Headstand Push-Ups

I've had the free-standing handstand push-up as a goal for a while. In progressing towards them, I started with holding handstands and one-leg push-ups as vertical as possible. The next step I took is what is in this video - headstand push-ups. To qualify as a handstand push-up, you're hands must be elevated so that your head can sink into a full range of motion. I'm going to up my reps in headstand push-ups before attempting the goal. I started with 5, but had to take a break due to a sore left shoulder. I've done 2 reps the last two times.

I have a few routes to take - I could head towards free-standing headstand push-ups or start into handstand push-ups against a wall.

Logging Information

Statistics are very valuable. Too many people rely on remembering things. If there is one constant in the world it is the fallibility of the human mind. We can go about life making false claims that we can remember everything and that we don't make mistakes, but you can benefit from acknowledging your own ignorance. When a human uses their memory to recall something, they are not reaching into reality's past, instead they're reaching into whatever they can remember (which won't be much), and often times they extrapolate without even knowing. This can be avoided though. We don't have to rely on what we can remember. We can rely on facts and evidence in the form of written down information.

Even if you had an excellent memory and you could recall all of the reps, sets, and weight for each of your exercises, you're still unable to view all of that information at the same time. It's not as if you could paint a beautiful graph inside your mind and easily navigate through it. For that, we have things like Microsoft Excel.

I attempted to use Excel early on, and it was very useful for making formulas that could spit out my next routine based off patterns. Through doing this, I realized that many of the formulas I used became skewed over time, and so I could see whether I had a weak or strong formula. I'm not currently using Excel for that ability any longer, but I'm glad to know it exists.

Currently, I use Excel to see all of my exercises, how long I've been doing them, what other exercises I was doing at the same time, what weight, reps, sets on everything. It's a lot of information. Before putting it all into Excel, I kept about a dozen notepad files with huge strings of information, and it was very inefficient to view all the information at the same time. I currently have 47 different exercises in my Excel sheet. It is also easy to add notes to Excel in each individual box so that I can give myself a little context on why I did how many resp, sets, and weight for any specific exercise. I have color-coded the backgrounds of the boxes according to date.

I also have a sheet in Excel on the same document for 'food' that tells me the serving size, calories, sodium, protein, carbs, and price of food products that I eat regularly. Another sheet I have is strictly for 'stats'. For that, I analyzed the Exercise Log (my main sheet) and made comparisons of the different time periods: which supplements I was taking, what gyms I was going to, whether I was training cardio or not, whether I was training yoga or not during these time periods, etc..

The last sheet I have in Excel is for my 'Daily Routine'. By looking at my 'Ex Log', I can very easily and quickly assemble my next routine, after doing this, I'll make a hardcopy of my Daily Routine and bring it to the gym with me. After the gym, I log all my reps and weight, along with any notes I want to make that are fresh in my mind. So as you can see, I have the one Excel file that covers everything, and I can easily e-mail it to myself (it's 40kb) so I can have it any location.