What did you get up to at the Weekend?

Me?

I was at CrossFit London attending the Coach Chris Sommer, Gymnastic Bodies Seminar.

In my pursuit of better teaching and movement I was hoping to learn some really cool things and refine some of my teaching ability.

What I walked away with were some tidy skill progressions and moves with a side helping of motivation and focus.

The weekend was broken into two days the first of which was based around the importance of mobility.

As a group this area was sorely missing. We were meant to be mobilising for the first 15-20 minutes of the session but 1 hour in to it and we were still writhing around on the floor pulling pain faces. A clear take home from this is the need to implement a clear and progressive routine that would allow good practise of gymnastic foundation movements.

I have always known this is the area of fitness that I am lacking. I am in a pattern of rushing through the stretching bit in favour of the bigger faster movements. Don’t we all.

So why am I going to listen to Coach Sommer? Allow me to degress a little.

As a child I really wanted to do gymnastics. I loved the cool moves, but I hated the teacher. In hindsight she was probably just a kid herself and was only coaching the way she had been coached, which was pretty much shout and bully the girls until they break. Well I broke after a term. I did not like getting shouted at and for that I stopped.

Now in adulthood my gymnastic dream pretty much faded. Whoever heard of adult beginner gymnastics?

Well funny thing is in 2010 my boss Andrew Stemler scheduled CrossFit London’s first Beginner gymnastic classes.

A chance to re-live my dream, only to be put on hold again by the news of my pregnancy. In keeping with pre-natal fitness guidelines I stayed away from aquiring new skills during my pregnancy and just scaled back CrossFit to an appropriate level. Leaving gymnastics on the back-burner.

Now after a long post natal period of recovery, I have been slowly looking at gymnastic skills and weaving them into my usual CrossFit training. And of course because I am impatient and the movements look cooler then the mobility I have been missing steps in progressions and skipping beats in mobility, all in all which showed me up in front of Coach Sommer.

So back to full circle. Why am I going to listen to Coach Sommer and mobilise my butt?

Because unlike my childhood attempts at gymnastics I am in charge of my training so it is only me to answer to, not a young coach out for blood.

It has never felt very realistic before as gymnastics has always seemed like a youth window that I missed. Working with Coach Sommer and seeing some of his advanced students, gave me re-newed energy for success. They can demonstrate amazingly cool moves on the rings or pararell bars and can tell you they were not child gymnasts but started maybe 2,3,4,5 years ago.

Great motivation for an adult beginner to hear.

And so it begins.

I have just finished writing out my training program for the next 12 weeks.

I can not wait to see what I can achieve by paying a little more attention to the finer things.

Here are some of the photos of the weekend.