PaulG's Challenge, Rebooted

[WhiteGhost]

23 hours ago, PaulG said:

For example, I seem to be humming along pretty well with pistols right now; but I worry that if I set myself a goal to be doing full pistols by the end of the challenge, I'll push myself too hard and too fast and hurt myself that way

I look at things like this in terms of progressions.  For pistols the goal for the end of the challenge could be increasing the drop by another few inches instead of trying to get full pistol.  I have seen progress in a number of skills through this method, although if I am honest I usually pick too many to effectively work on them all and see progress in a few while the rest kind of just stagnate.

[PaulG]

28 minutes ago, WhiteGhost said:

I look at things like this in terms of progressions.  For pistols the goal for the end of the challenge could be increasing the drop by another few inches instead of trying to get full pistol.  I have seen progress in a number of skills through this method, although if I am honest I usually pick too many to effectively work on them all and see progress in a few while the rest kind of just stagnate.

 

Yeah, I like that method of progression. It can be a dicey fortune-telling game to try to predict just how much I can expect to progress in any one exercise in five weeks, but I guess them's the breaks. I tried to set an aggressive goal for my upper body last time around (not my challenge goal, but I really, really wanted to level up all my exercises and get a kipping muscle-up), and I paid for it.

 

Once you get to a decent level of strength, I agree, I feel like your focus just kind of narrows by necessity. I spent months spinning my wheels with wall headstand pushups, for instance, and I only got that brass ring when I made them priority #1 and basically put everything else on maintenance. I feel like you can hit one upper body and one lower body goal pretty aggressively, and still be effective, but any more than that is always a balancing act as I start to push against my recovery limits.

 

Back in the day, Waldo used to espouse the notion that recovery and work capacity is like any other physical attribute in that it adapts to new loads and can be trained to increase. But I never really developed a knack for that kind of programming. Maybe it's something that just takes a lot of time and consistency. Or maybe I need to start reading up on programming again, though I don't know where I'd go for that level of knowledge.

 

Started the new challenge thread!