Upper Body Calisthenics Workout in the Park

Good morning! Check this out. We're down at the beachfront for a workout on the rings. Look at that view. It's a bit windy, so I apologize if you can't really hear. I've got my boy Davo hanging off the rings. This is like the perfect tree for it. Look at that branch. How's it feel, brother?

Oh, it's tight this morning, mate.

How come?

Yesterday's workout was hard.

What about last night? What did we do? Oh, dodgeball.

Team wrecked on it on Monday night.

What happened, mate? We went down valiantly.

We had like 3 weeks off. Yeah, and the boys came back and, uh, the throwing arm was not on point, let's just say that. So we're down here, we're gonna do some ring workout, probably do sets of what, dips, rotations, then maybe some bodyweight pulls. We don't usually, uh, track what we do. It's kind of just you go, I go. It's more just play than anything. But start off with the stick, use this. This is like my favorite tool at the moment. David exemplar how to use stick.

Alright, so something Dan showed me. I've got— I'm not very flexible at all and my shoulders get a lot of pain. So you start out nice and wide. This is a good exercise to try and loosen up your shoulders a bit. You rotate all the way through. As your shoulders loosen up and you increase your flexibility, bring your hands in on each side slowly and you will just feel everything.

Where you feeling it? Right through here?

Chest, through my biceps, even my forearms, through my rear delts. And where can one find one of these sticks? Oh mate, you can find one down at your local Bunnings Warehouse, which is a bloody store that we have here in Australia, or you can actually just open up your broom cupboard.

Local hardware store. This is actually just a broomstick. It's like $3, $4, whatever.

It's cheap, but it's a bamboo handle for superior strength and durability.

You get the bamboo. If you can get the bamboo, get the bamboo.

And most importantly, the materials are sourced from renewable plantations.

Key, key. All right, so we're gonna, we're gonna warm up with the stick for a few minutes and then jump in, film some sets, and, uh, I don't know, talk about why we're doing it, what's, what's going on, and, uh, how we're feeling. So we're gonna do about 5 sets of dips, maybe 7 reps, 6 reps.

What do you reckon, Deva? Yeah, I'll probably go on for 6 or 7.

Yeah, max. If you want to make the rings extremely hard, like if you can do the normal dips, try at the top just lock out with your wrists sort of outwards, facing outwards. I don't know the correct terminology, but instead of doing a dip where you're keep your wrists straight. You get at the top and then you turn your arms out, it makes everything a bit harder.

And it's something I like about the rings because you can't actually do it on a normal dipper, whereas on these you can.

Oh, that's fine.

My chest is already pretty peppered. I've done a few sets so far, so chances are it's going to be hard.

That's what it seems like.

Set 4?

Yeah, 4th set.

4th set.

Let's get 6 reps, come on.

Nice work.

Twist out. See, at the top is twisting out here with the wrist. So straight and then twist out. But it's getting hard, it's getting hard. Come on, you can do it. Couple more reps. I haven't even been counting, man. Hey, I think— how you feel?

Yeah, I think I did it. Oh my God, here's the blood. You really get—

how much, how much harder is it to twist your wrist out the top?

Oh mate, like, for those of you who have done dips on, uh, on standard bars before, like at your gym or whatnot, jumping on the rings, I can do usually like a 20 a 50-kilo plate, if not a little bit more, with the solid bars. Pretty— yeah, pretty comfortably too. Jumping on the rings, trying to twist them out. Yeah, there's nothing really to describe it until you give it a crack. Yeah, definitely advise to keep you honest.

Oh yeah, when you grip them, I like to— I don't know why, I like to go from the top and rotate down. So rather than sort of just jumping on here, like, I mean, you could jump from up here, but I like to grab on top. It sort of locks my wrist in. So as you see here, if I grab from here, my wrist is, is locked in on the ring there, whereas grabbing from here, it's, it's back here. So if you start from the top, top, rotate down, and you want to make sure these, these straps are flat against your arms, and you still get some sort of grazing from them. But if they were horizontal and you're dipping with it like that, rubbing up against your arm, that's a good way to get some real nasty carpet burn on the on the guns. So let's go from the top. I think this is only my third set or so. So when I first started out, I was like this, shaking. I couldn't really hold myself, but now I can hold myself pretty well.

And this is only after—

it's about a year of doing maybe one session a week.

But don't forget, you probably have this ability well and truly before a year into your training. Depending on your current ability, of course.

So we'll probably do a couple more sets of the dips, then move on to some other exercise.

Sick! All right, so we've just done some dips, feeling pretty sore. My arms are pumping, my chest's on fire. I probably couldn't do another dip if my life depended on it. Now We're going to do an alternate exercise, um, and we're going to do some pull-ups.

Hold on, why are you squatting down like that?

I don't really know, mate. You've sort of told me about this. Yeah, so come on, you talk about—

no, sure, what have I told you? All right, you can do this.

So according to Dan, Dan likes to read a lot of books, and so I take a lot of my knowledge from him and pretty much just repeat what he teaches me back to you guys, but I probably butcher most of it. But basically, squatting is an essential human movement, not an exercise. Now, follow me for a sec. If I stand up, we spend most of our day standing up.

Or sitting down.

Or sitting down. So we get really tight through our lower back, through our hips, through our quads, through our knees, and especially I notice through my ankles. If you take a squat and you actually just imagine a squat like you're a rice farmer. I needed my rice farmer hat.

Yeah. If you Google— seriously, if you Google Asian farmer, you'll see the perfect squat form. I'm not being racist or anything to Asians. It's just literally, if you watch them, they have the perfect squat form while they're down farming, while they're eating. Maybe that's why they live so long, because they're just constantly getting up and down, focusing on that fundamental human movement.

There you have it.

Proof is in the pudding.

Literally in the rice pudding. So have a squat. You're naturally— well, naturally my ankles and my feet tend to turn outwards. I think the idea is we should be able to squat down with our legs straight. Yeah. And not have too much tension between our joints, tendons, and muscles. Right now, I am just about in excruciating pain through my ankles up into like the bottoms of my shins. My hips are pretty tight, my knees hurt, behind my knees hurt as well. But this is a lot better than how it was.

So—

And that's what you call it.

You see that depth? Just there, that was what you call ass to grass. See, there's not much space in between there, the grass, and his ass. So that's ass to grass. Let's go on. Okay, what exercise are we actually doing?

So we put the rings up a bit so that I'm 6 foot, trying to see how high they are. And the idea now is we're gonna do some pull-ups slash chin-ups. Haven't really done them before on rings, this is the first go, so I kind of just give it a crack like I would a normal pull-up.

We decided to go one pull-up, one chin-up. Dave's just going to do pull-ups. Probably try sets of maybe 5 to 6 to start off. You can do it, come on, mate. There we go, 4, 2 more, up. There we go, good work. That's good.

It's a bit tight on the shoulder.

So how's that feel compared to on the bar?

I'm not sure yet.

Yeah. First time doing it. We're gonna try it out. We'll probably do about 4, 5, 6 sets of this, maybe 5 to 6 reps depending on how fatigued we get. I'm gonna try and do alternate, so I'll go pull-up, chin-up, pull-up, chin-up, uh, each set. And yeah, then we'll move on to something else.

Can you reach that, mate, or do you need a lift?

I'm not that short. I'm at least average height. Seriously, I googled the average height of the world and I'm up there, man.

Yeah, you're not that short, mate.

Little man syndrome. But you know that when people say you're not that short, it's not the same as saying, oh yeah, you're pretty tall. Nice, you got the alternates going.

How you feel?

A lot more range of motion than the bar at this stage. Well, maybe less range of motion, I'm not sure, because the bar I find you can go sort of high to the chest. Maybe my shoulders are a bit too tight to full range of motion, say going from here here, like there. I don't know, yeah, certainly can still feel it. And the grip, man, the grip there, because the rings, they aren't stable like the bar, so you've got to work on a lot of stability. All those little muscles that keep you, keep you in the one place rather than the big muscles just pulling you straight up and down. Rings work all those little muscles that keep you in the one place. It stabilizes.

But if you're like me, you get sweaty hands, get yourself some chalk, especially on the wood.

It seems to be a little bit slippery there, like a barbell where you've got Chalk it up.

Yeah, chalk it up.

But try a few sets. I think, I think it's important, try a few sets without the chalk to get your grip strong. But as Dave said, like, when you get sweaty hands, you can't really hold on, the chalk can help out. If you try—

yeah, if you're new to lifting, you won't have these calluses. I don't know if that's going to be focused or not, but you know, those beautiful hands, you need moisturizer.

No, I'm kidding. Look at that as well.

Yeah, that's what happens.

Years of lifting, that's That's natural grip right there. That's natural chalk. But when the natural chalk doesn't work, you can use the artificial chalk, the real chalk.

Yeah, it's so much— try and do some more like chin-ups.

This is set 2.

I'm gonna try and be pulling in with my biceps, trying to do my biceps as opposed to my back.

You want to use your back as well, mate. Come on.

But it finishes with the biceps.

A bit of everything.

So I'm twisting my arms.

This is good.

It's a beautiful silhouette here, mate. Look at that. I could frame you.

Touching the ground.

Up, up, come on.

I must weigh about nearly 100 kilos at the moment, probably 97 kegs, and I've never bicep curled 97 kilos.

Just did about 5 or 6 sets of pull-ups, about 6 to 7 reps each time. How are your arms feeling after that, David?

Swollen. Very swollen.

Alright, so this will probably be one of our last exercises, maybe one more after this, but this may be the last one. So, it's called bodyweight ring pulls. Well, at least that's what I call it anyway. Ideally, you want to start with your feet a little bit out, sort of putting yourself in an upside-down plank position, and then move your body towards the rings.

And where should you be feeling contractions?

Right in the middle of my back.

You want to make sure that you've got strings attached to your elbows, really focusing on driving your chest forward and your elbows back.

Nice, mate.

Maybe 4 or 5 sets of 10. As I said, on the rings we don't really record it as much as what we do. We probably should be doing that if we really wanted to improve, but it's essentially just play. So we're going to make sure we're getting enough blood through the muscle, really focusing on that grip, focusing on when you're pulling through, pretend like there's string attached to the elbow like I said before, and pull through, keeping that chest up, contracting in the back. It's a really good—

my turn—

I think of exercise to go along with the pull-ups. Nice and simple. See, that's it. See the slight rotation in the rings as it comes up? They start out horizontal and then they move 90-degree rotation. Where you feeling this, Davo?

Probably middle to upper back at the moment. I think it's where I've got my hands. You look good, man. Slow it down a bit. Yeah, that's better. Just a puppet on a string, mate.

All right, so that was probably the last set of, uh, of bodyweight ring pulls that we're going to do. And what Davo said is really important as well. I think that was my 5th set, and I think when you get to that stage where I'm a bit fatigued at the moment, it's sort of just pull extremely fast, just trying to bust out the reps without actually using the muscle properly. And that's where it's important to have a partner, because not only can the partner help you when you can't lift something or when you need a spot or something like that, they can also critique you, critique your form. Especially someone like Dave, who I've been working out with for years. It might be important to maybe have someone who's more experienced with you help you out, but I think also if you're someone else's partner and you know a bit more, give them some knowledge, give them what you've learned over the few years. So That's the last set of ring pulls. I'm gonna finish off with 1 or 2 lizard crawls. I'll show you what they are in a second, and then I'm gonna get some food. Look at this beautiful sun. Decided to come down to the beach. I usually do this on the grass, but the sand is a lot more unstable, so it's going to make it harder for me. And if you've never seen lizard crawl before, I'd suggest looking up someone like Ido Portal. I-D-O-P-O-R-T-A-L. He'll do it much better than I do. I'm still learning it, but, uh, essentially getting out on the ground, crawl like a lizard, and you keep your body as low to the ground as you can.

Mate, it's a bit about 58 degrees on this sand right now. We need to insert some Slippery Lizard music at this stage.

Hello!

Zed, you're standing on it. That's right. So you really only need 10, 15, 20 meters at a time and you get a whole body pump. Listen, core, back, hips, legs, shoulders, everything's engaged. I only did 10 meters of crawl just now and I'm breathing heavy. So do one more crawl and I'll be done.

That aren't meant to be convertibles get made into convertibles and they look so ugly.

You ever notice that? No, never noticed that.

Oh, Jesus, that car with the dicks on the back. Massive U-turn in front of us.

We just finished up working out at the waterfront. We did dips, we did pull-ups, we did some rotations on the rings, like in between sets. I don't know if we've got any footage of that. Um, we also did some— we finished off with some ring pulls, and then of course at the start we were using the stick to warm up.

Look at this form!

Some lizard crawls.

I'm never feeling this happy unless I've just worked out. Endorphins are pumping.

It's the greatest high ever. When you, when you finish a workout, it's It's, I don't know, I can't explain it. You know it if you work out. But you get a high, you start talking about crazy stuff, you start realizing that, I don't know, working out is the best high you'll ever get.

Don Skis high.

Our other mate's home, we just drove past it, so shout out to Don if you're watching. Yeah, what are we up to now? So we've done the working out, like that's the easy part in my opinion. Working out in terms of like building a great physique, building an overall strong body and whatnot, it's 10% of the equation. What's more important is the food you eat, you give yourself and the rest. So right now we're gonna go home, cook up some awesome food, maybe some eggs, some spinach, some greens, a whole bunch of vegetables, and refuel our bodies and then get back into the rest of the day. How you feeling, Davo?

Awesome, mate. Yeah, feel like it's been a good morning, good start to my day, and I am well set up for a day of work.

That's it. And so we like working out in the outdoors a lot more now. It's sort of less time in the gym, get a bit of sun on you. And plus, where we do where it was absolutely beautiful.

What have we been talking about? We've been talking about on a Saturday morning or a Friday morning coming down to like a similar sort of setup, maybe somewhere with a bit more space where we can set up some rings and bring some other little like basic equipment along, um, and get a whole bunch of bodies down there and start training with us.

Yeah, get a group activity going. So stay tuned, that might be coming in the future. But thank you so much for watching, and we'll catch you in the next video.

See ya!