support based on videos and people can post up programs and we can look at them so that support's there if you're interested in that you can jump in and you can check that out as well but that's a real long answer I think we've probably put in about ten minutes already someone out of rings with the answer was yes and no and maybe but understand what it is you're doing and question why you're doing something if you can't answer it Mark Williamson we met Mark at the workshop in Harpenden so I wondered whether it was the snooker player or was that Williams anyway hi Tim and Dave, hi Mark loving all your work I'm interested in though this is a great question I've actually applied to this I thought we could go into a little bit of detail but I've got some interesting thoughts I'm interested to know why you two accomplished athletes double compliment not sure it's true Dave and I often refer to ourselves as a couple of pirates poor man's gymnastics and retired anyway right so accomplished athletes like you have such different areas of expertise e.g. Tim head of human, head of handsands head of human flags is it simply which areas you focus more time on individually or something more you kick off on this one so the thing I thought so yes probably a bit there's a bit of like focusing time on and definitely and it's like what you then like interested when I started like I was mad keen to get a human flag I just thought it was one of those things that looks flipping cool and I knew that when I'd go on holiday holiday fairies would never look the same again it was more of a which I then started when I was thinking about this when I saw this question I was thinking actually does that tell us something a bit more about our personalities a little bit in particularly the way Tim does a handstand it's so graceful and sort of really fits in that sort of calisthenics that calisthenics beauty and strength no but whereas how I started trying to do a handstand to start again was like just kicking up and looking awful and then it made me think well the flag things very much like a show off thing and a bit of a bee cocking thing and I was like then is that what I'm like probably somebody else can answer that but certainly down I think it tells a little bit of story it tells you a little bit about our personalities maybe but in terms of getting good at one other then yes definitely times I'm sure I've spent more time doing a human flag I'm going to be putting out some human flag pull-ups soon which I've now cracked and Tim's spent a lot more time doing handstands it is time on to actually get what you're trained for you don't get you don't get good at handstands because you just want to or you think about doing them you've got to actually spend some time doing that stuff and it's the same for the flag you've got to spend time doing it any time like I don't do something for a while particularly like a back lever something that might go off the radar for a bit you don't train it for a bit and then we're teaching at a workshop and you're like I'll crack it back make sure my back lever's looking all right for the demo and you're like it can feel like a struggle even if you see us and go well that looks easy like every time I don't think there's anything I do that feels easy ever that's just the reality of it kind of sense you're spinning a lot of plates the whole time so it is really really difficult to keep if anyone sits down and go well I've got muscle up back lever front lever flag flipping planche whatever else perfect all time like fair play you've got more training time than what I've got and it's recovery time I struggled to recover between my sessions that's my biggest problem I'll give you a little bit of background of the story so my wife is South African and they've got a family they've got a place in a town called Hamanas and their deck overlooks the ocean so they're on holiday one time and I didn't really want to go to the gym in town so I said right I'm going to give this calisthenics thing a go this was literally my first kind of starting point in and I thought I'm going to learn to handstand that was a cool thing to do and I'd also had two shoulder surgeries multiple dislocations I'd done all the physio stuff in the book and none of it had worked I kept on having problems so in my mind this was very early days before I really started to investigate how the scientific theories and principles of training might apply to calisthenics and injury rehabilitation I kind of felt like if I could do a handstand then that would mean that my shoulders were stable that was the ultimate kind of litmus test for me so I started on with it and I'm a perfectionist by heart painfully sometimes so like Dave is now laughing is laughing because I'm probably regularly annoying because I'm quite particular but it's good it's one of the reasons why our team works because everyone brings them in different ways so for me to do a handstand was never going to be about can I just kick up into it it was like it's not a handstand until I can control it into a free standing handstand from a tuck position or a frog stand I'm not good enough until I can do a handstand push up and now what I've just kind of finished working on really is it's not good enough until it's perfect alignment where I could go to the Olympics and I could get some decent scores only for a handstand I don't know whether that will give me the final round or a medal but that's kind of what I was aiming for that's it for a short soundtrack and I wouldn't have to do any prancing around in between either I literally could walk on do it and get off but I loved it I fell in love with hand balancing exercises the control that I get from it and that's evolving to planches and all sorts of stuff and it's just I think the upshot is why do we why does Dave can absolutely smash a human flag and why is my handstand practice a little bit more maybe kind of further down the line is it's just where I spent time like you're dead right about that I can do a human flag but for me I've ticked that box where Dave wants to go to human flag pull ups maybe at some point but it's not a priority for me I enjoy the art and the practice of handstands and it gives me a nice title and my job title at the school of calisthenics is head of exercise science and handstands I think that's a cool job title you did give yourself that title yeah but surely that's the benefit of having your own school if I call myself where I'm at my best mouse next week we had a plunge before a lot this next one isn't the question more of a statement but I thought I'd read it out from Gerardo, best Q&A ever guys so thanks Q&A number 5 moving on there's a different Gerardo so we've got two Gerardos there's a different Gerardo, promise you he starts with good job guys the way you explain the exercise is great so yeah happy he's happy so you can see there's more coming on this question right that's not it so how many reps and steps should I do in a workout can I work out every day do you sell your black polo shirt we haven't got the black ones on today let me start with reps and steps we've not worn the red for a while I missed the red on the apparel we're working with a company in optimum to design first draft designs come through today actually so by the time this video goes out we're going to be close hopefully to having some stuff on our site to be able to so look out for that reps and steps, my head is spinning with this because I've written a whole section in the Muscle Up book about this how many reps and steps should I be doing a workout more than one this actually fits in really beautifully with the first question which means I'm going to be painfully ambiguous with my answer it depends what you want so roughly if you want to increase maximal strength we're going to work lower rep ranges 1-5 but that has to be done with a heavy load so we need to be hitting let's say 5 reps at 85-87% 1 rep max to have the percentage of how much you can do for 1 repetition if you want more endurance you're going to be hitting 10-20 potentially upwards if you want to go super endurance if you want some more hypertrophy increase in muscle mass which again is a different question around calisthenics we're going to be hitting 6-10 and the reps and sets or the sets that are going to go with those are going to be 3-6 depending on what you're trying to work on but again it comes back to this idea of it just depends what you want can I give an example my old S&C coach when I was at Nottingham awesome guy, French guy as French guys go Joe Brun who I can see out in France in rugby and he he had a beautiful way of explaining things so this comes in reps and sets and how demanding and exercises so you could do the washing up if you want big arms you can do the washing up all day every day you're never going to get big arms from doing that because plates don't weigh very much exactly and you're doing loads of repetitions but you're never going to build muscle mass because there's no need for that adaptation for adding on either strength or muscle size because you're strong enough to do the washing up exactly whereas I'm currently trying to work on a one arm chin up and literally day one of my one arm pull up training was three sets of one eccentric on each side and that was it and that was flipping more than enough building that up slowly but I'm going to stay in that one to five rep range three to five sets and just build up very very slowly because I'm trying to get a maximum strength adaptation I'm not going to put I could do it like have a rope next to me and a band ram a fee and do 20 reps on one arm but it's not going to give me the strength like the maximum strength adaptation that I want so hopefully that gives a little bit of yeah give some context but you can go back and read about it and maybe we'll put some in the information below so you can click and read those and understanding we call all that acute variable so it's not just reps and sets you've got to throw in reps sets intensity or percentage one arm you're going to try and train at you've got to throw in the tempo or the speed at which you're training and then you've also got to consider your rest period those five things all blend together to give you specific adaptations and again we mentioned before about the education side of stuff so that you can then start to make decisions because I want you to maximise the amount of training and opportunities that you've got everyone's busy these days so when you go in the gym if you know what you're trying to do reps and sets then you can go in there you can actually spend that time taking you in a direction you want to go in so again I could probably go on we'll put a link in there so the final question Tim comes from Wolfie Dragon I hope that is your real actual name well done to you sir he says hey guys good video this is from the last Q&A and he's been working on what he's 46 years old now 35 that's 35 the other week tough paper out that's what a lot of people said surprising it's all those it's a lot of people have the Sunday times heavy papers aren't they I mean you're looking at like this I had like three or four bags on a Sunday we talked about washing up before did you get a strength adaptation from Karen News I think I had a wonky back it's probably why you should that was because some massive like hammered me when I was playing rugby he's 46 and we're just saying well done he's doing five pull-ups with a weighted vest I'd be interested to know how what size of a weighted vest but normally I'd guess it's 10 but anyway so he wants to he's not sure about working on his he wants to build up to do a muscle up and he thinks he needs to work a little bit more on his pull-up technique which is the first thing to touch on and then also time and attention for his pull-ups to build up strength as well as building some muscle mass can I go with pull-up technique first okay I was just going to I'm just going to go first that pull-up technique compared to the movement for your muscle up is going to be different I'm sure Tim's going to dash upon that and then building strength and mass like this comes right back to the beginning like understanding what we want to do if you're going to want to build mass and make yourself bigger like that's then you're making it harder for you to then pull up and get above the bar so it's like what do you want do you want to be able to do a muscle up or do you just want to look jacked in a t-shirt both I'll have my cake and eat it boom exhibit A anyway Tim she had some lie on the muscle up there's a lot of work going on there's a lot of thoughts in my head at the moment about this share them not all of them just the ones related to the question pull-up technique Jacko's right in that the technique is slightly different because you're going to start to move a different angle but the most important thing about that is actually that you can maintain midline or midsection tension when we're doing the muscle up you have to start to move from a position and you're going to take all of your body weight up above the bar whilst you're putting down a considerable amount of force when we see people doing pull-ups in the gym and we're talking to people about them a lot of the time we see this arch in the back the midsection breaks and we're starting to not get into particular good positions every time we do that we're losing midsection tension and what I want is the midsection locked in, abs on tight closed rib cage down so that you can knock it out of your head no I did it we saw them do it start to transfer that force every time we lose control the midsection force leaks out the side we call that an energy leak so making sure that when you're doing pull-ups and that's one of the things about adding more weight people go I've got 20 kilo pull-up but it looks absolute garbage and I think can I just on that just a couple of things biggest one for me, for your pull-up is rather than thinking about trying to get your chin above the bar which is the end point that you want to get trying to pull your chin up, what you'll start to do is you'll lose control of your shoulder or the head of that humus and get into some nasty positions so thinking about driving my elbow down to my side gives me the same end result I just down to my side, my chin goes above the bar but I then keep the shoulder better chance of keeping the shoulder in a better position here rather than back there and a lot of the time we'll lose that midsection because you know you've got to try and keep the shoulders in a decent position but you lack that retraction of the shoulder blade so to give you that false sensory arch the lower back and then you feel like you're getting the shoulders back but what you might actually be doing is coming forward here and you've got lost complete control of that but your brain just thinks it's doing the job you're wanting to do so elbows down to the sides that will get you chin above the bar rather than trying to actually get your chin above the bar and I think whether you're building the strength with the weight versus is actually a great tool if you've got like some decent number of pull ups in the bag but the real thing my test for you would do is kind of work out where you need to spend a bit more time is can you do a high pull up, like if you pull up from a dead hang position as high as you can how far above that bar can you get and if you're literally still just getting the chin over then it's worth starting to think about doing a bit more explosive training and we've put a video about this which we'll link in below and you can go back and watch it because we did a whole thing about training for speed and power as part of the muscle rather than just being rather just be like can I do enough pull ups and all of a sudden I'm going to get a muscle because I can do 12 and that's the magic number which means you can muscle up there's quite a lot of people within the sort of realms and obviously the more pull ups you can do the chances are you're going to have a better chance of doing a muscle up but there was a guy that went to Rio Paralympics Chris B who could do 20 pull ups I was like no 23 pull ups in a row I think he told me but couldn't do a muscle up and I just did a muscle up in front of him to annoy him because I can't do 23 pull ups in a row not a chance but it's a different, it's a slightly different score like you say that speed element the video is called why you can't muscle up because we're just missing that speed element and just from me like generally when I see people in the gym coming from like a professional sports background where my job as a fullback or winger has to be fast so we have loads of speed training and power training and generally that's difficult for the upper body anyway and most people in the gym in normal day to day training we do three sets of 10 we do a nice controlled tempo we don't actually do any speed work we don't know how to train speed effectively even lower body stuff some people might do the odd box jump they do them really slow and controlled seeing someone doing a depth jump the other day it goes back to the first quiz go back to the first quiz what are you trying to get out of it and for the muscle up we do need that speed the time is going to touch on the time on the tension question as well again like that fits in quite well if someone says to me I'm going to increase time on the tension during my training that for me tells me that you're going to start training slower because you're going to do your reps for the 4 second eccentric you might pull on the concentric phase and we'll put a little bit slower so again just to reiterate what Dave says you get what you're training for so if you're training slow you're going to get slow some strength because you can't get that high pull up position then bigger muscle which is a useful thing to work towards if you're going to increase your time on the tension bigger muscles produce more force so it might be that you need to do a block of that kind of work to get basic strength and then you can bolt on your speed if you're struggling with the basic strength but you're trying to train fast well you haven't got the force to be able to get the velocity kind of relationship that you need so just get strong and then train speed or do it on separate days I'm going to throw a span in the works that you might feel that you've worked out that actually I'm really weak at the top position of my of my pull up and therefore the transition is difficult and you might do some time tension isometrics at the top in that top position literally not just hanging there like trying almost to get over the bar for like 10 seconds just hanging out there 10 seconds, 5, 6 sets where you are working in time tension but specifically for the outcome that you want is that muscle up rather than just either time and tension is a good thing to try and do and do it later the one thing I've done is actually work those high pull ups and then try and catch it at the top and even if it's just 2 seconds at the top every time you're doing that so you might do 10 reps or you might get 6 or whatever if you can hang there for a couple of seconds just really kind of focus on cranking the power down to try and hold that top position it might be 8 seconds per set and that's going to add up over time it's an easy way to combine a couple of things together but check when the muscle up b-butt comes out too much too much knowledge in there but it's going to be good, I hope you guys enjoy it because it's a lot of scientific rationale behind why we're doing what we're doing in that movement but it's very different it's got rings and bar muscle ups in we're trying to cover absolutely everything in there so that you don't have to go some might say it's the most comprehensive muscle up resource we'll see what the reviews say when they come out some people so that's it thanks for watching and listening if you've made it all the way to the end Q&A number 6 if you have got any questions make sure you comment in those below if you haven't yet subscribed that's up there by Tim Z if you haven't got our free beginners guide that is a must because it's free so you've got nothing to lose, that's down if it's free it must be good and then if you haven't we'll move out the way if you haven't got last week's Q&A