Results for “midline”

Retool your gymnastics skills with elite gymnast Carl Paoli, founder of Naka Athletics, coach at San Francisco CrossFit and creator of GymnasticsWOD.com. Through his Freestyle Connections Seminar, Paoli introduces athletes to advanced gymnastics skills using simple progressions and coaching points. In this two-part series, Carl Paoli teaches how to develop midline stability through the hollow-body position.

Paoli has his athletes lie down on the… Continue Reading

Retool your gymnastics skills with elite gymnast Carl Paoli, founder of Naka Athletics, coach at San Francisco CrossFit and creator of GymnasticsWOD.com. Through his Freestyle Connections Seminar, Paoli introduces athletes to advanced gymnastics skills using simple progressions and coaching points. Today’s movement is the handstand push-up.

In Part 2 of the series, Paoli explains how active shoulders create tension and stabilize the midline. He describes how… Continue Reading

In this series on improving your running performance, Brian MacKenzie and Doug Katona of CrossFit Endurance demonstrate drills utilizing the Pose Method of running.

In Part 6, MacKenzie introduces the Diesel Weasel, his CrossFitting dog, who pulls him on his skateboard or bike. He uses her to demonstrate running posture.

“In her movement, it’s the same with our movement,” MacKenzie says. She lands her feet underneath her and maintains a tight midline. It’s… Continue Reading

In this series on improving your running performance, Brian MacKenzie and Doug Katona of CrossFit Endurance demonstrate drills utilizing the Pose Method of running.

In Part 5, MacKenzie discusses midline stabilization and why it’s so important in running. Katona demonstrates drills that MacKenzie uses to assess an athlete’s degree of midline stabilization and develop it further. MacKenzie says these drills make great warm-up tools.

The first drill involves running with… Continue Reading

In this series on improving your running performance, join Brian MacKenzie and Doug Katona of CrossFit Endurance as they demonstrate drills utilizing the Pose Method of running.

In Part 2, MacKenzie identified a drill to help train you to move your legs more with your hamstrings than your hip flexors. In Part 3, he provides two more drills to reinforce the concept.

Standing with his back to a wall, Katona practices raising his… Continue Reading

This video series provides a fresh look at skill-transfer exercises and midline stability, combining the powers of Kelly Starrett and gymnast Carl Paoli. Both San Francisco CrossFit coaches use their expertise to refine basic CrossFit movements with the aim of improving power output.

In Part 5, the coaches examine the pull-up.

“It’s almost like a good pull-up reinforces his overhead position,” Starrett says as Paoli demonstrates the proper body position: active shoulders… Continue Reading

“This is really an advanced movement,” Jeff Tucker says of the ring handstand push-up. “Flexibility is going to be a big key here.”

Join the CrossFit Gymnastics coach as he takes elite athletes through ring handstand push-up progressions at the Again Faster Summit held at CrossFit New England. In Straddle Handstands, Tucker guided the athletes through wall-assisted, free-standing and ring work. In this video, Tucker explains the mechanics of the hand and head… Continue Reading

This video series provides a fresh look at skill-transfer exercises and midline stability, combining the powers of Kelly Starrett and gymnast Carl Paoli. Both San Francisco CrossFit coaches add their expertise to refine basic CrossFit movements with the aim of improving power output.

In Part 4, the push-up is taken to the rings, where the support or finish position externally rotates the shoulders. Getting organized with a tight belly and squeezed butt is essential to hold… Continue Reading

This video series provides a fresh look at skill-transfer exercises and midline stability, combining the powers of Kelly Starrett and gymnast Carl Paoli. Both San Francisco CrossFit coaches add their expertise to refine basic CrossFit movements with the aim of improving power output.

In Part 3, the pair refines the push-up to transfer better shoulder position to other movements, such as Olympic lifting. The proper, organized set-up allows for torque through… Continue Reading

This video series provides a fresh look at skill-transfer exercises and midline stability, combining the powers of Kelly Starrett and gymnast Carl Paoli. Both San Francisco CrossFit coaches add their expertise to refine basic CrossFit movements with the aim of improving power output.

In Part 2, the burpee is refined as a skill-transfer exercise.

“Here is another classic CrossFit exercise that ends up being a fantastic conditioning tool,” Starrett says.

The straight jump of the burpee demonstrates “The… Continue Reading

This video series provides a fresh look at skill-transfer exercises and midline stability, combining the powers of Kelly Starrett and gymnast Carl Paoli. Both San Francisco CrossFit coaches add their expertise to refine basic CrossFit movements with the aim of improving power output.

“The goal is to take the very basic things that we do that are simple to see and understand and then translate them into the fun stuff,” Paoli says.

According to Starrett, the easiest way… Continue Reading

Join Rory McKernan of CrossFit HQ Media as he receives some rowing tips from Rowing Seminar trainer Erin Cafaro, who won an Olympic gold medal in Beijing in the women’s eights event.

Cafaro coaches McKernan through a rowing session on a Concept2, and her first instructions focus on the set-up.

“Every time you sit on an erg, you want to kind of personalize it for yourself,” she says as she sets… Continue Reading

There is no violent hip drive in the gymnastics kipping pull-up. Instead of using the lower body to drive the pull-up, the upper body powers the movement. Why is this useful? It’s insurance at exhaustion. If you have the best mechanics before working to exhaustion, you can buffer the deterioration that happens under fatigue.

“That’s why I’m saying just go ahead and initiate it with upper body in the first place,”… Continue Reading

“If you go forward in this thing, if there’s any kind of failure, that’s where you’re going to eat it,” Jeff Tucker cautions as he watches his gymnast, Jeannie Bassi, demonstrate the frog tuck. “So I always tell people all the time, ‘Throw a pillow in front of you.’”

Join Tucker and Bassi for more gymnastics progressions to develop midline stability and body control. Today’s progressions involve the frog tuck, which helps an athlete develop balance… Continue Reading

Welcome to DogTown CrossFit, home of 2010 Games third-place finisher Valerie MacKenzie Voboril. Today, Dusty Hyland and Kelly Pearsall, two DogTown CrossFit coaches, are teaching the handstand walk. CrossFit.com recently posted a WOD of a 100-meter handstand walk, and Hyland and Pearsall aim to prepare athletes for that WOD by working on the handstand position and the progressions to the handstand walk.

The progressions start with the handstand… Continue Reading

“Oh my God, it’s rainin’ diamonds,” says Jeff Tucker, CrossFit Gymnastics coach, as he watches Jeannie Bassi demonstrate one of several positions requiring impressive core strength.

Beautiful gymnastics movement comes from lots of practice. Learn how you can practice planche progressions to improve your midline stabilization.

Using parallettes as an elevated platform, Tucker coaches gymnastics progressions to improve control and strength. You can develop an elevated… Continue Reading

“I hear some people in the room having a litter of bulldogs. What’s going on?” Jeff Tucker asks a group of athletes at a CrossFit Gymnastics Certification. It turns out the sound is the exertion of gymnastics practice, and it’s a familiar one at Tucker’s certifications, where his athletes put their bodies to the test.

In this video, Tucker provides an overview of the planche progressions he’ll introduce in this series. Starting with a… Continue Reading

Join gymnast Carl Paoli, Kim Bozman and HQ trainer Adrian (Boz) Bozman as they teach handstand fundamentals by applying gymnastics to elite CrossFit skills.

In Part 1, learn how to stabilize your handstand through the hollow-body position. According to Paoli, one of the misconceptions with the hollow-body position is that it is “closed down.” Paoli says: “It’s actually the most neutral position that we can possibly… Continue Reading

Carl Paoli is an elite gymnast and coach at San Francisco CrossFit who also runs his own practice called Naka Athletics. Today, Paoli teaches us how the hollow-body position and mushroom training can help your CrossFit movements.

The hollow-body position allows for trunk stability, which is synonymous with the key CrossFit concept of midline stabilization, and the position can translate into elite skills like freestanding handstands and freestanding handstand… Continue Reading

Kelly Starrett has a real knack for taking important principles of CrossFit like midline stability and putting them into real-world anecdotal scenarios for groups of trainees. This time around at CrossFit Santa Cruz, Starrett is doing just that: explaining midline stability by turning your body into a series of levers.

His main point is that many athletes get into the start position for a rep and then try to stabilize their… Continue Reading