Fergusonhouse

:: Description of Movements ::

Cross-body Lunges
Start with your feet at shoulder width and kick your right knee up high into your hands. Bring your right leg down and back, but over to your left as far as possible while performing a lunge. Complete the set with your right leg and then switch to your left.

Pull-ups
Change your grip for each set, but try to pull yourself up above the bar with each rep in as much of a controlled motion as possible. Listen to your shoulders and don’t injure yourself trying to squeeze out more than you can. If you get burned out and can’t do the reps, use a chair or something similar to assist yourself.

Dips
We’ve all done dips a million times, so the exercise should be familiar. Try to concentrate on performing each dip slowly. Get your triceps parallel to the ground and use some sort of support if you burn out before the end of the deck.

Hanging Leg Raises
Hanging in the down position of a pull up, slowly raise your legs out in front of you as high as you can. Don’t swing your body for extra height; you’ll only injure yourself if you make this a habit… If you burn out, do the rest of your reps with legs bent or by only going up until your legs are parallel to the floor.

ISO Chin Up Holds
Grab the bar with palms facing you and raise up 1/3 of the way. After a 10 second hold, raise yourself up to halfway and stay for another 10 seconds. Finally, pull yourself up above the bar and hold it for another 10 seconds. If you have the strength, hold for an extra 10 seconds at the top and then hit the middle and low positions again on the way down.

Clapping Push-ups
Everyone knows what these are, so I’ll make this brief and point out only what I think is important to think about when doing these. You want to go slowly towards the bottom position of your pushup and I don’t mean just barely moving. I mean just keep the descent in control and keep your arms and core tight. The big thing about these guys is that you want to EXPLODE out of the bottom position and get as high off the ground as possible to clap your hands. When you land back in the top position, use your arms to absorb the shock slowly – don’t just land with your palms crashing down…

Plyo Push-ups
These are great! This is an explosive movement, similar to the clapping push-ups above. When we explode out of the bottom position of the push-up, we need use both our upper and lower body to get as high off the ground as possible. When you’re in the air, you want to have your arms and legs out like you’re making an X with your body. Try to land with your feet back together and your hands slightly more than shoulder width apart. Again, use your arms to absorb some of that impact.

L-seat to Handstand
I’m still working on getting a full handstand out of these, but they are probably my favorite exercise of all. Using bars or parallettes, you push up to the top of a dip position and bring your legs straight out in front of you. Do your best to keep good, tight form with your toes pointed and legs straight. Next, move your legs back underneath you and up as you attempt to move fluidly into a handstand. This is where I’m stuck; I’m not strong enough to get my arms extended yet. No worries though, slowly return back to the starting position. Make sure you hold the L-seat and the handstand or the stall for a couple of seconds before moving to the other position. When you’ve got the strength, try changing these to a V-seat with your legs outside of your hands…

Uneven Push-ups
You can alter the difficulty level of this exercise by changing the height of the item you use and/or the width of your arms in the push-up. Get in a push-up position with one hand on the ground and one hand elevated on some sort of platform. You can use your parallettes, a block, a box, a stack of mats… whatever. Whatever you use, make sure you’ve got two of them (one for each hand). When you explode into the top position, come off the ground and bring the hand that was on the ground onto the previously unused block, moving the hand that had been on the other block to the ground. You can change this exercise up by going from ground to block with both hands or by putting the blocks out in front of you instead of in the normal push-up grip area.

Ring Roll-outs
I’m sure you’ve all done ab wheel rollouts before. We’re just doing them with our gymnastics rings. Move your rings down to where they’re only 6-8 inches off the floor. Stand with your feet between and just a bit behind the rings. Next, grab the rings and “rollout” into a horizontal position with your hands leading out in front of you (“above” your head like you diving). Hold the end position for a second or two and then return to the beginning position IN CONTROL. You can alter these by moving your straight arms around perpendicular to your body when you’re in the horizontal position and then bringing your hand in and body up similar to a fly before returning to the starting position. Sometimes I get to the horizontal position and then do a couple of jumping jack style movements with my arms before returning to the starting position.