Planche and Front Lever Training Tweak

I mentioned recently that I'm following Coach Sommers' instructions for learning the planche and front lever. I just had a breakthrough that I thought might be helpful to others (your mileage may vary, of course). I'm still basically in the fetal stage of acquiring these skills, but even now it's fun and rewarding, and Sommers' training approach couldn't be easier to follow:

You will use the same basic strength progression on all of the following exercises. Be sure to master one position in a progression before moving onto the next. Hold for sets of however many seconds you feel comfortable, while continuing to combine the time of your sets until you reach 60 seconds total time. The number of sets it takes to reach the 60 seconds combined total time is irrelevant. All that matters is that you accomplish 60 seconds of "quality work". Once you can hold a position correctly for the entire 60 seconds in one set, it is time to move on to the next harder exercise and begin the training procedure all over again.

So that's what I've been doing for a few months now. Progress has been very slow, but perceptible. And building up to 60 seconds was fairly painful. After getting to a point where I could execute a hold at all, my first hold of a session would be okay, but the duration of my subsequent holds would plummet, dropping to just a second or two for the last 20-30 seconds I needed to get to 60.

So last week I tried something different. Instead of trying to accumulate 60 seconds of quality work in one session, I spread my sets throughout the day. I'd do one in the morning. Then another at each bathroom break. Then another at each laundry break. As a result, all of my holds were of some semi-reasonable duration, rather than an almost instantaneous collapse into failure. I have been trying this gentler approach for three days now, and the result has been a clear spike in my improvement. In fact, after three months or so of working on these, this would be the only spike in my otherwise-linear improvement. My best hold last week for my pathetic version of a tuck planche was maybe 8 seconds after working on it for a month, and today I managed 15 seconds. I didn't gain much time in my advanced tuck front lever, but it felt like my form was much better (which makes the hold harder).

So is this what greasing the groove is all about? Sign me up. There are a few other variables that could account for the sudden acceleration (from snail to tortoise) in my progress, but it certainly feels like this minor training tweak is the big one. Less pain, more gain. It doesn't seem possible.