Monday’s training was a gymnastic skill-focus day looking at the skill of handstand walking. The training included some time spent practicing and developing the specific skill of handstands, followed up with some “for quality” work to narrow in on and train individual components involved in a handstand walk. These types of training days are often overwhelmingly met with dismissal avoidance behavior with an accompanying misunderstanding of our training purpose and approach.

The response I hear most often in regards to a skill day focused on a challenging and high-skill movements is “but I can’t do _______, so there’s no point in going.” Perhaps it’s muscle ups, levers, or, as was the case on Monday, handstand walks. The error in this thinking is evident when we use education as an analogy. Imagine you are in college, trade school, or perhaps going back to college for a second degree. Ostensibly the purpose of higher education is to develop your critical thinking, learn a trade/skill, and/or to dig deep on a specific discipline that you would like to pursue further. As such, when you pick your coursework, you should be taking courses in a discipline in which you are not currently proficient. It wouldn't make much sense for a career accountant to return to school to get a second degree in accounting, or for someone in electrician trade school to avoid classes about working on transformers because he is unfamiliar with how to work on transformers. Not to be blunt, but that’s the whole damn point. Skills develop with training, not avoidance.

I am fully willing to admit that this perspective on skill days could in part be due to a failing on our part to communicate the purpose and intended execution of the prescribed training (the workout that’s written on the board). Perhaps looking at the workout and seeing a list of skills that you cannot perform gives the impression that you will be tossed off to the sidelines to stand around and watch, or to do some unrelated separate from the group. Let me clear things up: this is not how skill days work. The training as it is written on the whiteboard is intended to be our framework, to be manipulated in its execution to best challenge and develop each student and their individual strengths and weaknesses. If you can't do handstand walks (and most of us cannot), then it is our mission to develop the physical skills and capacities involved theirein. This may mean training your balance, shoulder strength, comfort in being inverted, core strength, or any other of a host of skills and strengths. This is our variation of learning arithmetic before we learn calculus.

The other common explanation for skill-day avoidance is that “it’s just skill work, so it’s not hard enough to get a good workout.” On the one hand, I appreciate the sentiment of seeking out challenge in training, but this perspective is founded on misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of what is physically “hard.” While skill-focused days may not involve the traditional model of high-intensity, time-focused conditioning, intense focus on intentional execution of a high-skill movement, and particularly a skill in which you are not already well-trained and proficient, has the potential to be one of the most physically challenging training days of your athletic life. Remember the first time you attempted an overhead squat, and how heavy the empty barbell felt, how sore your shoulders were the next day? Learning new skills and exploring new positions and ranges of motion demands an incredible amount of exertion, as your specific motor control is undeveloped and your movement largely inefficient -- in short, it is very hard.

Remember why we all do this stuff in the first place: to get better. If you were just interested in staying the way you are, you'd probably still be on your couch rather than showing up at the gym before or after a long work day. Thinking about skipping a skill day? Take that as a sign that it might be just the thing you need.

- P

10/11/17

• “Daniel”

• For time:

• 50 Pull-ups

• 400 meter run

• 21 Thrusters (95/65)

• 800 meter run

• 21 Thrusters (95/65)

• 400 meter run

• 50 Pull-ups