(L to R: Jay Anthony, Lee Wade Turner, Māris Šlēziņš, Sai Ngo & Deividas Smailys)
The late great Godfather of physical fitness, Jack Lalanne coined the term and popularised the practice of facenastics - the bending, flexing and gurning of the face in order to maintain youthful good looks.
Māris Šlēziņš, President of the World Street Workout Federation seems to have taken up the mantle of Godfather Jack's good work via the practice of 'facing' a more urban static based fear-inducing spin-off.
Support for the new trend has been hugely forthcoming in fitness quarters and the likes of Jay Anthony, Lee Wade Turner, Sai Ngo and Deividas Smailys of the Bar-barians were eager to teach 'facing' along with other types of bodyweight exercises at their workshop at Train Manchester last month.
Regular readers of our blog will know we have a slight soft spot for bodyweight training and callisthenics. One form we practice frequently has similarities to gymnastics and is generally performed on pull-up bars and parallel bars found in parks. It has become popularly known as 'street workout' and friends of fizzYcaL, Sai, Lee, Jay and Deividas are amongst some of the known faces in this up and coming form of fitness.
With the success of their first UK workshop, which Rick Seedman and Mark Leitz of the US Bar-barians co-presented, the UK faction (with assistance from their Lithuanian brother, Deividas, and soon-to-be Bar-barian, Miguel Ulloa) presided over an even bigger group of hungry to learn exercise enthusiasts this time a round.
Still able to recall the challenging second day of the first UK workshop we thought we would take it easy and just attend the first day of the basics. The 'Bar-barian basic' however is not like your ordinary basic. Simple exercises like push-ups, pull-ups and dips are given an overhaul that challenges you like nothing else.
For example, one such challenge was a group dead-hang pull-up session. 5 or 6 people dead-hang from bars, one person does a set of pull-ups, stops and dead-hangs, then the other person does a set, stops and dead hangs and so on. As soon as someone lets go of the bars the team is out and the number of pull-ups that everyone collectively did is added together and compared to the other teams' totals to find a winning group.
It was great to be reminded of, and introduced to ways of making even the simplest of exercises fresh, fun and challenging. By shaking up the routine and using super sets, giant sets, pyramid sets, timed sets, games and group workouts the Bar-barians showed how easy it was to stop exercise plateaus without having to introduce equipment.
Such has been the success of the Bar-barians bodyweight message and their exposure this year that the audience was made up of people with broad exercise and fitness experience. And what was really good to see were more female participants getting stuck in and switching on to the effectiveness of 'street workout.'
Them BoxRox dudes were on hand both days to capture what went down. So make sure you checkout the video of day one above, and day two below to see what you can look forward to when you attend the next one. Keep it locked here.
(photos by MNL)
