HSPU Progress

Not to drown you in alphabet soup, but Madison's making me learn the shorthand for all the basic exercises. HSPU does not, as you might imagine, denote some obscure state university; rather, it stands for "hand-stand pushups."

I was telling you about the first stage of these, which involves one's knees on a bench. Yesterday Madison had me do three or four of these while she watched critically. She must've liked what she saw, because she pronounced me ready for the next stage which, she warned me, was "a big leap."

She wasn't kidding. The next thing I knew, we had the Smith bar set to about the level of my chin, my hands on the floor, and my feet hooked around the bar. The idea is to touch your head to the floor and use your arms to push yourself back up, using your legs if you need to. It looks like the photo above, or, as The Boy said when I told him about it, "Really dramatic."

The form took quite a bit of getting used to, and after a few awkward tries, I told Madison that perhaps I should go back to the bench. She scoffed and told me to keep trying. On the third round, I did ten in a row! "And you wanted to go back to the bench," Madison laughed.

It would seem she knows what she's doing.