A ‘Daily Practice’ – Genius Or Gimmick?

In my last post recapping 2023 I shared I’ve been trialling a daily practice since August, which is now approaching 6 months.

A daily practice is as the name suggests, a practice you do daily (every single day) to boost an athletic endeavour (or skill) by good old fashioned regular repetition.

Where it’s been virtually 6 months now as well, I feel I’m somewhat qualified to review such a practice. As we all know, the world is full of those who write things off before even giving them time to start working, let alone work to their full potential.

In my case though, it’s been 6 months without missing a single day. Yep, without missing a day. Not. A. Single. One.

The brief backstory behind this experiment or implementation was courtesy of Paul Twyman – the online handstand & bodyweight strength training coach from Australia, who made famous the #handstand365 on Instagram many years ago now; essentially doing something handstand related each day, every day of the year…

As crazy as it is, he’s now at something like 10 years of doing this!

I went to a workshop of his in August with my good friend, and colleague, Ollie. Who is incidentally one of Paul’s online coaching clients. Ollie had helped arrange the workshop and I just had to get involved.

We went over basic handbalance & handstand principles, strength training for handstands (work towards handstand push ups, press to handstands & even combos of everything). All in all it was a great experience with plenty learnt, both from a personal practice perspective and coaching perspective alike.

Paul doesn’t just advocate handstand work every day, he advocates mobility work as well as some light skill training work too, depending on your level and goals. His theory being if you want flexibility to stay, you need to use it. And if you want to get good at something, you have to do it.

Who knew?!

Ollie had been already doing handstand work everyday all the year thus far anyway, as well as putting the daily practice into practice, with some very obviously great results. His hamstrings were looser, hips more open, wrists more adapted and his body just seemed ready to do whatever he wanted it to do.

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A post shared by Ollie Brown (@olliethomasbrown)

My initial thought was there had to be something to this and I instantly began plotting out a practice I could do in my head…

It started out super simple: I did a 30-60 seconds once per day stretch of all the major positions, very much like Paul explains in the video shared previous.

• A resting squat pattern
• Something for each hamstring
• A pancake stretch
• Something for the hip flexors/quads
• A tailors pose/butterfly stretch
• Something for external rotation of each hip (this started as a 90/90 hinge)
• A daily visit of a loaded extension over a foam roller (much like Paul encourages)
• Something for shoulder extension (behind the back stick fold was the choice here; a nice double whammy of hamstrings/pike & shoulder extension)
• And finally a daily sleeper stretch for internal rotation of the shoulder (an area woefully lacking for me naturally)

Some days would feel quite progressive. Others would feel pretty damn regressive, especially at first. It was hard to not want to see progression each day but this is a mindset I’ve always struggled with. Things ebbed and flowed a lot but I always did what I promised myself I would….finish the routine every day.

Sometimes it was nearly the early hours of the next day. Other times it was first thing in the morning before teaching. There were times it was my ‘warm up’ of sorts before the main training too.

And yep, it did get boring after a while. That 90/90 sit was any more fun even when I could comfortably sit with my forehead on my foot, on each side. But this is right where I began to build the routine out more and think outside the box, courtesy of all my coaching experience. I changed the 90/90 sit to the more aggressive ‘double pigeon’ or ‘firelog’ pose as my hips built tolerance to more external rotation.

I slowly added more specific stuff into the daily mix. Butcher’s block being one to help with my stubborn elbow flexion, as well as some simple handstand holds to maintain and improve the skill, without having to dedicate/allocate large time blocks to it.

I began varying the drills for some positions, to where I have 2 or 3 options each day and sometimes cycle through them day by day. This not only jazzes up the stimulus but also prevents boredom. A great example of this is for internal shoulder rotation. I now use the sleeper one day, an eagle hang on the next day and a behind the back stick internal rotation stretch on day three. Then these are cycled through just like that.

Around month 3 onwards I started adding skill work and slightly more active drills in. Some examples are ring & bar muscle up transitions, assisted one arm chin up lock off holds, compression drills and a few other active based versions of the stretches I’d been doing up to this point.

The active work is quite important as it’s the main way to encourage the new range you’re creating, to stay with you long term. It doesn’t have to be loads of active work, it can be as little as 1-2 x 10 second contractions each week. Over the course of months these add up, and add up fast.

Results

I’m pretty sold on this being a great long term approach to movement as you age, as I’m sure you can already tell, but my real world results here have been another great sway too.

My handstand has gotten so much better. I could handstand for 60 seconds anyway but these 2 x 30 second holds each day have become easier and easier, along with other intricate details improving all the time. Things like the elbows extending more and more within the holds (I could never hyperextend my elbows while in a handstand position thanks to tight shoulders), but they’re slowly getting firmer and firmer!

Even shape changes have found their way into the daily handstands on occasion. But these are usually only every so often and when I feel up for it.

Muscle up transitions have slowly become more and more available, from being almost impossible except fully warmed up and fresh previously, to now being accessible at random times with little warm up or prep.

I’ve never found slow transitions easy naturally, particularly on the bar but these days they’re as ‘easy’ as they’ve ever been and seem to be slowly improving all the time.

Flexibility has undoubtedly levelled up but more importantly my resting tension levels have dropped; meaning I can access deeper ranges within less time and with more comfort. (See my last post on Flexibility for more info on this key factor of flexibility).

And I need much less warm up and prep time to get going in general training, which is a godsend as we all know how annoying and time consuming it is when you have to do loads of rehearsal sets and drills prior to a session/movement. This makes the daily time investment worth it for sure.

How long is a daily practice though?

The rule here is to keep it as short as you can while maintaining its effectiveness. This is a balancing act. If the routine gets longer and longer, inevitably, focus will decline and so will chances of adherence. You’ve also got to factor in what other official training you do across a week. If you’re doing 4 strength training sessions weekly, then try to add a daily routine of 30 odd minutes to that, it could easily be too much.

I do know of some people doing a 40 minute routine each day but there are some key points that make this work for them.

1. They’re retired so have more free time.

2. They have built up over the course of a long time, incrementally, to this amount.

3. They have kept the overall intensity controlled and only added progressions conservatively.

Mine takes 15-20 minutes roughly depending on how fast I want to get through it. Rather than build it up, I have slowly added more variety and more complexity/intensity; harder stretches, more stretching options, harder variations of skill based moves etc.

Is this forever?

Is this really a life sentence? Do you have to do this everyday of your life until your last breath?

The true answer is all dependent on your ambitions. Do you want results for a certain period and are you happy to then let it slide as you age?

Or do you want to keep improving as much as possible and at the very least, trying to improve, or even prevent/mitigate old age induced deterioration?

If it’s the former, then it can be applied for periods of your life until it becomes unimportant to move well anymore. If it’s the latter I genuinely think it’s a great idea to keep some form of daily practice in your life until you no longer grace this earth.

It’s naïve or even ignorant to expect your body to maintain that which it’s not forced to. At the end of the day your body is an adaptive mechanism; it adapts to the tasks at hand. If the tasks are sitting in an armchair with a can of fosters in one arm all day, that’s what it will be good at and that only.

Whereas if its’ tasks are to touch the floor with locked knees, do 10 push ups each day, hang for 60 seconds and a few other things, you can be sure it will be capable of doing so. These differences can be so stark you could look, move and feel like you’re 10-15 years younger or older, subject to what you do as you age.

Little & often vs heavy & infrequent?

Another question I want to tackle is the one of how this approach stacks up against my previously successful, ‘hit it hard, recover hard and repeat’ approach of years previous that led me to multiple types of split success.

Could this be a viable way to acquire advanced flexibility positions with much less hard work?

When I first embarked on my flexibility journey I used a well documented, heavy and infrequent approach (every 5th to 7th day & primarily mostly active, strength based moves) that netted me great results.

The problem was maintaining this. The breakthrough was all fine and dandy. I was hungry to say I’d achieved positions even if it was only once. But I never found maintaining them easy, or even gave much thought towards doing so.

Stupidly.

So the effort required to get me into positions was 100% or sometimes 105-110%. Very unsustainable. Whereas with the daily dosage you find the process is slower, but the exertion is much lower and with every passing day you’re making the positions that much more normal/engrained.

The same can even be said regarding skills/strength moves. Reason being, the recovery aspect. It took me years to understand hard training sessions to the death, taking days on end for your body to come back to baseline, let alone shoot above it (supercompensation; what we want!).

All because the approach is hyper-aggressive and hard to sustain long term. With smart daily work though, you train the body to expect and tolerate positions, be it of strength or flexibility without having any energy left for other goals.

And I’ll admit, I thought this was a gimmick that would wear off after 6-12 weeks but we’re now approaching 26 weeks, and I’m liking it more and more. So go figure.

Have you dabbled with a daily practice of some form for any extended period of time? Would you like to?

I think it’s invaluable.