Last night my athletes did an unusual workout for the GPP (general physical

preparation) portion of their conditioning which some of you may be interested in.
In the past we have not done any high rep circuit type training and I was curious
to see how they would respond to the challenge.

(After a four hour workout and completing their ring strength training) the GPP
assignment was to complete, in 15 minutes, as many rounds as possible of the
following: 10 muscleups followed by 20 pause jump squats. The winner would be the
one who completed the most rounds within the fifteen minutes.

To avoid traffic congestion problems, the muscleups were done on a single rail of
our parallel bars rather than on the rings. Full extention at the top and bottom
was required in order to count the rep. The sets could be broken up as needed.

The pause jump squats were simply a jumping squat with a 2-3 second pause at the
bottom with hips parallel or slightly below the knees. I placed these here
primarily to provide a break for their upper body before the next set of muscleups.
(As a side note, towards the end of the workout, one of my athletes became bored
with the pause jump squats and began adding a back flip on the jump portion.)

The results were as follows: Chris and Greg chased each other throughout the entire
fifteen minutes, completing 12 rounds each and were beginning a thirteenth round
when the clock ran out. Chris was crowned champion as he finished his 12th round of
muscleups one rep ahead of Greg. For these two yound men that means that in fifteen
minutes they completed 120 single bar muscleups and 240 pause jump squats. They
were not extremely fatigued and would have been fine had I extended the time of the
GPP conditioning period to twenty minutes.

Davey was second with eleven rounds completed for a score of 110 single bar
muscleups and 220 pause jump squats. Davey is the one who got bored and began
adding the back flips to his pause jump squats.

Allan and Zach were tied for third with 10 rounds apiece for 100 single bar
muscleups and 200 pause jump squats. As an interesting aside, Allan only recently
turned 9 years old this past March.

We finished off our workout with 50 flairs on the pommel horse. I anticipated some
problems here due to support fatigue. The athletes however were in high spirits
from their GPP conditioning contest and managed to turn their pommel horse
conditioning into another contest to see who could do the most flairs in one turn.
Allan and Greg had a great battle with Allan eventually coming out on top with 25.
They were having so much fun with their contest that they forgot to stop at fifty.

All in all, a very productive conditioning period. A lot of specific as well as

general conditioning was accomplished and the athletes especially enjoyed the
challenge of something new and different.

Yours in Fitness,
Coach Sommer