A little background for what brought me to changing it up for 6 Months. Back in May of 2014 I suffered an ankle sprain while throwing a cast away, missing a mat, and rolling my right ankle. It wasn’t that bad, but I knew it would be a good six weeks before I could do high impact stuff. That was fine to me, I had plenty of experience rehabbing injuries and dealing with the change of pace. So I started to condition and do more strength work. If you look at my Journey workouts you can see what I did to keep myself occupied.
In between these workouts I would focus on just swinging from bars. You can definitely see my ability to use my shoulders and my grip massively improved. At this point I was at 175 lbs,
All this time I had gotten in touch with and had been Gmailing someone I had respected for years…Jujimufu (Jon Call) if you don’t know who he is check out his website it is loaded with tons of great advice for tricking, bodybuilding, and just over all life and clean living.
The thing is since I like strength based workouts as well as calisthenics I’ve always had definition and size, but I never did it with only weights. I’ve been at 185 before, then over the years dropped to 162
I was 162 in this picture right before another injury I suffered …
Any way why did I do this?
Why would I start working on isolation of muscles?
Why would I try to gain unnecessary muscle mass?
The answer is, I just felt like a change in regiment. I’ve been doing calisthenic workouts as long as I know, with the occasional dead lift or back squat routine or lifting or rocks and logs I have never done conventional body building. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
Sure it became harder to move than at 162 or 175 but the only real thing I lost was my climbing strength. Considering I was still tricking throughout this entire ordeal my legs and tricking ability went through the roof while my strength acro and parkour suffered a little bit.
It was fun to get pumped up from bicep curls, dumbbell chest flys, tricep extensions, and shoulder isolations. Sure I still did compound exercises, but the mass I was really going for which was a wider back, thicker legs, bigger chest, bis, tris, and shoulders all needed attention. And now I can put those in maintenance mode while I focus on acro strength and parkour again.
My joints actually benefited a lot from the extra nutrients I was getting and the pumps helped with circulation. It was a much needed chemical and anabolic change.
I increased my ability to withstand greater external loads of weight in my upper body. I do acrobatic routines with my Girlfriend and I could tell a big difference with our lifts. I could also tell with just Labor Intensive stuff like when I moved the gym equipment around. What would normally take 2 people I could make up for with just myself. It felt good.
My leg strength improved greatly finally accomplishing a wide stance PR of 185 in my dead lift, I turned that into a conventional stance with the same weight without nearly the same struggle. Jujis Deadlift Routine (http://acrobolix.com/deadlifting-the-jujimufu-way/) got me off to a solid start then the last 3 weeks I went back to a conventional 5×5 routine to accomplish one of my goals.
What did I learn from this?
Well for one I developed a new respect to those that develop their body for aesthetic purposes, it takes time and dedication.
I learned that I could change my body into any type of athlete I want.
I learned even more the benefit that focused sleep, eating, and regiment could do for you.