Workout: Static Break Time

"Handstanding", a sculpture by Martin Heron

In keeping with my current goal in 2016 of pressing into a single-arm handstand from the floor, I've been incorporating a lot more static holds and balance movements into my workout routines. Here's one that we're going to rock out today that I'm pretty excited about and so I'm bringing it to you here, on A Cosmobiologist's Dream.

This workout, which I'm calling "Static Break Time" will include holds of handstands, L-sits, and horse-riding stance mixed with situps and pullups all done in supersets. Then the whole shebang will be followed with some deadlifts. Check it out below:

Static Break Time

4 Rounds of:

1:00 - Handstand

1:00 - L-sit

1:00 - Horse Stance

30 - Sit-ups

15 - Pull-ups

After all four rounds, 5x12 Deadlifts

Some notes: 

If holding a handstand for 1:00 is too difficult, this can be done with your feet lightly touching a wall for balance (it's much easier that way). 

L-sits can be done on parallettes, on dumbbells, or just on the floor. To the right is a picture of a woman performing an L-sit, for those who haven't heard of it.

Horse-riding stance, or horse stance, is pretty common in lots of martial arts. It's pretty much just standing with your legs straddled as though riding a horse. It's a great stance for standing meditations, but is also good for developing leg strength and flexibility. I like performing various depths of horse stances, from very wide and deep with full knee bends to very relaxed with slight knee bends and feet separated at only about shoulder width. 

Beautiful performance of a deep horse stance
(from "10 Most Effective Butt Exercises to Shape Up Your Body" at Lifehack)

Sit-ups and pull-ups are staples for my workouts (along with pushups and squats). I like to incorporate them fairly often. To keep them fun, I like to add lots of variations. For sit-ups, I'll add twists at the top, punches at the top, one leg straight, one leg of the floor, both legs off the floor, add in a side-to-side bend on the way up or down (or both), and more. Anything to keep it fun. Pull-ups are the same. You can add various leg positions, use different hand positions and widths, add kipping motions in for some or all of them, or, if you like a challenge, you can do them very slow and add in pauses on the motions going up or down. There are lots of fun ways to modify pull-ups!

I'm adding in the deadlifts at the end for some strength movements, but since I have the horse stances in there and so much static body positioning, I'm going with 5 sets of 12 reps of a lower weight for deadlifts on this one. 

StrongLifts has a great article on performing a Deadlift

If you give this workout a try and you like it, let me know! 

Here's to fitness and getting that one-arm handstand this year!