A little while back, I plugged CrossFit’s Workout-of-the-Day as the best approach I’d found for high-level athletic training. I still think it is. And I’m even more impressed that they put up their WotD for free. So, to support them, I recently subscribed to their monthly journal, which talks through some of the theoretical underpinnings of their approach.

The latest issue, which I received yesterday, is all about gymnastics, about how great gymnastics movements are for developing general fitness. And, in the journal, they suggest that CrossFitters add a gymnastics stunt to their warm-ups, to learn them one at a time. Looking over their list for one to add in, I noticed they included ‘skin the cat’, which I remember hating, hating, hating when I last did gymnastics, at seven or eight years old. So, naturally, ‘skin the cat’ was the first one I tried.

For those who’ve never seen it, skinning the cat looks like this. Basically, you start in a regular pullup position, lift yourself into an inverted pullup position (where your legs are pointed up at the ceiling – the first frame in the photo), then keep rotating through. If your shoulders are flexible enough, you can roll all the way forward to an eagle grip (the last frame in the photo); if your shoulders are strong enough, you can then reverse the movement from that eagle grip position and flip back through the motion in the opposite direction to end up in a regular pullup again.

And, in short: Holy crap, I can totally do it! I can do it repeatedly! I could totally kick seven-year old me’s ass!