Dufisthenics

This has probably been the roughest month of all to judge the Bar-barian forum competition.  It was rough for a couple reasons.

The challenges were all 5 set max rep exercises.  In some attempts there were as many as 200 reps in an attempt.  That adds up to a whole lot of form to watch.   With that many reps there are bound to be some reps that are better than others.  Trying to decide if there are enough poor ones to disqualify an attempt totally gets pretty tedious.

The other factor was when Zef generously offered up Bar-barian shirts to the winners of the three contests.  All of a sudden the desire to top the scoreboard was cranked up tremendously.

This desire to win had the side effect of some guys focusing too much on just the number of reps and not the quality of them.  We had to disqualify a number of entries because of sloppy form.  I feel bad every time I have to disqualify an attempt because I know regardless of form quality the guys are really pushing themselves each time they do an attempt.

The bottom line is the Bar-barians represent excellence in body weight exercise so I would be doing a disservice by allowing shoddy form attempts to count as good.

Last night I did the only mode of the January challenge I hadn’t tried, Bar-baric mode, which was hand stand push ups against the wall.  I had avoided this challenge for a reason, I’m not very good at them. My very long arms mean I have a real long distance to push my body weight through.  The only reason I did an attempt is because Tyson, a kid on the forum I have a friendly rivalry with wanted me to try to beat his number.

Well as expected I struggled quite a bit, only getting 5 reps on my first set and four singles on the subsequent 4 sets.  Oh well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YqYCd_Be_o

I also shot a quick intro video for the February challenge which I named the 5150.  The 5150 is just another name for a warm up routine the Bar-barians do.  The goal is to complete 50 pull ups and 100 push ups within 5 minutes, breaking the sets apart however you want to.

I tried this once using 10 small sets of pull ups and push ups and it took me 7 minutes.  Using a bunch of small sets is definitely NOT the way to go.

It should make for a pretty interesting month.  The contest will scale to all skill levels.  The elite guys that can complete all 150 reps will be competing for time, lowest time wins.  The guys that can’t complete all 150 reps with be scored on a point basis of how many reps they do complete in the 5 minute time frame.

Here is the video explaining it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFf1Teuc8yk