Day 44 of my 60 day handstand challenge

Hey everyone, I uploaded this video a couple days ago, but I just got around to posting it here.  Shoulder's still hurt so I'm taking a bit of time to let it heal before I do more handstands.  Other than that, ETS! Eat, Train, Sleep.

Speaking of eating, I took my girlfriend to Teatro's last night, a nice restaurant downtown Calgary, in the theatre district housed in the historic Dominion Bank Building built in 1911.  We started off with the calamari appetizer which was really fresh and tasty.  I usually like to have a soup to start too but they were serving cold pea soup that day and well, it was raining outside, a little chilly, and I wasn't feeling it.  For the main course I had the Lamb Terzetto which was delicious.  Served with sausage, sundried tomato gnocchi, mushrooms and rosmary jus, it was better than other lamb dishes I've tried.  I had the lamb dish at this place called La'Chaumiere, a really nice French restaurant, and I think I might like it at Teatros more.  My girlfriend had the Tagliatelle, which had saffron, ham, and scampi in it, and she was happy with it too.  For dessert we ordered the raspberry shortcake and I got the tiramisu.   All in all, a good meal, spent with amazing company.  =D

Day 31 of my 60 day handstand challenge

It's been a while since I've posted anything about my handstand progress.  In fact, there hasn't been a lot of progress.  Since I posted the video of Day 7, I got excellent feedback regarding my arched back and walking hands.  Following their advice, I stopped trying to hold the longest handstand, and focused on better form.  The past two weeks I've been essentially doing belly facing wall handstand holds, and trying to work on a press handstand.  (I prefer to have control of my handstand rather than kicking up into it).  But, I haven't seem to gotten very far with it.  My line seems better, but at the same time, it makes the handstand much more difficult in my opinion.  Wrist pain still restrains my training, and I've tried using parallettes, but so far I haven't learned how to dismount properly, and I'm still not used to controlling my balance with my wrists rather than my palm/fingertips.  Anyways, here's a progress video, and as always, any advice is appreciated.

Day 7 of my 60 day handstand challenge

So I'm 7 days into my handstand challenge, and things are looking pretty good.  I made some good progress I think, but I'm starting to run into a couple problems.
-Wrist pains
-Can't seem to get my body straight without crashing down.

Of course, I could settle with the curved back handstand, but I'd like to challenge myself and really try and get the perfect gymnastics style handstand with the straight back.  I figure, if I'm going to do this, might as well go all the way.  The only problem is whenever I consciously stiffen out my body and legs, I seem to lose balance... I thought it was supposed to help me keep my balance?!  The other problem is that since I workout everyday, by the time I get home from school my muscles are exhausted.  Especially yesterday, (which btw, I got a new personal record on deadlifts... 350 lbs!) =)  My wrists were extremely tired from deadlifts and back day in general, and found that my handstand suffered as well.

Anyways, here's a video of my progress... as promised!

Handstand in 60 days!!

So ever since I created this blog, I've been asking myself, what are my goals?  Do I want to be a bodybuilder, a strongman, a fighter, or gymnast?  (mind you, all roads lead to spartan glory)  I wasn't leaning towards body building, because I don't want to be grossly out of proportion and it also limits a lot of my other activities such as fighting and gymnastics.  I've been working really hard on my strength training lately, but I also don't know if I want to be a strongman; it also takes a lot of dedication and sacrifices.  So the more I think about it, I think I have an idea of what my goals are:
- I want to put on a little bit of weight, maybe 10-20 lbs, BUT
- I want to keep my body fat % low, preferably less than 10%. I'm not exactly sure what I'm at now
- Work on my functional strength, through weight lifting and gymnastics.  I've neglected gymnastics for a while, but I'd like to get back into it.

I quite often have to remind myself why I started working out in the first place.  I've always enjoyed the fact that strength gives me the ability to control myself, and also my surroundings to a greater degree.  For example, I love climbing things.  Climbing rocks, walls, buildings, you name it, I'll climb it!  Honestly, the main reason I don't climb more things is that I believe society is creating these cultural norms which are holding me back.  For example, I'll be walking down the street, and there's a short fence in the way of my direct path.  If nobody was watching I'd just climb or jump over the fence, but only "trouble makers" do those kinds of things.  So I grudgingly force myself to take an extra 30 seconds to walk around and it kills me inside! If this sort of sounds like an ad for parkour, it is.  I love the idea of parkour and deep down I think I have a good understanding of the essence of it.  I'd really like to really learn it, but since I'm moving to a smaller city soon, I don't think they'll have any clubs out there....

But to get back to the point, my goal is to put on a little bit of weight so I can get a little bit stronger, but at the same time maintaining my strength to weight ratio because it's no good if I can sit down at a pull-down machine and lift 200 lbs but I can no longer climb things like I used to.  So I need that strength to weight ratio so that while this is happening, I can get back into gymnastics.  I don't know a lot, but I've played around on gymnastic rings and just strength holds. 

So here's the best part of this post:  If I'm going to be taking this gymnastics thing anywhere, I figure I'm going to need to learn how to do a perfect handstand first! So for the next 60 days, I'm going to spend 5-10 minutes practicing the handstand, and we'll see what happens on day 60!  I'll take videos throughout this process, and hopefully by the end I'll be walking up and down stairs with just my hands! Ok fine maybe not on stairs.  After I master that, on to hollow backs, hand stands on rings, and hand stand presses!

Here's a good read on handstands:
Hand Balancing Course