Tuesday 10 May 2016

New Challenge - Handstands

I'm still alive! I think we can safely say that the last challenge was a failure. FAILURE! It's often an ugly word. Knowing that I started something and didn't finish it was painful, and certainly one of the factors contributing to another year-long absence. I want to get into my head- get into your head for a second! Failure is awesome! It means one of two things: you busted your ass and made progress, or you didn't and you need to shift your focus. For myself, the latter is twofold true. I started with the best intentions on my flair challenge, but things quickly fell apart because I had too much on my plate to meet the lofty goals I set. In retrospect, I also think my challenge was too closely tied to my actual job, and it became a redundancy issue. None of this changes the fact that I crashed and burned, but the only progressive option is to look at that failure objectively and tweak my goals, processes for meeting them, and general failure-based thinking. That reminds me. There's something over there, glistening on the horizon. What's that? It looks like... feet? Wait.. it's...

Handstand!!?!


Ambition's great, but it's better when rooted in reality. I'm all about keepin' it real, and so is this challenge. Something a little less time consuming than the last, but it's no cakewalk... actually I might need to do some research there, is a cakewalk done with hands or feet? Anyways, it's not my first tangle with inversion, but I'd like to take it a little more seriously than previous attempts. For a little perspective, my best of roughly three years ago probably sits somewhere around 1-2 seconds of sustained balance. That was also during my time in cross-fit and probably the most all 'round fit I've been. My fitness has taken a hit lately, but I work a physical job, and there's a fairly reasonable chance I can probably do more push-ups than your dad. That's what I got goin' for me, now 'eres the rough n' tumble: mobility, mobility, mobility. Years of ignorance and abuse have my back and shoulders messed up. I'm talking years of office work, video games, negligent training, poor posture. As I'll explain next post, it's not something a month of training will easily overcome.

I just said I've 'technically' done a handstand. What up, young buck?  We're gonna (royally) crank it up a notch for the challenge. Here're the two goals for the month:

10 Second Handstand

3 Meter Handstand Walk

Just so we're clear, 10 seconds is roughly twice as long as this. Just let your big juicy noggins process that while you watch it at least twice more.

That's it! Nothing else for now. Definitely no poorly planned videos of overwhelmingly underwhelming handstands...


3 comments:

  1. I vote your next challenge be cakes. Then you can do handstands while eating cake, and really isn't that the best possible thing ever?

    Dan

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    Replies
    1. Am I also baking the cakes? While doing handstands? I feel like that would really help me expand my viewer base.

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