Home   >   Cognitive Performance   >   Skills Training Workouts – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Skills Training Workouts – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

By on November 9, 2017

If, like me, you are constantly looking for new ways to get faster, stronger and more unstoppable, then you’ll probably have come across a whole range of different advice – a lot of it probably came from this channel!

You’ve probably heard how training with slow negatives can help you to increase your explosiveness, strength and resistance to injury. Maybe you’re interested in using meditation and other techniques to try and maintain a flow state. Maybe you want to hone your senses and your reflexes so that you can dodge punches and navigate darker spaces. Ambidexterity training can improve your ability to fight southpaw and may enhance creativity. There are specific drills you can use for running faster and jumping higher. Training your grip is essential to boosting overall strength.

Training Gloves

And the list goes on.

Except I don’t know anyone who is actually implementing all of this stuff. It’s just not doable on top of improving basic strength and fitness and living a normal life. Unless your name is Bruce Wayne. Or Bruce Lee.

This has been bothering me for a while and so I came up with a solution, which is to make one day of my training per week a ‘skills training’ day. This is the day when I do all that ‘extra stuff’ that sounds awesome but just doesn’t fit into a regular training program.

So, what does it look like? Well, it changes all the time, but here are some things I’m working on that might also serve as inspiration for your own skills day.

Meditation – 10 Minutes

Meditation is a habit I’ve been trying to form for a while now but it’s hard to stick to it. By starting my skills day with 10 minutes of meditation though, I know I’ll do it at least once a week. I use meditation with my eyes open while trying to engage my peripheral vision. I then try to keep this going throughout the rest of the workout.

bioneer-brain

Stretching –  7.5 Minutes

Flexibility is an area where I definitely need to improve. And there are a ton of very specific reasons that flexibility training is worth your time too. For one, it can help you to jump higher and punch faster by reducing the resistance presented by antagonistic muscles. For instance, stretching the anterior tibialis muscle is a fantastic way to increase jump height.

stretching

Of course, increased flexibility also makes you feel more limber and energetic generally. I’m also working on my bridge at the moment as I’m building up to regaining my backflip skills.

Hand Balancing – 7.5 Minutes

Hand balancing follows nicely on from stretching and gives you a way to train your balance and your proprioception at the same time as developing raw strength and cool party tricks.

Hand Balancing

As well as holding hand stands and other positions, this is also when I’ll try to shoot for other more complex movements like the planche and hopefully soon, the backflip.

Ambidexterity – 5 Minutes

Ambidexterity is simply the ability to use both sides of your body equally. This may lead to a thicker corpus callosum, potentially enhancing creativity. If nothing else, it’s a useful skill for sparring and boxing. I’ve talked about this at length in the past but one of the best things you can do for ambidexterity is simply to write and to copy out passages with your other hand.

Batman Learning

Hand-Eye Coordination – 10 Minutes

Next up comes a test of hand-eye coordination. I use tennis balls at the moment to try and juggle or to throw against a wall and catch. It follows on very nicely from the ambidexterity training.

Hand Eye Coordination

Grip – 10 Minutes

Training your grip and your forearms is key for developing greater strength and performance in a whole range of different exercises and activities. It goes at the end of the workout because it is the most nervous system intensive and it would hamper the hand balancing and the juggling otherwise.

Rope Climbing

There are plenty of things you can do to train your grip, all of which I’ve talked about here in the past. But my favorite option is simply rope climbing/pull ups from a rope.

Dual N-Back – 10 Minutes

End with a quick session of dual n-back training for enhancing working memory. Of course, any form of brain training can go here, it all depends what you’re trying to develop specifically and what you respond best to.

I might add some training for synaesthesia here in future.

Total Time: 60 Minutes

***

Either way, these exercises form the basis of a pretty interesting workout that challenges both the mind and the body and that develops skills and attributes that often get overlooked but which can add to your overall performance significantly.

The way I’ve designed my workouts means I also get quite varied training through the week using a variety of different methodologies to train explosive strength, eccentric strength and etc. You can

About Adam Sinicki

Adam Sinicki, AKA The Bioneer, is a writer, personal trainer, author, entrepreneur, and web developer. I've been writing about health, psychology, and fitness for the past 10+ years and have a fascination with the limits of human performance. When I'm not running my online businesses or training, I love sandwiches, computer games, comics, and hanging out with my family.

5 Comments

  1. ZeoCore Tv says:
    November 9, 2017 at 3:45 pm

    Hello Adam, I wanted to ask you if you were still looking into Human Jason Vorhees’s workout plan to become as capable as he is?

    Reply
  2. ZeoCore Tv says:
    February 13, 2018 at 1:07 am

    Hello Adam, I wanted to ask you how’s the research going?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error: Content is protected !!