Human flag for kids

Today's human flag is proudly brought to you by my son.   

My son doing human flag

While his form is not perfect yet, he is training, and he is making great progress.  

While I am very impressed by what he can do, and while it is even more impressive that so few adults in this country will ever be able to do the human flag, I am mostly proud of him for putting in the work.

I am very proud of him for putting in the effort, I am proud of him for sticking at it for so long, I am proud of him for keeping this up even when it was hard and when he wasn't in the mood, and I am proud that even though he knew how difficult this would be he still decided to train towards it.  

While I helped him train, the biggest improvement he makes is when he gets a spare moment through the day and goes down to the monkey bars to put in a few minutes of training.  Training multiple times a day is the best way to improve.

Anyone can shift a heavy weight, anyone can 'work out', but not everyone has what it takes to train long enough and hard enough to be able to do this.  I am proud of him, and he is proud of himself.

We hope this inspires you to do some strength training.  

1,000 Pull Up Challenge - Before and After

My son and I have been doing some pull ups using our monkey bars.  I do sets of ten, he does sets of... actually I don't know how many he does per set.  

We don't go to failure, we aim to do about 50% to 70% of our maximum in each set.  We do a few sets each day and do them most days, and are not really dedicated to it as they are not part of my exercise minimums.  

On the days I work from home my son comes into my room from time to time during the day and asks me to go do pull ups with him.  A set of ten takes me about 15 to 20 seconds to complete, plus walking to/from the back yard, so probably less than a two minute break.  Time well spent.

One day my son came in 8 times, meaning I did 80 pull ups that day.  It was easy enough and I felt fine the following day as I was only doing small numbers.  I didn't 'feel the burn', the next day I felt normal, there was no muscle soreness.  

To build strength, the aim is to train as often as possible while being as fresh as possible.

This got me thinking.  If I had a day at home I could do ten sets of ten and complete 100 pull ups in that day.  If I had a few consecutive days, these numbers would add up fast.  

I had ten days off work over Xmas/New Year, and we were not planning on going anywhere, so I would have access to our monkey bars.  This was an excellent opportunity to do ten days of 100 pull ups every day, which would add up to an enormous one thousand pull ups over the ten day challenge.

Given that most people in this country would not do one thousand pull ups in their life (or even one hundred pull ups in their life) this sounded like an opportunity that was too good to miss!

To keep track of my pull ups I wrote down how many I did after each set on a post-it note.  I had planned on modulating the numbers somewhat, but ended up mostly doing sets of ten.  

Some days my son convinced me to do extra with him after I had reached my daily goal.  That's ok, I would rather do too many than too few.  At the start I did a few sets of 15,  that was too many and I would have been better off keeping the numbers lower.  

Each row were the numbers I completed in each set

I also decided to take some before and after photos of my back.  Some of these I was just standing relaxed, and others where I was flexing.  I was curious to see if there would be any difference after such a short amount of time.

Perhaps ten days is too short to notice any difference, or perhaps the difference would be easily noticeable.  You can find out below.

 

Before the ten day 1,000 pull up challenge: 

My back relaxed - notice the imbalances

My back flexed - before doing 1,000 pull ups over ten days

My back flexed - ignore the weird little scars

After the ten day 1,000 pull up challenge:

Relaxed - imbalances are noticeably reduced

My back flexed - after doing 1,000 pull ups over ten days

After the ten day challenge my lats feel firmer, my forearms feel firmer, my shoulders feel more stable, and I am far stronger, but you can't really see any of that.  

It appears that ten days is not long enough to see a great deal of change.  That's ok with me, I wasn't doing this for visual change, I wanted to get stronger and am glad I completed my challenge.  

Other than being slightly more tanned from having ten days not in an office, you can't see much difference at all.  This challenge was only ten days, so this is not unexpected.

There are some slight differences that can be seen in the photos.  

In the 'before' relaxed photo you may notice that I do not stand straight, I stand slightly twisted to one side.  The 'after' photo I stand slightly straighter.  I didn't know I was doing this until I looked at the photos side by side.  

  

In the 'before' photos my left shoulder is higher than the right due to an old injury.  This causes me a lot of headaches, neck aches, and other pain.  If you look closely at the 'after' photos you may notice that (when relaxed) my left shoulder is now lower, almost the same height as my right shoulder.  Being more balanced means that I am in less pain.  

Less pain is a great result, I'm happy with that!

How many push ups can the average American do

I wrote a previous post on how many push ups the average Australian can do.  I also included average numbers for pull ups, chin ups, and more impressive body weight exercises.  If you have not already done so, please also have a read of that post (spoiler alert: the numbers are hideously low and you are likely doing more than that without training). 

Since then I found a page from a fitness magazine that details the strength of the average North American male.  I found this to be rather interesting for a number of reasons.  

According to that fitness magazine (I forget exactly where this image came from), the average North American male considers themself to be physically fit and can do: 

• one pull up 
• 31 sit ups in one minute 
• 21 push ups in one minute 
• has 17.6% body fat 

That is a pretty poor result for a nation that is so incredibly rich.  With all that money, and all their education, why are they all so weak and unhealthy?

Average North American Male

What makes these results even worse is that they are likely an over estimation!  The above estimates are based off people with gym memberships.  

While the above states that 69% of north americans consider themselves to be physically fit, the Mayo Clinic conclude that only about 2.7% of them really are fit.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025619616000434

While you may disagree with the mayo definition of being physically fit, and you may not agree with drawing these results from a sample of only 4,745 people, you probably can't help but look around and see Average Joe in the street and notice that he is unhealthy.

The mayo clinic also estimated that the number of Americans who can even do one single push-up is likely only about 20 to 30 percent.  This statistic was based on people aged 19 - 39.  This means if you can do a single push up, you are above average.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/push-ups-body-weight-bmi/592834/

Given the amount of North Americans who are overweight or obese (35% are obese, in addition to 40% who are overweight), and the massive health burden that this places on their society, perhaps the old Soviet tradition of obligatory morning exercises (zaryadka, зарядка) was a good thing.  Perhaps it was better than the indulgent and opulent attitude that prevails in current Western society?  

With zaryadka, the average Soviet did strength training every day, no excuses, without having a few rest days here and there, without over eating one day and working out harder the next day, without rewarding themselves for being good by sticking to their training regime, without motivational quotes from celebrities, and without overpriced gym memberships.  Back in those days you did the morning exercise routine, no lies, no excuses, end of story.  It didn’t matter if the weather was cold, or hot, or rainy, or if you were tired, or if you weren’t in the mood.  You just did your strength training, and you did it every day, so did everyone else, an everyone was better for it.  

Individuals benefited from being stronger and less prone to illness, families benefited from being more productive, and society as a whole benefitted from not carrying the massive disease burden that stems from a disturbing lack of fitness in the general population that we see in the western countries.  

I no longer do Western style training, I do prochnost' training.  This is based upon old Soviet style training.  I train every day, I have exercise minimums that I have to meet, and I meet them, no excuses.  It costs nothing, and it works.  

Even though I am scrawny, and I only have a few minutes to train each day, I can do far more pull ups, more sit ups, far more push ups, and have considerably less body fat, than the average North American.  I can also do considerably more of these exercises than the average Australian.  

If you are skinny fat like me, then stop working out like a Westerner.  It won't work for your body type.  Stop working out every few days in the name of fashion, stop trying to lose weight and/or gain muscle.  Start training, and train every day.  Start training to increase your strength.  Forget the gym, train at home.  

Two minutes of training every day will make a world of difference to your body.  You will become vastly stronger, you will probably lose fat and put on muscle, and you will be far healthier.  

Prochnost' training - be more!