Yesterday I attended Carl Paoli’s Naka Athletics Gymnastics Seminar at Crossfit East Sacramento.  Most of you probably recognize Carl from gymnasticswod.com and from various gymnastics journal videos. 

The seminar is 6 hour in length, mostly practical work and covers three gymnastics movements:

Handstand Pushups
Pistols
Muscle Ups

programming was also discussed at the end.

We started off the day with Carl leading us through finding our hollow body position and holding it longer than I’ve ever done.  I’m impressively sore from that stuff, but it was well worth it as I can now find my hollow body position quickly.  We did the same for superman position and then moved on to headstands, tripod rocks and kipping HSPU progressions.

After the HSPUs we worked on basic squat mechanics and then pistol progressions.  Carl has a great pistol progression utilizing a band around your lats.  We also did candlestick rolls to narrow squat stance and candlestick rolls to pistol.

We broke for a short lunch, then got to work on tap swings, kipping pullups from a strong hollow body position, then chest to bar pullups, belly button to bar and hips to bar.  Next up were spotted bar muscle ups followed by Carl showing us how to save ourselves if we over rotate the bar muscle up by just rolling over the bar to dismount.

After working on the bars we moved to the rings and started worked various muscle-up progressions with bands including the lay back ring row to sit up, the dip balance (catching yourself in the bottom of a deep dip), forward roll dismount if you overrotate and his new ‘band catcher’ progression to help save you from overrotation.

After the muscle-ups, we discussed programming for about 30 minutes and it was the end of the day. 

It was a great seminar which pointed out lots of skills I need to work on!

That’s awesome to hear!  I have been thinking of attending his or jeff tuckers seminars and started leaning towards carls.  The only problem is the closest one with carl is DC (I’m in Philadelphia) so this is good to hear its worth it.  Thanks for the details!

I’m there in two weeks, thanks for the writeup. Looks like all useful stuff.

I attended this here in Denver this last weekend, it was excellent. The progressions were both innovative and accessible.  The best takeaway was just how applicable proper positioning/alignment with body weight exercise transfers to lifting, rowing etc. A real emphasis on how mastery of basic movement, position and pattern sets you up for athletic excellence.
It was at CrossFit Verve, Matt and Cherie Chan’s gym, it was interesting how gracefully Carlo was able to use both of the Chan’s as examples of both good and bad (not much but there) positioning and how quickly each of them was able to integrate the information.
Not all of us, uhem, were able to apply the information as quickly. yet he was great at finding and using cues to get the pattern desired, even from those of us not in the elite status.
There was a great discussion on self cueing within such things as snatch and MU’s the interplay between coach helping the athlete a cue and then getting it so that the athlete can end up self cueing.
He puts most if not all of this info on his site but a solid 9 hours of explanation and demonstration and practice makes a world of difference