 Welcome back to the school of Callisthenics. It is Q&A number 12. Hello. I'm retiring my phone this week. I've got no questions. I was about to say order has been restored. Restored. Restored. I would say temporarily loaned. Anyway. I am taking no question master duties this week. Yeah, just purely time to shine. Thank you, Tim. And looking forward to it. We have a couple of or a few really good questions from all across the different platforms. Which is nice. And so we're going to kick off firstly with Sean Roberts. Nice easy one. I assume that's his real name. No question over that one, is it? I think I've got that one right. And he commented on YouTube video that exploded about your calves. It exploded. I'm still waiting for my calf to explode. Anyway, he starts with, hey guys, great video as always. You're on. You're on. You're in. And an interesting question is he's talking about how do we balance the strength training that we do in terms of and ways to put that strength slash reps as in like I guess that volume sort of side of training. And how do we balance that with the skill practice when you're trying to learn something new? How do we balance that? And then how do you have enough time? So how do you balance that? And what does our what does our week look like? So if we give a bit of an insight into what does it look like for you? And then is there actually sort of finishes off with like is there is there enough time for both? I think it's interesting. Yeah, it is. And it's something that comes up all the time. Like I replied to a Facebook message about this last night about how do I do this and fit this in and mix it all together. And we've talked about this before and I'm going to be annoying from the outset. There isn't there isn't a magic solution. Unfortunately, it comes down to me to priorities these days because it's yeah, if you were if you're a full-time athlete, we can write all of these things in and we've got lots of different training time that we can play with. And you kind of do this on this day and structure that in our rest days. But the reality for most people though, that's just not the way that it kind of it plays out. So let's break it down a little bit because and while we're kind of going through how we might fit a few things together, just think about what your week looks like and and ultimately it comes down to priorities. What do you want and how much time you've got to invest in it because if you can kind of in one of the books, we actually use like a blackjack. What's the word analogy? Do we go actually red then? No, I'm just thinking about blackjack as in like 21, pon two. Yeah. I'm just trying to I'm trying to piece it together. I'm interested to know the Oh, it's set down, I'll tell you. You could you could play small bets on lots of different hands. That big win big to him. That's exactly the strategy. You've got to you've got to go if you're going to go for it, you want to win big, you've got to invest a little bit of money and risk losing it. Fortunately, we're training, we haven't got such a monetary cost at stake. However, the principle of like if you play smaller hands, you might you might get a few wins if it's your lucky day, you start to accumulate a little bit of stuff here and there. Or if you just go one hand all in, then you're going to start to get a bigger payback and that's the similar way to look at your training. You could do a bit of CV, could do a bit of strength with it, could do a bit of skill acquisition, you could do a bit of like global kind of weight training or low body training depends whatever you want. Or do you want to learn to do a human flag and it's there's not a right or wrong answer in that and it might be that you go, I want to do a human flag, I want those other things as well. Fine. Just accept it might take you a few more trips to the casino to get your to get enough money to tie it. Really nice, I like that, I did ask. Get a bit of texture on it. Yeah, it's good, really nice texture. Just at this point, just to circulate that we don't condone or promote gambling. I'll tell you about my gambling, I've been to a casino before and I hate losing money. So what I do is I go to a casino, I actually went to Vegas one night in Vegas, flew into LA one night in the left. But what I would do is I go to a casino, put down like minimum bet $2, play a hand, win a dollar. Thanks very much. Have I had enough now? I'm up. I am. That's what I'm like because I think well, I've got I'm better off than what I came with. Yeah, I was trying to be like, we don't promote gambling at all. Do whatever you want me three time. Yeah, computer gambling. Ridiculous. Like playing against the machine. I'm just going to put that out on the internet. This isn't it comes about like, oh, people have got a gambling problem. Why are you playing against the computer? I get, I mean, we're going massively off topic, but just like that. I get, not I get, I don't get. No, I do get to a degree like horses, like horses because you're like, people might, I've never done it and I don't know about horses, but people can find out about the horse and the goods of firm and what's the, what's the running? Yeah, not that much. I like it. But then you can go in a betting shop and you can do a computerized one. Look at it. Well, I guess you're watching a computer video game type thing of a horse. And before the race starts, the computer knows which one you've bet on, how much you've invested in that sitting of betting. Don't feel right. Yeah, anyway. We've gone off topic, haven't we? Training. Yeah, I wanted to add, so I wanted to throw a couple of my two pence worth in something Tim will often talk about with the skill acquisition side of, if we're talking about handstand, because I think sometimes it's interesting people, how you define skill, because we might, some people might say that like, when talking strength and reps, he's talking his pull-ups, his dips, his push-ups, his sort of, his bog standards and then go skill is, we'd say handstand skill, yeah, and then go, oh, this other skill that I'm working on, planche as a skill and front lever as a skill, but when you get into the depths of like planche and front lever, yes, there's some like muscle activation, patterning work and we can sort of put that under a skill, but from what we've learned in terms of training for those things, they're much more strength-based than skill-based, they're just very specific strength, so they're like that, the applied strength part of the framework, rather than necessarily a skill, rather than hand balancing, balancing like handstands, other variations of hand balancing, where there is a genuine skill acquisition part of learning the proprioceptive control of balancing on your hands, that does benefit from small doses regularly. It's like fine motor control, isn't it? Yeah. I think like skill, if we look at motor learning and skill acquisition, I keep getting like days, it can come with lots of different forms, but there comes a point in a front lever where the skill of can you connect these muscle activation patterns together, yes you can, right, now you need to make that stronger, and yes we can get into the neural activation side of strength work, and there is neural adaptations in higher intensity work, but if we, so you can look at it that way, we can look at a bigger portion of skill acquisition where it's fine motor control. So skill acquisition playing a piano, it's like you could hammer a few keys and you could actually work out how to play a pretty novice tune, but to get a real kind of skill acquisition of fine motor control, and a lot of the things like art and is a very similar chopsticks, that's going to be a little bit more a different process. So in terms of how we mix it together, like Dave's touched on, probably the main thing is what are you working on and the skill acquisition, I actually like to do quite a lot of the skill work and we put in our movement patterning is the part of our framework where we kind of group our skill acquisition work here. At the beginning of a session, after I've done my movement preparation work, so I've primed the body, I've achieved a range of movement, I've activated some muscle patterns, and then I'm going to go into a skill acquisition or movement patterning phase where I'm just going to learn something new. We do it in athletes programmes quite a lot where I just like the idea that at the beginning of a programme, let's learn something new, let's learn to move in a new way, let's change ourselves, do something which we can't do already, and the good thing about that is you do it when you're fresh, there is very minimal benefit for us in calisthenics of doing skill acquisition when we're tired. You can argue it from a sports perspective where you have to play under fatigue, but we're not in that type of situation or environment. So skill acquisition at early doors, and actually what I find with skill acquisition work is if you're working on a handstand for example, or it's even a front lever or muscle kind of the activation patterns within that, it just actually serves as a really nice continuation of the warm-up. So if we were talking corrective exercise with an athlete, we might go through some form of range of movement change, we might isolate the muscles that are underactive, that we're trying to charge up to improve the postural patter, for example, and the phase after that is to integrate it all together and effectively educate the body how to move again with all this improving range of movement and muscle activation. Skill acquisition is that it's moving with purpose, moving with a specific outcome in mind, trying to learn to integrate and activate all the systems to do something which it's not done before, and then once you've done that, go and get strong. And whether that's specific strength or more global strength. So I'm trying to just piece together his answer a little bit for him. You're sort of saying that there is a skill acquisition part in the movement patterning and the strength combined, and then the strength that's also combined in the same session. Yeah, that's where our framework works is one of the options, yeah. Yeah, because we go movement patterning, which is essential for before you start a session, if you're going to maximise that opportunity, and you go movement patterning and then you flow into applied strength, and applied strength is a very specific strength. So the movement patterning could be quite sort of like activation based movement, it's not massive load, but more focus on the intricate feeling of the position. And then the applied strength is well let's get strong in a specific position that you're currently weak in. And then that starts to bring in the connection of how you're going to link in that movement pattern together, but under more intensity and higher load. So it's actually really progressive in that way. So if you haven't done that, I encourage you to go a really little bit more about the framework. We're going to quite a bit of detail about it in the books that we, in the eBooks, which is on the website. So just understand that process, and in terms of how we fit it in from a very simplistic approach, use sort of your movement patterning, skill acquisition to start your session, and then use the main body of your strength workout to go and get that kind of annotation. The one thing that you just need to be aware of is skill acquisition, especially hand balancing, is addictive. And you can very easily spend 45 minutes of a one hour session practicing hand balancing, and then go the end of it, go actually haven't really done anything to get strong, and that getting strong is such an important part of your progression forwards. So just make sure that you've got a balance, and sometimes if you're like we are, we've fallen in the file of this so many times because we end up playing, which we're massive advocates of playing your sessions, but all of a sudden we've done 45 minutes of messing about, and we actually haven't got strong, and you wonder why we're not strong enough to do what you want to do, and we haven't dedicated training time to it. At CV, touch on that probably? That one. No, no, that's a different question. I thought that was part of the battle, wasn't it? No, no, no. Yeah, that's the tip, sorry. Or jumping the gun. Or jumping the gun. So just to finish this off, I would suggest you look at the movements that you're trying to achieve, and are they truly skill-based? Is it like you're trying to learn to hold your handstand, or even some other hand balancing movements where it's very much more skilled than strength, or is it a movement like a front lever, human flag, or planche war, something like that where it's, yes, there's the skill element, like I said, but it's very much more strength-based, and if it's strength, if it's more strength-based, you're not going to be then trying to hit that every session, because you're just not going to get the adaptation in the recovery you want, whereas if it is skilled in terms of genuine hand balancing, then that is something that you can touch on more regularly throughout the week, like if you were going to learn to do the piano, you wouldn't just do one lesson a week if you wanted to accelerate that learning, you would do it regularly throughout the week, but just not do it for an hour every day. We touch base with that, well I tend to touch base with my hand balancing before every single session, it's a bit of a refresh, and then depending on how much of that session content I'm going to dedicate towards my handstand work, we'll determine how long that extends, but it might just be literally a few handstands to warm up before then going to a pulling session. It helps as part of the almost 5-10 minutes finishes off your warm-up, so nice and easy. Yeah, exactly. I don't want to extend the answer too long, but the other thing we haven't said is, in terms of periodising programs for like we do for an athlete where we would go through different phases, there is a potential option, and I haven't discussed this before, so be interested to see what you think, of going like, right you're going to do a four to six week block where you really actually focus on skill things and not worry about the strength, and then move into a block where you then do focus on the strength side things and leave the skill almost alone, and go through some training cycles like that in a more of a periodised way rather than just forever doing the same type of thing until I die or stop training. I think there's a balance there, and just like when you're doing a strength session, like you're going to go, I'm going to pull a session today, there'll get to a point where you can't do any more pull-ups because you're tired, and the same happens with skill acquisition, you're going to especially if you're kind of working at the limits of where you are currently able, which is where you need to be, you need to be kind of pushing that on a little bit, you're going to get to a stage where your skill acquisition work and progression just starts to deteriorate within a session because the new assistant is tired, it can't take an endless onslaught. So I think, yes, you could prioritise some of that skill acquisition work into a periodised block. I tend to, my personal feeling would be to spread that out, I think skill acquisition, there's some benefit of doing it smaller doses on a more regular basis rather than just trying to have an hour in. Sometimes it works quite well as a recovery session or you want to do something but you're going to play around but you don't really feel like you're fresh enough to go and start smashing out a huge amount of reps in terms of strength-based work. So there's an option there to do a little bit of just balancing your hands for a bit and have some fun with it, and that's quite a nice little session which you can break up during your trade week. As I said, we touch on this a lot because we get asked about it, but there's people that have written whole textbooks about it. The one thing that I would say is, and it's referred back to the framework, we've put a lot of thought into that and it's a very progressive approach to training. And if you start to structure your sessions around that and understand how you can manipulate it, it will take you to where you want to be because it's got every single component that you need to be able to do whatever you want to do in calisthenics. And it's just then your decision of how much training time you're going to apportion to that. And we've got lots of excitement. So if we're going to take this to another level when we've got some projects on the go, which is, we're super excited about. And it's actually, it's intimidating in a little way because I'm sat there going, this is really going to make me stretch me, but that is where I want to be. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited to bring some of that stuff out. So, yeah. Understand that a bit more? Yeah. So Sean, hopefully that gives you plenty to think about, like, to just- You stopped listening ten minutes ago. Simple. For Sean and anyone else out there, it's a question that comes up a lot of time and it's take a message I would say one, it's actually quite, it is difficult and something that we find it is tough to try and get that balance right. So don't beat yourself up about it. But make sure you're getting a little bit of a blend across in that. But just don't bite off too much. Don't try and work on four different skill things at the same time. Pick one or two and try and get it. That's a take-off thing. Watch your priority. And then actually just go, like, don't bite off more than you can trigger. We won't do all of it because it's not going to happen. Pick what you want, prioritize it, give it session time, train consistently, and then evaluate after four weeks. But don't jump around all over the place. Yeah. Make a plan, roll it. Cool. So question two. Yes, question master. Good. Question two ties on nicely from, or leads on nicely from, that last question we were starting to get into. I think you jumped the gun on one stuff, but I see if it started to get into a bit like, so then what does our week look like? So because it, because we're set up now with camera one, camera two, camera one, camera two, we're going to ask question two. We're going to go to camera two. Oh, I like that. So I have to look at her now? Yep. Why not? I'm going to ask the, well, you look very, you want nothing. You can look at your beautiful face, do you? I'm going to, we'll get into that later. Amazing. So Neil Phillips, you're number two. He is from Facebook. He doesn't start with, it's a, why am I, again, an easy, easy name, and I think it's his real name. Why am I asking, why am I reading this question out if he hasn't given us a, compliment at the start? This is the first and last time you're giving me a, unless you gave me that. Maybe. And that sorted. Maybe we're getting less compliments. But anyway, so Neil Phillips, you're lucky for this one. Guys, what's the makeup of, no, no, not the makeup that you wear? What's the makeup of your week consist of fitness wise, apart from honing in your calisthenics moves, do you have a normal weight session, CV sessions, etc. So basically, I, I'm taking that as like, what's your week? Like, give us a quick half an hour summary of what your week, that has a summary of what you all, because I've got something that since coming back off holiday, I'm trying to stick to, and I've, so I'll could do that for you. Start, I think we start with that. I'll start. I've banged a lot before. Okay. And mine will be like, oh, well, it depends. She's fucking that. Well, no, definitely, it still definitely does depend. But since coming back off, I had a bit of a holiday after the retreat we did in Morzine and super exciting. I do this all the time, but I generally don't stick to it. So I'm trying to stick to it more. So I've written it down a little bit in me in a nice little school class notebook that was now on brand. And I don't know why I'm still talking that I can talk to everyone up. So what my week is trying to look like. Don't do any weights. Generally turns that question. Shock horror. Shock horror. Calisthenics wise looks, is trying to look like this. Monday, like the hard stuff that I'm working on, the things that I can't yet do. So it should be hopefully fresh on a Monday, beginning of the week, honing on the hard things that I'm trying to do. So my front lever and planche work. Tuesday, lower body, and a lot more sort of, for me that's based more around trying to improve my hip mobility. So some lower body stuff that's mainly focused on improving range of motion rather than rather than trying to make my legs stronger. Which is an interesting one for you actually is jumping up because some of the stuff you're working on, your planche, your press to handstand, the limiting factor for you is your range of movement. So since I've done more of that, like things are starting to go a little bit there, and also starting to just go, well what sort of impact does improving my hip mobility have on my shoulder? And so a little bit of, and then a little bit of that session on Tuesday is some shoulder health sort of stuff, some prehab stuff, some stuff around my shoulder to try and make sure that they stay nice and safe. So shoulder, upper body, shoulder health, shoulder body focus. Yeah, yeah. After the hard stuff that I've done on Monday, Wednesday off rest, difficult, find that hard to do. Thursday, my pushing and hand balancing stuff. And then Friday, play day. Yes, finish the week. And then at the end, and so play at the beginning of that session, and then, so split that session in half, the first half of it play, so like, you should play around with some stuff that I'm just for fun. And often that's when you start doing some cool things, but then the second part of that session is like the base, my basic reps and sets for the week of like, right, dips, push-ups, pull-ups, things that don't have to think too much about because by the time Friday comes around I'm pretty tired. Yeah. The reality is, I think I've done one week of that, because other weeks, there's just all sorts of, like we've got a lot of stuff going on, we've got the school of calisthenics, but also with, we've got the other business, one athlete with, apparently the athletes we do, so there's a lot of things going, going on where that just goes out of the window a lot. So the week that we're currently in, Monday was in London all day, Tuesday I did actually manage to get a session in, Wednesday we had like meetings all day, and did absolutely nothing other than just sit down and talk about business. And then Thursday and Friday I'm not going to train because we're going to Newcastle on Saturday and we've got a workshop, so I don't want to be tired for that because you guys, that are coming in are going to want to see us demonstrate something. So if we turn up a garter show, we're really tired from the session I did yesterday, my flag looks a bit ropey because of that, you're not going to be that impressed. So the reality of sticking to that is difficult, but that for me is a plan, that when I have been able to do it, does feel nice, the difficulty for me is trying to make sure that Wednesday becomes a rest day and not do too much. When you do your CVU. So then the other things I do, my CV and other things, tend to be stuff with the Wi-Fi, aka Wi-Fi, aka Mrs. Jaco. So one of those sessions tends to be running around after her because she's much better at running than me. So we are big fans of Park Run, so 5K runs, or we've done a couple of 10Ks recently. It's too far. It's actually nearly twice as far as a 5K. I can beat Mrs. Jaco over 5K, but I can't beat her over 10. She's the type one athlete, she will just go all day. And then the other thing we do is we're trying to do a hot pod yoga session a week. That's not because I want to try and promote them, it's because I went there, enjoy it, it's good, and that's helping with my hip mobility for sure. So we try and get a yoga session in basically, and I get my CV tends to be 5K run, or sometimes we do some intervals and stuff as well, sometimes we mix it up. And then the other thing we do is we've got a road bike, when the weather's crap, I'm a fair weather cyclist. I'm the guy that cycles without a shirt on and all the other cyclists with all their lycra on. If it's Sunday, wave at me. Oh really? Yeah, it's not, Joyce will do it with her football shorts on, and she's not into it, so we don't, we're rebels within the cycling group. Like that? But we do, We're not rebels. We just go and do oversight. Right, let's go and cycle over to there, because they've got a nice coffee shop over there. How far is it? I don't know, I can get there in an hour or so. You might see it as CV and training, I just see it as a nice day out of my misses, but yes, it's training, but it's not training. So yeah, so it's very much for me, that side of things needs to just be like fun, enjoyable type stuff. Like I like going out running, I like going out cycling, it keeps me fit, but I'm not. It doesn't feel like it's training, I've done way too much in the past, when I was playing rugby, where it was like from a sloggy gut sound, you've got to do this, it's many sets, it's many reps and it's like, I've done that. Now it's time for Tim. Tim, what's your week of the day? So Monday is chest and calves, Tuesday is back and upper traps. I like to, you know those shrugs, where your traps don't actually move, but you get lower. Dane. That's what I do on a Tuesday. Victory Visuals knows that too well, I've just done a great impression. Yeah, I love all that sort of stuff. Now I'm actually going to be the ying to your yang, David, because where David's got what looks like now, great structured plan, well what I said was that rarely happened. Yeah, no, but you've got an idea. Yeah. I start the week with absolutely no idea what I'm going to do, and that's the honest truth at the moment. But is that, are you talking about your training? Yeah, yeah, everything really. Because it is for the reason that my life is a little bit unpredictable, it's fair to say. So like Dave said, we've got all the business stuff going on, and there's creative content, and there's all that really exciting stuff. And then we've got the Paralympic Business. I also contract another governing body, so I'm sort of knotting him for a day or week, which completely takes out Tuesday as an option generally for me, and everything else that comes with that. So I am an opportunist trainer. You have a baby. And I have a baby. I have a big difference. Eight month old, my little boy Jack, who is very much on the move. So as an aside, I've made a rod for my own back because from two weeks old, I was like, let's practice moving Jack, because there's one thing that I can give to him. Like I'm not much of an artist or a singer, so I'm going to get him good at moving. So now, this little dude is like a rocket. Should see him. So I spend a lot of my time just chepeding him, as those of you who've got children will know all too well. I can't wait to come round your ass one day. And he's like, Daddy, let's do arts and crafts. Yeah. And I'm like, sure. So I'm going to move up. We've all set a break and we're at South Africa to see the family. And I actually haven't now trained for over a week. I was a bit sick. So when I get an opportunity to do a session, it very much just depends on what the week's looking like. I don't have the luxury of stretching and stuff in. And I probably need to. And I went, they're like, I'm joking, because I think for a lot of people out there will panic if they don't do what's going to happen if I don't train for a week. And actually, probably what's going to happen is you might actually, depending on what you're doing for you, probably super competent, you might actually come back better. Well, I think in the last four weeks, I've probably done four or five sessions. And I've been to that all the way back to before we went on the retreat. And so I really haven't done a lot of training in the last month. So I've got a bit of a job to do to get back into it. But my basic structure, say if I had a run at a week, and I knew I could get some sessions in, I'm going to have to train a couple of times at home because I just don't have to be at home for family time and that sort of stuff. So I've got a little setup at home, which means I can do some stuff, which is generally going to be a lot of body work. And then when I'm at the gym, I'll do some lower body session, a lower body session, which might be something around some dumbbell kind of lunge work, which I really like. Just exploring a few of those different things, the pistols and shrooms are kind of just ticking over in the background. And when I'm at the gym, I do things I can't do at home, so that might be just muscle ups, or because I haven't got the head high at home to be able to do them, or it might be some handstand push-ups because I don't like to rub my feet up against my own wall and rather use the wall at the gym and make it dirty. Not wear clean socks at home. You know why I don't like that much space really. So yeah, it really depends. And I don't really like that, if I'm honest. I much prefer being able to say, right, these are my training sessions and I think there's a job for me to do to look at doing that, but it's just the reality. It's the reality. And at the moment, literally last night, I went to bed at quarter past eight and our flipping was buzzing about it because Jack was up this morning at quarter to five, so my days are long and I was lying on the sofa going, I'm just tired. And so I got home, done bath time with Jack, got me to bed, we had some dinner and I was like, I haven't got any now to do a session. And I don't hate myself because I would rather train this week or the last week, but it's just the reality. And that doesn't help you at all, but I hope what that does is help. Some people have sat there just going, I can't get a structure. My message to you guys is just like me, don't worry about it. When you can train, take that opportunity because I might, if I have an opportunity to train again, feel good, I'm going to train. I'll try and bag that opportunity because tomorrow, even in the best or the will and intention, I might, I'm definitely going to train tomorrow. I might not, is the reality. And therefore when I train at the moment, and this is last year going into games was crazy. I was out of the country a lot. I had no energy because we were working hard. It was all over the place. So I just hit basics. And a simple session for me when I'm tired might be like 100 chins and as few sets as possible. I might go 150 dips. I might go 200 push-ups. Like a little bit of a tricep. And it's going to keep me ticking over. I'm not going to like shake the world of calisthenics by how much new stuff I'm learning, but I'm sticking on top of some stuff. I'm throwing some play in there. And do you know what? Like I did some handstand stuff while I was away and it felt all right. Like, I think it's good to have some of those sessions in your back pocket where it's dead simple. Not having to think about a lot. You're tired or you just get that session. One thing I'm trying to do better now, which I think will help, also is if it is very sporadic like that, at least when you do do your session, right, keep a log of it, what you actually did. Just so that next time when you come in, you go just trying to remind yourself, oh, what did I do last time? If it was very, say it just happened to be very, yeah, or say it just happened to be very, your last session happened to be very push-based. You might want to go, even though you might want to do another put, you might be like, ah, actually, I need to make sure I get a decent amount of pulling stuff in this session, just to help balance it out. Or, you know, if it is really sporadic, you always try and do a bit of a balance, push and pull together and that sort of thing. A little bit of exercise science to finish this off. If you, so when we're going to take with athletes, we might be prepared for a competition. And what we do is we drop some of the volume out of a training program to give them opportunity to rest up. But we can learn a little bit from that. So if you know that you've got a busy couple of weeks of work or your life's a little bit upside down like mine, all I need to do on a weekly basis is something of intensity. So that's the one determining factor that's going to make sure you don't lose anything. And so research has shown that you can maintain strength levels for about 20 weeks just by making sure you're hitting some form of intensity on a weekly basis. So it doesn't matter how many reps you do, it doesn't really matter how much sessions, how long your sessions are, is it hard. So if I wanted to maintain my pulling strength, all I've got to do is a set of pull-ups on a weekly basis where I'm just like literally going hard out. Same with my pushing strength. And that is going to mean I'm not losing anything. I'm not gaining much, but I'm not going backwards. So that's a very simple thing to put your mind at rest. If you're worried about losing gains, intensity is your magic goal and ticket. And your brain will tell you whatever you want to, it wants to tell you about what you look like in the mirror, but just life is life. And there's a lot of psychological stuff we could talk about, but that's probably for another day. Yeah, there's more to life than training. There is, yeah. And Mike and Jack, I want to... There was something to be able to accomplish on Friday, my last point, and we saw a speaker, she was talking about a life plan and stuff, and one of the things that she said is that she wanted her son, when he grew up, to choose to be her friend. And that's how I want to be with Jack. I don't want to be like, I'm not prioritising pull-ups over a little more. Yeah, yeah, cool. Because let's get stuff in reality. And if I look a little bit smaller because of that, I'm not bothered. Again, question number three and the final question is, comes from an email. So I totally come across all the different platforms. So you can get in touch with this however you want. If it's good enough and you press a compliment, then you might get your question answered. So it's from Mike and he says, Hi guys, really enjoying the podcast and tutorials. Thanks, Mike. Guilty. And he was also glad to discover that Dave and Jack were the same person as he was having some time trying to work out who wore the hat. I think that's my fault that I am inconsistent with how I address you. Yeah, what you call me. Yeah. So I think that's how you address me. That's for the time. And you should do that in the morning. Just to let you know, I'm only one haircut away from a mullet now. Move on. Danger. That's what we call that. The danger zone. That's not it. Yeah, it is dangerous. Let's give it no more space to grow that thought. Right. So his question is about injury and recuperation. So he's asking about he's 51 years old and we got a lot of people who have seen Graham, our 70 year old, top, top students. So I hope I can do the peck dance film, 70. And the clutch flag. Yeah. But he's proof that age is just an unburned. So I've had a few people that go, I'm 34. Do you think I'm too old? And I'm like, well, I'm older than you. Graham's double your age. Anyway, so he's been doing some jogging works trying to loosen up his muscles as part of his warm-up. But have you got any helpful ideas about trying to loosen up what is called knotted muscles, but tight muscles? And any things to help speed up recovery or prevent injury other than the use of ibuprofen and gels that he's using? And do we recommend using a physio? He's coming to the workshop in Manchester on the 2nd of December. So we're looking forward to seeing you there. And through the form, my Lloyd and Ben excited to see you. Solved out very quickly that one. So it's obviously a popular one. Right, I'm going to drop a little bit on this. So a couple of things for knotted muscles that, again, we refer back to it in the first question, but go and have a look at the framework. There's a whole section of the framework. So for those of you that haven't come across it, we have two pillars of our framework, movement and strength. And within the movement section, we have movement preparation and movement patterning within strength and applied strength and capacity strength. The movement preparation is something that we do before every single session. It's something we do with our athletes before every single session. It is possibly the most valuable thing that you can do in your session. And people are looking to go, well, it's flexibility work, yawn. But it's not. It's optimizing the opportunities that you're going to have in the rest of your session. So if you can prepare your body for the session you're about to do, which you want movement preparation is all about, it means you might get an extra two, three, four, five, 10% because you're moving better. You've prepared the body to coordinate itself, to produce force, to get into positions that are going to challenge it without finding compensation, dysfunctional movement patterns, all of those things in calisthenics are golden. So within that, one of the massive tools that we use for everybody is self-massage release. Self-massage or basically phone rolling, or we use lacrosse balls a lot because they give a little bit more of a pinpoint accuracy and it's a great balance between something which is firm, but also has got a little bit of giving it. So effectively it's a poor man's massage. If you were to go to a physio because you've got tightness in your muscles, you've got those knots that you're feeling, they're going to do some work, they're going to put some pressure on the trigger points. What's happening there is it's resetting the newer overactivity of that muscle. So we get these adhesions, which is a build-up of collagen, it forms in all random areas, it's a bit like a roadblock in the muscle. And the analogy that we use is if you had a rope, and it got knots in it, that rope shorter, if we want to make that rope a bit longer, we need to do something to take those knots out, which is some pressure point release work, which we can do ourselves. So by placing some tension on those trigger points, what happens is it resets the brain's neural activity to that muscle. We get a little bit of ischemia, which is basically some sort of refreshing the blood flow. So by pressing into it, all the blood leaves that area, then we stop that pressure point, the blood returns, it brings new nutrients, new oxygen, helps with the regeneration. It's an interesting thing that came out when I did my masters, there was very many detailed conversations with one of the lecturers about this, and he was very anti-ferro on it because it came from a place of applied practitioners rather than from a scientific background, but there's much more science coming out about it. The problem around it with the science is we actually don't really understand what's happening in massaging therapy, we don't really understand what's happening in stretching, is it fascia, is it collagen accumulation, is it neural, is it joint, all this kind of stuff. What we do know is that it makes us feel better, it makes us feel like we move better, and if we retest or test retest at the beginning of a session, we do a little bit of self-martial release, can I now get into a better position? Yes. And you can argue for the academics out there that that's a placebo, but if it makes me feel like I move better, it makes my athletes feel like they can get into better positions, then it is worth the fighting. If you're going to do some handstand training or some handsome work and your overhead position in terms of the range of motion at your shoulder is improved by doing a little bit of release work on your pecs and your lats, whether it's, whether you think it's a placebo or not, I guess, or whatever the mechanism is, it doesn't matter. If your overhead position becomes better, then it's going to help you train. Absolutely. So the upshot takeaway is if you don't currently do anything like that, then just don't worry about how much static stretching you're doing. Again, that's a different subject in conversation about where that fits into a training program, but just start doing something to release those type of sorts. If you look at any of our textbooks that we've put out, or an e-book, sorry, with the, even from Beginner's Guide, any of the specific movements, the one that we're going to have ready for the end of the year, which is our intermediate guide, they all start with self-massage. So starting to put that into your program, so five minutes before a session, so if you've got particular areas where it's upper traps, lats, pecs, hip flexors, whatever it is, just go to where there's a stack of content in our free Beginner's Guide and give you the principles of what you're trying to do. So essentially, five minutes, find the tight areas, the bits that are a little bit gristly, the things that feels like it's knotted down, stuck together, get a little bit of pressure on them using a cross ball or a foam roller, work through some gentle, kind of like simple, small, massage movements around that area, and you'll start to, over time, feel that pain level decreases, and you're going to get an instant kickback, but it's not going to solve 51 years of abuse because the other thing that we talk a lot about is when you're going to come into a session, a lot of us will have been sat down all day, we'll have been in front of computers, in a car, at home, whatever it is. We don't come in with optimal posture, so aside from injury prevention or injury rehabilitation, it's just helping to get back to undo some of the nasty kind of positions you've been in for the rest, for the most part of the day. So that's for a pre-session. Don't end up doing half an hour of self-massage release before a session because too much of it will decrease the neural drive to the muscles, and that's not going to help the main outcome of the session. However, throwing in at the end of a session, there's some research that came out that said that foam rolling after a hard session can actually increase the recovery time. So the study kind of stated that we could get a peak onset of doms at 24 hours rather than 48 hours, and then power output actually was back to normal at 48 hours rather than 72. So actually by doing a bit of foam rolling afterwards, the upshot of that is you can speed your recovery by 24 hours. So I was going to touch on that to say that in our framework, we haven't talked about it a lot, so it's a good question from him about trying to speed up recovery and aid recovery, and it's something I'm not personally very good at myself. We stop training, walk straight out of the gym. Yeah, because we're just sort of what's happening next and maybe prioritising that a little bit, but certainly if it's something you really do want to try and improve in terms of your recovery, we don't in the framework go movement pattern in, apply strength, passive strength, and then add on movement prep again, but to say that actually some of the release work you're doing in that movement prep, you can do at the end to try and help speed up that for sure. Just to direct you in the Free Beginners Guide, the movement prep work, there's some self-myofascial release or self-massage using a lacrosse ball for the lats, which Tim goes through and explains in detail about that. That's in the Free Beginners Guide. It's that same tutorial that's also on YouTube. So you can see that and just take, yes, that's one muscle, but you can take that principle that's explained there and you can apply it to any muscle that feels like it's got some tight knots into it. The only thing to stay aware of is if you've got tingling or your arm goes numb, you're rolling nerves, don't roll nerves, stick to muscles. But just yet, if you do nothing else, start your session with some release work and that is going to, I often say to people, if you've got a niggle or something which feels a bit grotty, 90% of the time, you can stop that from going any further with a little bit of targeted release work. And that means that if you ignore it, then you're going to find your way on to the physio couch. So just be proactive about it, put it in at the beginning of your session, and you're doing something to maintain movement quality and hunky session, decrease injury, that's got to be worth five to 10 minutes before you get into the main body of your work. Cool. So hopefully that has helped you, whether it was your question that was being answered or whether just the question was something that made, treated some thoughts in your mind and give you some things to get really important for us is that you can then go away and you can take some of those points out of those three questions and those answers and go away and start implementing and actually make a change with your training and helps you improve your training. We recognise with some things that we're not always perfectly prescriptive, but if you read any of our material from our eBooks, you'll know that our purpose is to educate you to make decisions for yourself. We actually want you guys to become self-sufficient rather than going, I need Tim and Jaco to tell me what I'm going to do next week. Understand the principles of what you're trying to do, become more educated and knowledgeable about yourself, your own needs and what your situation is like, and then you're just going to get so much more from your trainer rather than me and Dave just going, here's five sessions that you should do this week and I've just made it even worse because I referred to you and Dave and Jaco in the same bit of chat. Same one. Same person. It's the one way. Maybe you can do like Jaco is the when I've got the top mark up and you know when it's done. You're not having more than one person. You've already got question master when adding another one to the mix. That's a good personality. Yeah. So anyway, I hope you've, I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you haven't yet subscribed and you've made it all those at the end of the video. Click up there which was an achievement today I think. If you haven't, I haven't got a free beginner's guide. That's a no brainer. You can get that from the website down there. And if you want to check out some of the other Q and A's last week's Q and A is up there. So until next week. Class dismissed.