by Michael Plank
If you’re reading this, chances are good that you know what a kipping pull-up is. This post is NOT about the relative merits of kipping vs. strict, what/why a person would kip, or anything like that. For our purposes today, we’re just going to talk about kipping pull-ups as a technical gymnastics skill.
One of our members has struggled with that movement for awhile. He’s plenty strong on strict pull-ups. He’s consistent with attendance. And every time we work on them in a CrossFit class he tries his best to improve and the coaches give him pointers and tips along the way.
But although we love group sessions and they’re such an important part of what we do at our gym, they have their drawbacks. One of them is that it’s not the optimal environment to learn a skill. That’s not to say that people don’t learn tons in group sessions, because they absolutely do. But after months and months of struggle, we finally decided to do some personal training.
Any guesses on how much personal training was needed to make this months-long-elusive skill click?
I’ll tell you: 30 minutes
Now, please don’t extrapolate from this story about how long it will take you to learn any particular skill or get any particular result that you’re thinking of. It’s not about that. And it’s not about a promise of results in an hour or less.
It’s about this: group training is awesome and it works really well. But if you have a specific goal, and you want to get results even faster, personal training is what you need. Find a coach to work 1-on-1 with you and you’ll be surprised just how fast you can go.