No thinking, just go. That was more or less the idea behind the workout of today. After quite the technical start of the week, with workouts that are both intense but also demand some technique and therefor thinking, we went a bit more back to the basics today with Chasin Waterfalls:
This is a lovely workout to coach. Yes, we all love our olympic weightlifting and high skill gymnastics, but we also realize that all this snatching and pull-ups won’t happy if you don’t get in the basics in the first place. And the sit-up / wallballs are one of those basic movements to build strength, engine and body control in a very safe and effective way.
After the warm-up, we had quite some time to walk over the technique of these ‘basic’ movements. The focuspoint for the wallballs being the squeezing of the ball, hereby activating the chest muscles. As a huge fan of ‘tension over position’ (google it, worth it;) ), I love the feeling of a good chest pump. Why? Well, the coach can tell you a million times how you should look when you are doing a movement, ”Back straight” ”Chest up”, but as long as you don’t have a mirror right next to you, it’s always a bit hard to guess if you are ”looking” right. You don’t know and can’t feel your own position, especially when you’re body awareness is not perfect yet. But tension you can feel! You can feel if your abs / hamstrings are working. That’s a bit easier to work with than to ‘feel” if your back is straight. So by feeling your chest pumping in the wallballs today, you can feel yourself if you are doing it right or not. You can’t feel position but you can feel tension, and thereby you can get feedback from the body when there’s no coach around.
These little things make basic-days like today even more fun. A wallball, a movement that not everybody thinks about as a technical movement, can be a bit more challenging and thereby fun by adding these little details to work on. Same thing goes for the sit-ups: Shoulders over the hips in the top position and keep tension when you’re going down. Just the little point to take with you into your next workout. Have a great night guys, see you tomorrow!
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