Motoyuki Tomita. Steve Benn. Larisa Lucas. Chris Page. Show More. Views Total views. Actions Shares. No notes for slide. Given the endless help I received editing, re-editing and proofing Convict Conditioning, I barely qualify as a writer at all! Often I was mailed the same questions, over and over. In the vast majority of cases, these were questions I never got asked when I was training students hands-on.
The obvious conclusion? Parts of the book were just not as clear as my readers deserved. So when John Du Cane a. This F. It represents my opportunity to clear up any aspects of the Convict Conditioning strength system that might seem vague or ambiguous. Thanks John, for allowing me this space on your site; thanks also to Brett Jones for looking at and correcting some of these answers. Many of these questions, complete with my responses, have been replicated word for word in this F.
Thanks, man. But those early steps are there for a reason. They gradually condition the joints and soft tissues, build coordination and skill, and kick-start the slow process of building permanent energy supplies into the muscle cells. Intermediate or advanced athletes will probably want to think about starting from steps higher up the series; but this is a decision they should make very carefully.
I know a lot of very advanced, powerful inmates who have scoffed at the idea of starting from the initial steps. Motivation skyrockets. Jesus, most of the bodybuilders I know lay off or vacation for at least two months a year! To answer the initial question: no. But starting with the first steps is never, ever a waste of time. I think this makes your system artificial. Why are there ten exercises for each of the Big Six? There aren't. This argument is based on a simple misunderstanding. I've set the progressions for each exercise into ten simple divisions: the "ten steps".
That does not mean there are only ten exercises per movement in the Big Six. There are, in fact, many, many more. Let's take close pushups as a good example. When you have mastered regular full pushups step 5 I advise strength athletes to move towards close pushups step 6 , pushups with the hands next to each other.
That's one progression, right? As I say in the book, if you need to you can break this step up. Instead of putting your hands close the minute you master regular pushups, you can put your hands just one inch closer. Some prisoners I've known marked their hand positions on the floor when working through this step. If your hands are twenty inches apart on a regular pushup, there's twenty progressions right there—not just one! Most bodyweight guys only focus on more reps and slower movement speed to make things harder.
These can all make a huge difference. To a degree, the idea of "ten steps" really is an artificial construct. It's supposed to be. In reality, every single step actually branches out into lots of potential mini-progressions, each consisting of slightly different technical variations. I call these "hidden steps", and they're an important part of progressive calisthenics. An athlete who knows how to find and utilize hidden steps can keep pro- gressing pretty much forever.
In Convict Conditioning, I've described plenty though not all! Just check out the Perfecting Your Technique section of each exercise page and you'll see them there in black-and-white. So why did I settle on ten basic divisions, ten steps? Why not? People groove on tens.
Ten is a magic number. We have a decimal number system; people have ten fingers, ten toes. If I'd wanted, 6. Or I could've used twelve. Or twenty. The number of steps are not an issue. No matter how many progressions you require, you'll find them in the book.
How long until I can move to the next step? Avoid this attitude. It demonstrates strength—the strength you actually built by knuckling down and working hard on earlier steps! A point I always try to drill into newbies is that the earlier exercises are the key to success in the later steps. They are not the enemy—not something to rush. Take your time on each step. Slow down, and get everything you can from your exercises.
Enjoy them. Master them, inside and out. At the opposite end of the spectrum, every athlete on the planet has to cope with the reality of diminish- ing returns—in short, the closer you get to your ultimate potential, the harder it is to get even stronger, all else being equal.
This means that the further you progress through the steps, the longer it takes to hit the progression standard. This focus on slow, methodical progress is particularly important as you approach harder Master Steps like prison pushups and one-arm handstand pushups. You become single-minded about hitting the progression standard, to move up to another step.
All it understands is effort. How long will it take me to reach the Master Steps? How long will it take you to get a pound bench press? How long will it take you to write that Great American Novel? How long will it be until you get laid again? I get asked this kind of question all the time, and I really, really wish I could give people an answer.
But—as any coach will tell you—reaching an elite level goal is dependent on a huge amount of factors. Controllable variables like bodyweight, nutrition, recovery and lifestyle also play a big role, and again these differ for different people. The only goal should be progress. Focus on that. Is this speed set in stone? I advise all my students to aim for a speed of two seconds down, two seconds up, with a one second pause in the hardest position.
Athletes should try to keep to this speed in all movement series—at least until they reach at least step 5. Working at a speed conveys a lot of pretty potent benefits.
For a start, it helps protect the joints, and builds soft tissue integrity. Smooth, slower movements help give athletes a grounding in control and coordination, as well as building a powerful mind-muscle link. Ironically, starting slow also helps you get stronger and bigger faster. As a result, going slower and taking the momentum out of your training really shifts the load onto your muscles and joints, literally forcing them into new growth.
This is why so many CC newbies report a sudden jump in muscle size and tone right from day one. Which is tougher: ten pushups in twenty seconds, or ten pushups in a minute? This means that you can spend a big chunk of training time developing your strength and muscle by utilizing fairly low risk, therapeutic movements.
Moving a little faster as you progress through the later steps is fine— provided you are consistent from workout to workout. For more information, see Convict Conditioning and plyo- metrics, below. Is this true? Including easier exercises in the system is like handing an empty Olympic bar to a novice. You add weights to that basic bar as you gain power. What should I do? Go get the book. I want to beef up and gain strength as fast as possible, so shouldn't I be training for a lot longer?
Ladies and gents, there's something you need to know if you want your body to adapt by gain- ing strength. Strength and endurance are polar opposites. Strength is a short-term thing. The stim- ulus for strength only happens over a small space of time.
As a result, the stimulus for gaining strength is not cumulative. I hear youse guys. Just that, in training, sets don't have a cumulative effect.
Let me give you an example. If you bench press pounds on one set, then 50 pounds on the next, the body doesn't think it just bench pressed pounds. Your body will gain the strength it needs to adapt from the pound stimulus. Since your body is already adapting to the pounds, what was the use of the 50 pounds?
There was none. It was wasted. Bodyweight strength work is really no different. If you want to gain strength and muscle, give it your all but not to failure!
If you're learning coordination for a new technique, three sets, even four is acceptable. But for gaining maximum strength and muscle, keep your sets low and your effort high. Work hard and you can gain well on just one set. Back when I was in jail, I often used a lot more sets—sometimes hundreds a day. They increased my endurance, but did jack shit for my strength. Guys on the inside don't train all day to get stronger or more muscular.
They train to fill the time. If you're on the outside—with a life and commitments—you'd be nuts to train like those con- victs who go for long, exhausting sessions over hours through the day. Extra training beyond what you need to stimulate strength and growth is a total waste. It not only drains physical energy that could be put to better use, it also extends recovery time and irritates the joints.
Any thoughts on the mental aspects of training? How do I stop myself quitting? Convict Conditioning is a tough program. It takes a huge amount of patience and consistency to stick with a bodyweight program and add reps week after week. The movements require a lot of control, a lot of discipline to master. These elements make Convict Conditioning one of the harshest training styles to have to weather.
It only survived behind bars so long because there are just no alternatives—at least, nothing that really works. In fact, most of these quit- ters were adding reps week-in, week-out to their exercises. At its heart, bodyweight strength work is difficult to screw up.
You pick a movement, work it hard, add reps, then graduate to a harder movement. The people who quit the routine never do so because of lack of physical progress. They inevitably quit for psychological reasons. If I could pass on one big clue on how to keep on training long-term, it would be this: athletes with the greatest training longevity are the ones who instinctively know how to make training more entertaining, more interesting for themselves. Boredom is cancer. Avoid it by altering your routine every few months.
Here are some options: But if you do radically come off your pro- gram—maybe by going back to weight training—maintain your bodyweight gains by adding in just one total-body calisthenics workout per week. In the end, no amount of tricks can make up for low discipline. This is just as true when it comes to fat loss as muscle and strength gain. Resolve to become one of that elite group of bodyweight warriors. Consistent hard work is the key to success in bodyweight training.
You need to work hard when you train—real hard. The harder you work, the better your results. Training is serious business. Take it seriously. Some very hardcore athletes—bodybuilders in particular—have taken this type of training to the limit. One of the major proponents of training to failure was Arthur Jones, exercise ideologist, eccentric genius and inventor of the Nautilus exercise machines. When Jones was training athletes, That is true training to failure.
As anybody who trains this way will happily tell you, there are pros and cons to this approach. Like I said, the harder you work, the better your results, and training to failure can definitely bring home great results over the short term.
But training this hard takes its toll on the body, not to men- tion the mind. Jones practically had to hold some of his athletes at gunpoint to get them to train this hard. After a few months of this kind of training, the body and mind start to rebel against the torture. Bodyweight training, at its simplest, is about learning to control your body. Control is an essential principle of bodyweight training. But when you train to failure, you have lost control, by definition. Losing control can also be unsafe during body- weight training.
When you are performing compound, total-body calisthen- ics, you should always leave a little energy in your limbs to complete your set safely.
Remember, Jones—the arch-advocate of training to failure—was, first and foremost, a manu- facturer of exercise machines. Training to failure on an exercise machine is a totally different animal than training to failure on a calisthenics exercise.
This makes training to failure safer. This can be tough to gauge in the heat of battle; so as a good rule of thumb, you should terminate your sets when the quality of movement begins to deteriorate sig- nificantly. If you feel the need to work beyond this point, resist the temptation to keep going to failure.
Instead, either continue on with partial movements, or take a brief rest and return to your set to perform a few more quality reps. Negative-only training should only be considered in spe- cial circumstances, by very advanced athletes.
I thought low reps were better for strength. This just means that you keep working at a certain level, building up your reps until you hit a pre-deter- mined target rep goal. When you hit this rep goal, you increase the resistance of the exercise. This drives the reps down and you repeat the process. Virtually every productive strength training system known to man is based around the double progression method. Whether you work with dumbbells, machines, or kettlebells, the basic prin- ciple remains the same: you work at a fixed level of intensity until you can handle a target level of volume, then you jack up the resistance and start over.
The reason why has to do with the logic of bodyweight training. Often, the move from one bodyweight exercise to the next, tougher step, represents quite a hike in strength. The jump from half one-arm pullups step 8 to assisted one-arm pullups step 9 is a good example.
With bodyweight progressions, the best chance of moving on forwards is to gain as much strength possible from the exercise you are working on, before attempting something significantly more difficult. One of the best ways to really master an exercise is through high reps. In this sense, higher reps can be used by bodyweight athletes as a strength tool.
Who is stronger at one-leg squats? An athlete who can only do two reps, or an athlete who can do twenty? In contrast, lower reps are fine if you are training with weights. If three reps is your progression goal, you can add 5 pounds to the bar and try again.
The most reliable way is by focusing on higher reps. Low reps sets make progress harder. This is why higher rep sets are much more manageable and make progress smoother over time.
First off, higher reps are better for adding muscle. You can improve nervous efficiency without fatigue, but if you want to gain mass, you need to deplete those mus- cles. That means higher reps. Higher reps work the cardiovascular system, prevent and heal injuries, and increase muscular endurance. They improve the mind-muscle link so precious to bodybuilders. Perfection is within reach. Well, you can—and sometimes maybe you should.
Working this way is essentially, a form of motor learning. It trains the nervous system. The nervous system is capable of adapting at a fairly high speed—sometimes seconds think of drilling a skill like a karate technique or a dance move. As a result, you can potentially train like this several times a day. As well as training your nervous system, you need to train your muscular system. But the muscular system can only adapt by adding new hardware—by increasing size.
This takes much longer. Your muscles are powered by chemical energy. If you exhaust that chemical energy—through hard, fatiguing work—this triggers a survival response on a cellular level.
Your body builds even more chemical energy into your muscles, in case you have to perform the same exhausting feat again. For many average, drug-free athletes an entire week—or more—is better.
So if you want to get big, train hard, exhaust your muscles, and let them rest a few days before hit- ting them again. This is an advanced prison strategy that builds confidence, co-ordination, and trains the nervous system to leap the chasm and get a han- dle on the new feat without burning out the muscles.
Unfortunately—as with any nervous adap- tation—improvement happens quickly, and as a result the Law of Diminishing Returns is ampli- fied. For this reason, inmates tend to only use consolidation for short bursts, to get the most out of it.
Inevitably, some people have likened the consolidation work used in jails to the grease the groove approach employed by Hardstyle practitioners. But as far as I can see the two are differ- ent, in both motive and application. Another difference is that GTG can be employed in a variety of rep ranges, depending on your goals. The bottom line: If you want to see a big jump in muscle size over the shortest time possible, you need to fatigue your muscles over a brief period, and then rest and grow.
This is true whether you are using bodyweight training, barbells and dumbbells, high-tech machines or sandbags. However, it feels a bit strange doing reps when the Beginner Standard is 10 I'm trying to take my time.
Should I taper off the reps, or do the sets a little less focused I've kind of been subconsciously been doing both. Is it safe to assume the Beginner's Standard is basically whether you're ready for that exercise? It's more applicable to later steps, obviously. But if something in a Step 4 has a Beginner Standard of 1 set of Or does it just mean you have something to work up to and to stick with that Exercise. I assume that the book was laid out so if you can meet the Progression Standard on a step, meeting the Beginner's Standard of the next step shouldn't be TOO difficult.
Work Sets was my biggest question. In the routines, they list Work Sets. I wonder why this was written out this way if the number of sets are laid out in each exercise. That is if my understanding on how to progress between levels is correct. I couldn't find a set breakdown on this in the book. He's just refer to adding more sets or more reps. I did find this little tidbit in CC2's Calf Raise progression text however: "Start with a couple of sets of twenty.
This should give you a bit of a burn in the muscles; a great place to start. Gently stretch out your calves between sets for about a minute. Add a set every week until you get to four sets of twenty. Then begin adding reps. So the way it's laid out is like this: a. Meet the Beginner's Standard, do 2 sets of Add sets till you reach the number of sets in the next level, while keeping the number of reps the target, 3 sets of 20, 4 sets of Pile on the reps till you meet that level 4 sets of If I used this same template on Wall Pushups, with its 3 levels for example; Beginners 1 set of 10 , Intermediate 2 sets of 25 , Advanced 3 sets of 50 , it'd look like this: a.
Meet Beginner's Standard, do 1 set of Add a set since the Intermediate asks you to do 2 work sets, while keeping the same rep target 2 sets of Pile on the reps till you reach the Intermediate Standard 2 sets of Add another set Progression Standard asks for 3 sets while keeping the same rep target 3 sets of Pile on the reps till you meet the Progression Standard 3 sets of Does this sound right?
If this is the case, it sounds like the home stretch is going to be quite long in comparison. I guess that makes sense. I just wanted to know if this is what "Coach" was pushing for the entire workout.
One exercise I saw an exception on was Fingertip Pushups there might be others , where they say never go above 5 reps per set, and tells you to consult the Pushup Progression for guidelines. So should I assume for FTPUs, the progression goes: Beginner: 1 set of 5 Intermediate: 2 sets of 5 Progression: 3 sets of 5 Or is this the sort of thing that adding an extra set wouldn't hurt?
I understand it's a bit more sensitive hence the low reps. For the Trifecta routine in CC2, it says aim for a 20 second hold in each step, with no mention of reps or sets. I realize it's not that kind of exercise, but just wanted to be sure. Also, I assume it's a daily routine too. So is this basically saying you just need these three stretches to be done in just over a minute a day to get the effects? Whew, I think that's all. I consider myself fairly new to this kind of workout and am excited!
I've read different people's interpretations and their own mods and tweaks but whenever I get started on something new, I have this stubborn habit of needing a broken down, detailed routine to stick to and to keep me motivated. I thank you for your time in reading through all of my words! Current weight: 81 kg lbs. The only way to get better is to work more often with both light and difficult exercises.
If you want to master the archer pull-up for instance, then, in my opinion, you should work with about sets of max reps each time until the exercise becomes more manageable.
I agree that there is a lot to benefit from, starting light and finishing heavy. But why not doing the other way around? After a proper warm-up, inverse the system and work in a pyramid.
Begin with the hardest progression that you can master already and move towards the easiest ones. You have more energy and feel fresh at the beginning, right? You always have to work at the low-medium-high intensity with high-medium-low sets and reps.
The same exercises can be done in a circuit, in a pyramid, or split into sets and reps. All of them are good for strength and muscle gains!
I do them all. You can add leg and abs exercises too and build a full-body workout. These routines are best for strength, muscles, and endurance gains -all at the same time! If they seem too harsh, change with other light exercises. You need to train muscular endurance to recover better and be able to work other harder progressions. Coach Wade also said that when he struggled to learn a tough exercise, then he went back to his basic workouts and increased the sets and reps until his body adapted.
Get the Best Articles in Your Inbox! I did a fantastic bodyweight drill this Saturday afternoon, and I really want to share it with you, guys. There is no bodyweight training without the most iconic and fundamental exercise, the pull-up. Sprints are fundamental exercises utilized by all professional athletes because they improve conditioning, motor skills, stimulate fat loss and hypertrophy. You can use them for. Old School Calisthenic Adorian Moldovan is not liable for any injuries or damages that individuals might incur by attempting to perform any of the exercises or feats of strength depicted or discussed on this website.
Any individual attempting to does so at their own risk. Consult with your physician before beginning an exercise regimen. How to Train with Convict Conditioning. Breaking Through The Confusion! Adorian Moldovan. I am the author and founder of Old School Calisthenics. Table of Contents. You Are Not Working Enough!
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