The Constant Awesome

This blog post is all about my nerdy journey of attaining a handstand pushup against a wall!

Note: I am not talking about a freestanding HSPU. That requires a solid freestanding handstand which I have not maintained. I am only talking about the goal of achieving the strength for a chest-to-wall HSPU.

This is one of those moves that I worked on in the past, but have neglected for at least a couple years so I have to build up the strength for it again. And that’s somewhat of a blessing in disguise because I get to do it in a methodical manner and share how I am doing! And will update as I keep going.

The main progression exercise I’ll be using as a stepping stone will be these feet-elevated pike pushups

Pike pushups, with feet elevated or not, require mastery of proper pushups. Proper form is crucial and easily neglected for pike pushups, even more-so than regular pushups. (Even I, a stickler for form, used to do it poorly before as well.) Notice how my lower arm (forearms) and elbows never go backwards or flare outwards during the movement? The forearms never go backwards even the slightest bit. The cue is to send the shoulders forward so the head goes well ahead of the hands. And notice how I go until the nose boops the ground.

Curious about how far away pike pushups are from HSPU’s in terms of intensity, I got my scale out and put my hands on them in the pike pushup positions to see what my weight would be.

As of this time my bodyweight is exactly 180lbs (81.5kg).

When I put my hands on a scale…

• Other interesting observations are that making the distance of the feet and hands further apart by a few inches (in case someone doesn’t have the hamstring flexibility), doesn’t reduce the intensity by more than a few pounds (only 1-2%)!
• Another notable observation is that raising one leg up doesn’t intensify the movement as much as one would think. It only makes the scale read a few pounds heavier (only 1-2%)!
• And just for fun… when I did a downward dog (shoulders far behind the wrists), the scale reads 83lbs. (46% of bodyweight)

So with this info at hand, we can calculate how many pike pushups one would need to do, to get to one handstand pushup using a 1RM chart.

Now that we know that a pike pushup is ~66% of the intensity of a HSPU. And a foot elevated pike pushup is ~77% of the intensity of a HSPU, we can use a 1RM (one-rep max) chart to find out how many reps of these exercises one should be able to do, to get to one HSPU.

The above chart shows that if you could do a maximum of, say, 9 reps of an exercise (first column), that is around 77% of your 1-rep max (second column). So if you could do 9 reps of an exercise, you probably have the strength to do ONE rep of that same exercise, with 30% more weight or intensity (third column).

You could put it the other way around too: If someone could do only 1 HSPU, and a pike pushup is 66% of your 1RM, then that person should be able to do 12-15 pike pushups. And since a foot elevated pike pushup is 77%, maybe around 9 of those.

So the question now for me is… if I build myself up to 9 reps of foot elevated pike pushups, will I be able to do one HSPU?

That is what I will find out, because at the moment I cannot do a full-ROM HSPU with perfect form. This vertical pushing strength is something I am eager to build up and have been building it up daily. Here’s my current plan that’s underway…

For this month, I’m focusing on feet-elevated pike pushups

• Exercise: Feet Elevated Pike Pushups
• Setup: Feet are 18″ high on a chair. And hands are always 36″ away from the feet for consistency.
• Program: Applying pavel’s “fighter pullup” descending ladder rep scheme. (Detailed here)
• Started at: “4, 3, 2, 1, 1” reps with perfect form.
• Starting HSPU capability: I can only do a few 10-second controlled negative HSPU’s.
• Goal: Get to “9, 8, 7, 6, 5” reps and test my HSPU.

I’m also training these concurrently with my one arm pullups, which are going swell as well and I will probably give an update part 2 of that blog post before this HSPU program is complete as I’m making great progress there.

Will I be able to do ONE HSPU in a month or so?  🤔 Let’s find out. For the results and complete training log… wait for Part 2 (coming January 19, 2019).

After I get the handstand pushup solid, my goal is to see what it’s going to take to attain the hollowback press, which will require me to work on my handstands in all sorts of ways.

• What do you think of my plan?
• Anything wrong with my calculations?
• What are some pitfalls I may run across, you think?
• Will I need to do HSPU-negatives to bridge the gap or will 3x9reps of pike pushups with perfect form be enough? 🤔
• Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

In the meantime, since my hamstring flexibility program was so well received, I’ve been working on another flexibility program, specifically for gaining passive and active flexibility for the hips and legs. This has been months in the making and I’m almost done beta testing it with all sorts of people to get it nailed down. (Woohoo!)

The One Arm Pull Up (or One Arm Chin Up) was never a goal of mine until very recently and I’d like to talk about my foray into this journey. The r/bodyweightfitness forum goes through seasons where the userbase brings up the same theme repeatedly and it has been very pulling-oriented for the past year. Last year it was all about Pavel Tsatsouline’s Fighter Pullup program (detailed below) and recently there’s a lot of talk about one-arm training. The userbase is collectively getting stronger and it’s infectious in the most positive way. It is now a goal of mine to do a pullup or chinup with one arm for the sheer fact that it will make me much stronger at pulling in general.

My Recent Pullup History

Near the end of 2017, I did “Pavels Fighter Pullup” program where you slowly increase the number of pullups you’re doing day after day and it has been proven to be beyond effective. I shared a detailed log of my experience here but the gist of it was the following:

I went from being able to do 18 pullups (in a day) to 39 pullups in exactly two months time. The program was supposed to be done in a month but I did it in two months cause I kept surfing and swimming and doing other shit in between so I had many more”rest” days. (I’m never in a rush and not going to follow a program blindly when my body is saying you need rest, especially because swimming is already extremely upper back intensive.)

By the way, speaking of pullups, if you’re still new on your pullup journey, I have created a couple YouTube videos here that might help you:

• Part 1: How to do Proper Pullups
• Part 2: How to do Pullups if you can’t do one

What is Pavels Fighter Pullup Program?

Why does Pavels Fighter Pullup Program work so well?

Well it’s very simple, really. Let’s say you can do 5 pull ups. So you begin with 5-reps which is at or near the max of what you can normally do. Then you’re resting as much as you need to (anywhere from a few minutes to few hours) and the next time you’re only doing 4 reps, which is less than before, so psychologically it feels very achievable (especially cause you’ve rested plenty) so you can’t psyche yourself out. And you do that until you’ve done 5 sets. And the next day, all you need to do is add only ONE rep on only ONE set, so it’s not very difficult at all. But you’re getting way more reps in… and it’s building week after week… and next thing you know two months goes by and you’re starting at 14 pullups and you’re like WTF I’M A BEAST.

My Current Pulling Strength (as of August 2018)

For many years I’ve maintained basic, decent pulling strength. I can ring muscle ups, L-Pullups and V-Pullups quite easily at any given time. And while this is definitely above-average strength relative to the general population, this is barely intermediate-level for what’s possible with calisthenics or bodyweight exercises.

As for my front lever, which is very relevant to this discussion because it’s a straight-arm pulling exercise… In my previous blog post, I wrote partly about how I was constantly holding single-leg front levers at home in between computer breaks in the months of June and July. Given how difficult it is, I’m super happy with my current level as I can pull into it from a dead hang and into inverted hang repeatedly. Here’s a video demonstration after doing heavy pulling work for 5 days with no rest days (turn speakers on for the funny bit):

Building Pulling Strength Beyond Basic Pullups

Since I had such a great time doing Pavels Fighter Pullup Program last year, I decided to apply the structure of it to towel-assisted One Arm Chin Ups. According to Mathew Zlat, he says that many OAP/OAC video tutorials are incorrect because the people explaining how to achieve them have not achieved them themselves and in his video he says that most teach the assisted-version incorrectly because they don’t put the towel or band directly under the pulling arm. Doing it directly under the pulling hand mimics the rotation and pull just like true one arm versions.

Below is me performing some Towel-Assisted One Arm Chin Ups. You can do these with either a shirt, towel or band (band not recommended though cause it’s non-linear):

ProTips: It’s very easy to overdo reliance on the assisting arm, so only initiate the pull with the non-assisting arm and use the assisting arm only as much as you need. When going down, don’t freefall down, instead try to resist going down as much as possible (and again, use the assisting arm as little as necessary).

The other exercise Zlat recommends are negatives. I cannot do negatives at all. So my goal for this training cycle is to continue progressing the assisted version until I can do at least 1 controlled negative on each arm. (Note: You can intensify the towel-assisted version by simply holding the lower end of the towel.)

Training Log for my Towel-Assisted One Arm Chin Ups:

I started with 15 reps (5,4,3,2,1 on August 3) and 2 weeks later I am at 23 reps (6,5,5,4,3). My fingers are fried to hell from gripping the towel. This is strengthening a huge weak point for me: my fingers. So it’s like I’m training two goals in one. (It’s interesting to note how varied grip strength can be. My one-arm-grip is amazing on the rings but poor for performing the rope climb, which the towel mimics.)

I am extremely wary of the signals my fingers are giving me.

My fingers are very sore from gripping the towel and that warning sign is not to be ignored because the tendons of the fingers are tiny and take a lot of time to recover. If this strain becomes a tendon rupture, it will take more than a year for a finger to recover, so I have two options here:

Continue training the assisted-one arm pullups…

1. But instead of using a towel, hold onto a shirt or sarong or band as it’s not as taxing on my fingers.
2. But instead of doing the fighter pullup program (which has a constant increase in volume), stay at this level of sets and reps and apply a steady state cycle to it where the sets/reps are the same for 2 months. The intensity stays the same the entire time which allows for the tendons to recover and catch up to the muscles.

For now, I choose the first option because using a sarong isn’t taxing on my fingers as much as gripping a towel, so I am going to continue the fighter pullup program using that instead of a towel. If my fingers become painful again, I will reassess the condition and update this post.

A Note About Safety of One Arm Work

One Arm Pullups & Chinups are NOTORIOUS for causing elbow pain if the exercise is rushed through. This exercise is very hard on the joints and it seems as though most people run into some sort of elbow issues when training for it, especially when they get to one-arm negatives, because if they run out of energy to control the descent, they propel rapidly down into a dead hang on one arm, which fucks your elbow up, especially in a supinated/chin-up position.

One Arm Chinup (OAC) versus One Arm Pullup (OAP), which is easier?

• Chinup mean the palm faces you (supinated).
• Pullups are when the palm faces away from you (pronated).
• Many people find chin ups to be slightly easier than pullups.

So following that logic, you’d think that a One Arm Chin Up (OAC) would be easier than a One Arm Pullup (OAP), right? But reality says otherwise: The reason for this is that on a bar, a one-arm dead-hang with a supinated grip (chin up grip) is very difficult and awkward to hold as opposed to the pronated grip, so initiating a OAC is very difficult and most don’t actually start from a dead hang on a bar. So if you are using rings, train the OAC first because you can start in a neutral position and end in a OAC. If you’re using a bar, train the OAP first.

This drives home the importance of knowing who you are taking advice from. Hopefully advice from someone who has been there and struggled throughout the process.

If you read the old GymnasticBodies forums, that forum was full of people constantly regurgitating whatever everyone else was saying: Everyone who never had a One-Armed-Anything, said that the natural route is to learn OAC first, then OAP. And those who had the actual achievement said OAP is easier but they were drowned out by the noise of others saying otherwise. Those few people saying the truth were on-point but you wouldn’t be able to know it given how firmly and eloquently the others were saying that OAC should be learned first and because they were going against the hive-mind.

Also, I won’t name any names, but there were many people on that forum who acted like they knew everything, but years later I found them on Instagram and realized that these people were and still are novices in their abilities and all that talk was literally just talk. Yet on the forum, masked behind a cryptic username, they were speaking of elite moves as if they had been there, done that. So it goes to show you, there’s great merit to taking advice from someone who you know has achieved the actual goal you’re after and has gone through the process through and through. There are also some athletes who have achieved some difficult moves without ever training for it. These people are often not the most qualified to give advice to those struggling as well, cause they somehow cheat-coded their way past all that. That is why I feel my height and weight is a blessing in disguise. I am not short, nor too light, and thus progress takes longer with the harder moves in calisthenics, and thus, gain moree experience figuring out how to bridge gaps in progression exercises and thus, can pass more knowledge onto others who are struggling at any phase of their journey.

Soooo… long story short: I’m currently working on towel-assisted One Armed Chinups using pavels fighter pull up rep scheme, but I should probably be working on the pullup version instead because it’s counter-intuitively easier (on a bar), and if my fingers or joints yell at me, I will instead implement a steady state cycle to ensure my joints don’t run into any issues as well. The goal is to be able to do this until I get to slow and controlled negative One Arm Pullups.

Part 2 Incoming!!!

In part 2 I will talk about why I ultimately ended up choosing to do One Arm Pullups instead of One Arm Chinups as the initial goal, dissect the form in detail between the two, and talk about the internal progression of not only increasing the number of reps, but also increasing the eccentric phase and lightening the grip of the assisting arm as other forms of progression, numbers aside.