 And the celebrations are wild. She's doing the bicycle. We're back. Welcome back graduates. This is my kitchen. This is where most of the graduation... Ceremonies. Ceremonies go down, fully stashed up, available in store. Jaco, I'm feeling like we need to crack on with it today. Show me. I wanted to talk about how you downgraded to a small t-shirt. Oh, well, that's probably for another day. Q&A question. It's a great fit. September graduates, what's been going on? There has been the month of muscle-ups. The month of muscle-ups. So you're going to see a lot of muscle-ups. And yeah, let's get into celebrating these bad boys. Muscle-ups are a big one for people. I can remember the first time we were trying to do both bar and rings. And it is a definite, this feels impossible, type of moment. So you're going to see some... The celebrations is what always makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Keep me in suspense no longer, David. You were even present at one of them. Oh, there you go. There you go. Come on, let's go. Hit the jingle. There we go. You've covered the screen. Yeah, sorry, there we go. We can move ourselves. Anyway, September graduations. I thought you might cut that out. I think I'll leave that in. Show people how it really happens. So first up... Or just pause it. There we go. Note the set-up. Ben Brown from the virtual classroom. And one of the things I was saying to you before is, I love it when we see someone's like genuine first muscle-up. The actual graduation. And we've got a couple of those this time. As opposed to a lot of the time, people will wait till they can do three or four or five and they feel like it really comes with them. And then it's like, right, now I'm ready to graduate. And that's cool also, because as we said, it's when you feel that you're ready for it. But Ben Brown, this is his first... He's done his ring one recently. He's a workshop as well. Great guy. Yeah, well deserved. But as you can see... Boom. Get it. Get there. He's also wearing... He's got a school t-shirt on. But you can see... I'd like to have seen just a tad more of a celebration from Ben, maybe giving it some big licks. But his message sort of said, it could be cleaner. Everyone says that about muscle-up. I still say that about mine. But he comes over the top. He doesn't go one side than the other. That shape that he gets into there in the truss and both arms have gone through together. And we talk about the importance of being able to pull till the bar reaches your sternum. And that's where you can see why. Once your bar gets your sternum, gives you a chance to get into the bottom of a deep bar dip. When we pause, there you go. Is it at the bottom of a dip or is it at the top of his pull? Yeah, the easiest bit of this is to make that easier. It's just get faster pulling higher. The higher you can pull the less range of movement you need to be able to work through when you get to your dip. So you basically transition higher because the last little bit here where Ben, you just have to fight for getting out of that bottom position. If you caught that a bit higher, because you pulled higher, it's going to be easier. But these are the things that's great about calisthenics because you've always got something you can do to work on. Just move these things forward. Put a bit of polish on, but I am proud of you on that one, Benjamin. I've noticed that he's got his weighted vest here. So he can do a little bit of power working on some weighted pull-ups and then some speed work. As Tim mentioned, he's got his green band down at the bottom and he's been doing some mobility work. Combine your strength and your speed to generate power. Get powerful. Pull fast. You're going to get high. You know what I say, Jaco? All the gear, in this case. All the ideas. Right, next up is a special one. This is Frive from The Retreat. I'll let Tim tell the story of when she comes up. So next up is Laura Clark. There we go. And you can see Tim look in the background. There you go. Looking good, Tim. She even dyed her hair the colour of the school. Laura and Darren have been engaged with us from right from the beginning. They've been on three retreats. They've been to Marbella. And Laura's had this muscle-up in her impossible box for the last two years, but she has put a ton of work into it. And she came to the retreat and I said to her, in our one-to-one sessions, what do you want to work on? And she just said, I need to crack my muscle-up. And she was sort of, I think, there's a little bit of magic dust at the retreat, isn't there? I'm going to take all the credit, but what we did was basically just start to troubleshoot around. I got to show me where she was at and we just started to play around with this position because she was so, so close to getting it. And all it took was one cue. One thing she wasn't doing was basically on the rings pulling high enough, but then remembering that this comes a point where you've got to shift that force downwards so that internal shoulder rotation, just to give yourself that opportunity to shift the elbow on top of the wrist. And someone will sit there and go, well, of course you've got to do that, but that's not always the case when we're doing callus. I think she sometimes needs somebody just to give you a little bit of context or tell you the one thing that you're not doing because there's so much going on. And Laura's done an incredible job on this. So she's got a ton of sense. We'd seen before, pulling high enough, comes with pulling up and pausing at the top of that pull with a good false grip, dipping deep enough. And she just wasn't piecing it together and I guess it was the difference of having, and she said afterwards that having Tim there just one-on-one for it wasn't even, it wasn't like this wasn't an hour later in position, it was maybe 15 minutes into your one-on-one. And you just found something that you noticed that she was missing and it just made that connection for her. I think the one thing, just before we do it, it's like you often talk about pulling high and pushing the bar down. We don't always talk about on the rings because you've got that space in between. So just to go to show, sometimes you just need a little bit of support. Nice false grips. Celebrations are wild. She's doing the bicycle. Look at that. Super happy. That was actually sort of Laura's weekend made. And I think especially anyone who knows how much time that's gone into sort of achieving something like this is, we will appreciate that. And we will also appreciate it's my celebration. We say it a lot, but then that is the reality of it. We say that the longer the journey and the harder it is and the more struggle you have, actually the richer the process and the richer the enjoyment afterwards. And you see that there on a face in a celebration. It was a place to be a part of that as well. And so to reiterate that point, if you're someone that is pulling high and dipping deep and you're just not piecing that together, maybe you're not actually applying the force and the transition downwards, transitioning from pulling force into pushing force. So that may be one for you to help you redefine your impossible too. Are you not now absolutely gagging to go, speaking of high, Tim, is Sam high? That's a jack-o'-joke. I hadn't, you've done that one. No, I didn't think about it. From New Zealand, I believe. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Think I love how this is. Right, people have problems in the gym sometimes with low ceiling heights. No problem, Tim. Take a bit out of the rave. I actually did that in the National Performance Centre of British Paris, swimming in Manchester. You had permission? No, because I'm an original rebel. So Sam comes in strong body position. Boom, flip through the roof. Straight up. So you can see the... That came through quick. You can see the speed of that lift and how high he gets. Some of it created by the momentum of that starting position and movement of the knees. So if you were to make... Not for the purpose of making a comparison, but just how Ben perhaps didn't, in the first one, they move as fast, but he kept his knees in a straighter position. You just see the difference here of how those legs are helping. Fine, you can decide whether you want to do more or less of that, that's totally up to you. But you see that the speed that's created because of that, how high he gets, is almost getting the hips to the bar, and then that transition is an awful lot easier. Now, the same we talked about the principle with Ben, to be able to get higher is about creating power and pulling with speed. Or if you want to be able to get that high for Sam here, without moving his knees, if he does, up to him, then he needs to do the same process. He needs to develop more power, and that's just a bit of a difference between a kipping muscle-up and one that would be described as a strict, and again, Jaco says, you choose how you want to move. If this is a great example of a muscle-up, the difference is that you just don't necessarily in a strict muscle-up push your hips into this position where you're almost parallel underneath the bar. But again, it's a nice little controlled muscle-up. The shoulder's going over at the same time. It's got control of the movement, so we make that as a happy movement. The biggest thing to try to make sure I avoid is it's the position that the shoulder's getting into as you transition through. Keep your shoulders, that human head, in a good position at the joint. Don't get one arm up and one down. Don't just absolutely right through the shoulders from the socket. Those are two things to avoid. Very good, well done. Next up now, I was thinking you could have a go at pronouncing this one. Rodrigo, Pareta, Azumendi. Can you probably about that? I think you probably need a little bit of accent, but that's the first one I've seen it. Rodrigo, Pareta, Azumendi. Boom. It's your time to shine, son. Oh, it's coming off hot. Nice. That does help actually, that last little bit of walking. We've used that with people before, is actually approaching the bar with a little bit of momentum. It actually allows you to start to get in that initial first pull. And the second rep for muscle-up is always easy in the first because you're operating with a little bit of assistance from a stretch-shortened cycle. I think there's a lot of people struggle with the set-up position because we're so used to just being up and down underneath the bar for our pull-ups that actually we don't get that sort of 25 to on the clock face. We're swinging there, but he's getting his body past the line of the bar. And again, if he wants to take out that knee shift in that position, then it comes down to developing more power. But that was, you know, it's a nice, fast pull, gets over the bar nice and smoothly. Yeah, the difference here is you're going to go underneath the bar into a set-up position similar to this. And if you're going to just go more pulling power jack, as you just body, whole body should move on a line in that direction and then transition over. The difference being when you want to start to use the momentum, you use that swing, you drive the hips and the knees upwards, up in this shape here underneath the bar. And then you're just going to basically roll over the top of it as you come through. And the principle is the same. The knees are driving up on that diagonal to help with that, just proving that that is the position, the motion that we want to go in. And then, you know, for a lot of people, the most important thing when you're trying to redefine your possible muscle is breaking through that, like, barrier. And sometimes it's a little bit mental as well as physical of getting past that top pull-up position, really getting through into a transition. And once you can do that, then you can worry about whether how strict and no movement at all that you want to make it. But it's going to be very difficult to do one for the very first time without moving your knees or hips at all. Now this gentleman has been on a journey with a human flag. We said it was a muscle-up month, but just throw in one little juicy human flag. Todd Davidson. Todd's been part of the virtual classroom. He's engaged with us plenty on social as well as a strength and conditioning coach. Also got some decent number on his powerlifting. He's like, he's big into that. So he's strong. And what I was pleased with for Todd when he went through this process was he understood the transfer of his basic strength. So I remember seeing some messages of he hadn't been trained in the human flag, but just from a general strength perspective, he could produce enough force. And the real connection for him was just learning how to apply that force in a specific movement pattern, even though he hasn't done, probably by his own admission, a huge amount of like isometric hold of 10 seconds. He just basically was a strong guy and he's just rewired a little bit of how he produces force in this pattern. And he's now got what I'm expecting you to show me, Jack. Hold on a second. You'll see that. We haven't even rehearsed this, but you'll see that he gets it on the second attempt because obviously that pattern is still relatively new. So he'll go up on this first one. He's trying to make sure he gets that shoulder through nicely, comes up into it, and then comes back down. He sort of had it for a split second, but coming down, you're thinking, oh, actually, that wasn't very long. Can he actually hold one? And it's like, I don't know. Let me just make sure I make that connection right. And then this time, shabang. Now as it makes, and you can see that connection happening and then boom. And the bit for me about that one, where the big difference is, is what he remembers to do. If you watch it, it's real subtle. Whereas he kicks himself up, watch his bottom shoulder here. He's just going to bang that into shape, and it goes boom, boom. You see that extra little movement there. He just kind of kicks it in, which I'm guessing if we were to go back, I'm going to guess. The first one. That would be the end of the first. Because you talk about that bottom arm being the anchor. And he lines it up. There's a really kind of put a force on. Watch the second round. There's that extra little bit of like push away and rotation, just a smidge. It's just that bit. Yeah, you do. You see it. It's nice. Look at that. That's a nice long. Yes. And the celebration. Well, also a must have heavy month, but some great successes and loving seeing some familiar faces in the graduation reel for September. And loving the celebrations, because that's what it's all about. Including mine. I went hard. Yes. To be fair, you probably won the celebration. You celebrated more, I think, than Laura did. While she was busy above the rings. And she was dancing around like a mad person. But sometimes, as you know, you guys will know, you put skin in the game and we've seen people put skin in the game. And then we are as equally happy for them to really find their impossible as they are for themselves. Sometimes more. Yeah. 100%. So if you are on that process to redefining your impossible, we've shared plenty before where people haven't done their full thing. It's just a step towards that. Feel free to share those with us because we need to celebrate those wins along the way. I've had a lot of people saying that to us recently. It's those little wins that give us the motivation to keep going for the big things. So we'd love to hear from you and to see and celebrate with you, your graduations. If you need some extra help, we'll always hear whether you can, whether you're watching on YouTube or on social media. And if you would like to follow some of the programs that these guys in the virtual classroom using and head over to the virtual classroom at schoolcasts.com. We can access all the movements of the classrooms as well as stuff that's designed specifically for beginners if you're just trying to get started. There's some free content in there for beginners as well. Nothing to say to him, is there? I'm just going to go and bask in your glory, not yours theirs. Congratulations. You've done well. Ten more. Until next month. Class dismissed. Yes! Come on!