A. Back squat – 3×7@70%.
B. Pull-up strength:
- 5 slow negatives. If you can do strict pull-ups, instead do 5 (separate) reps, aiming for equally slow up and down portions of the movement, e.g. take 15 seconds to pull from the bottom to the top, then the same length of time to return to the bottom.
- 3 max effort sets of supinated (palms up) body rows underneath a barbell. **We are going to add a tempo to the movement this week, and that will be 31X3. That can be deciphered as: 3 seconds to lower down, 1 second at the bottom, eXplode (quickly) up, 3 second pause at the top.** Relax the shoulders (protraction) at the bottom of the movement, and pull your chest to the bar, focusing on maximum retraction (pull shoulder blades together) at the top. Your set ends when your form starts to break down. If these are easy and your form is perfect, raise your feet up on a box and/or lower the barbell to increase the difficulty.
C. Headstand practice. Lots of people are fairly new to these, which became clear last week, so you get to work on them some more. Get comfortable with these, and challenge yourself. If these are no problem for you, work on your handstand balancing. If you want an additional challenge, try this. It’s called an elbow manna, and speaking from experience, you’ll want to try these on parallettes first. They require quite a bit of ab strength to pull them off.