Bar-Barians UK Seminar Video 1

The weekend of the 16^th and 17^th of June saw two days of seminars hosted by elite bodyweight team the Bar-barians, held at the Northampton Crossfit box. Jay Anthony, Lee Wade Turner and Sai Ngo were joined by two of their American counterparts, Rick Seedman and Mark Leitz, fresh from a tour of Europe that took in the Street Workout Festival in Ukraine, seminars in Switzerland and visits to Vienna and France.

Around 30 people attended the two day event, and with about five women each day, the female to male ratio was much higher than that normally seen in such a male-dominated style of training. Whilst bodyweight exercises and bar calisthenics may seem more suited to men, with their requirement for seemingly supernatural levels of strength, there are many reasons that it is also well suited to women, and they were certainly demonstrated over the weekend.

The first day covered the basics – pull-ups, push-ups, dips and L-sits. The Bar-baric style of training puts the emphasis on form, fun and participation, so there was no boot-camp style shouting but plenty of clear explanation on how to achieve perfect form on each exercise. This can be summed up as: keep your feet together, keep the body straight, utilise the full range of motion, and don’t swing or kip. All much easier said than done!

Although cranking out a set 10 pull ups might seem like a completely unachievable task to all but the strongest women (and a good number of men, too!) there are many progressions that make working up to such an impressive feat seem less like a mountain to climb, and more like a long walk up a gentle slope. For example, pull-ups done lying under a low bar can lead to doing them on the high bar using assists from decreasingly heavy resistance bands, which can eventually be abandoned to do full bodyweight pulls. There are progressions for dips, which can be done on a bench whilst building up the requisite strength and muscle stability to do them on the parallel bars.

Part 2

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