Olivier Lemieux training for what must be a fantastic act. Cirque du Soleil seems determined to demonstrate that it’s their Matrix, and the rest of us are just living in it.

Coach Sommer, who you may remember from articles like Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning or Developing the Hanging Leg Lift, has a post up on a very interesting "prehab" exercise, Wall Extensions:

Wall Extensions are a relatively simple movement that can be quite effective in treating what I have occasionally referred to as "Bench Press Syndrome"; or a greatly reduced range of motion throughout the shoulder girdle due to an incorrectly designed exercise program.

Just tried these, there is only one way to describe my performance: I sucked. Which is totally unfair, since I don't bench, and work harder on pullups than pushups. Sigh, stupid computer job. Definitely something to add to my regular stretch breaks.

Also, very exciting, his long-awaited book on gymnastic strength training for the layperson, Building the Gymnastic Body is available for preorder! As you can see from the link, you can also buy it with DVDs and/or rings if you want.

Jim at Beast Skills does the best tutorials. He has a new one up, the Front Lever. Excellent.

• John Berardi posted a comprehensive, balanced piece on soy at his forums.
• Coach Sommer describes a brutal abdominal exercise, "The Crank".
• I'm getting started with barbell training, so bought a copy of Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore. Looks fantastic. And I just learned you can ask questions of the man himself at the Mark Rippetoe Q&A Strength Mill Forum. I would definitely read the book, the stickies, and take advantage of the search feature before posting (here's why).

Three goodies today:

• Crossfit Seattle's athletic skill levels. In particular, this PDF.
• Coach Sommer, author of the popular articles Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning and Developing the Hanging Leg Lift has been working on a book for a very long time. It looks like it might finally be on the verge of coming out. He has a new website, Gymnastic Bodies, which claims the book is ready to order (although that doesn't seem to be the case quite yet)
• Ross Enamait links up a slick Excel Deck of Cards workout generator. Just hit F9 to get a fresh workout generated from a variety of exercises. Customizable.

• YouTube: excellent rings and pistols work.
• Straight to the Bar embeds a great air flair video.
• Crossfit Oakland really loves coconut oil (I have not checked the research behind those claims).
• Mark Sisson weighs in on soy.

Two from YouTube:

• I know nothing about gymnastics aside from what I've seen on TV during various Olympicses, but even to my untrained eye it's obvious that this guy is a total pommel horse stud « via CF ».
• Nice cheap version of an expensive (for what it is) piece of equipment: Homemade Tornado Ball.

Dan John says carrying The Slosh Pipe, which weighs in at a mere 38 pounds, is like wrestling a python, will totally kick your ass, etc. It'd be hard to believe, if it weren't coming from such a good source. Gotta build me one of those. Sounds like fun.

And as long as we're on the subject of fringe (but likely killer) core exercises, check out the picture on the cover of the October CrossFit Journal, and consider this description:

Gymnastics coach Phil Savage explains how to use a simple bucket-and-rope contraption to allow the Rest of Us to train like gymnasts. Working the ability to perform circles on the floor (as male gymnasts do in competition on the pommel horse) with the feet supported and rotating around the body provides excellent strength and coordination work that carries over to all sorts of endeavors.

I bet a few circuits of Slosh Pipe carries and Bucket Circles would be just the right kind of torture.

A good post from Crossfit Oakland: The 5 Gymnastics Skills Every Crossfitter Should Have. Be sure to check out the video of the rope climbing competition.

There's an interesting thread over on the Crossfit forums on the strength benefits of static holds. Particularly interesting is Coach Sommer's second-hand report (seventh message in the thread) on the gains made by a guy who trained exclusively with a couple static holds (putting in a grand total of two minutes of work per day).

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.