All I need now is a bob and a beaded dress

I brought this souvenir home with me the other night from the climbing gym. A "flapper," as it is so vividly called, is a fairly common climbing injury, although they're usually up by the part of the hand you're pulling with, near and on the fingers, and not way down at the base of the hand, like this one. That's because this particular injury wasn't caused by climbing at all, but rather by some overzealous use of fitness rings. They're essentially gymnastics rings without all the fancy rigging that lets you do swinging moves, and they're my new favourite workout toy. Mine are from Ringtraining.com (shameless plug), which is where everyone seems to get them. The guy who runs it, Tyler Hass, seems like a really nice guy, and the service is fantastic.

I throw them in my gym bag, hang them up from a chin-up bar, the lead-climbing wall, or the bouldering cave, and use them to do a workout after my climb. Hang them high and you can do pull-ups, dips, and static holds; hang them low and you can do all sorts of push-up variations. The additional need to stabilize makes any exercise much more difficult than its non-ring counterpart. They're loads of fun and I always have curious people joining in when I hang them at the gym.

My favourite ring move, though, is the muscle-up. I discovered this through CrossFit, where they worship this movement like a pagan idol. I can't blame say I blame them. It's essentially a pull-up followed by a dip: moving from hanging under something to supporting yourself on top of it, using only your upper body. It's also hard as hell, with a standard substitution being 4 pull-ups and 4 dips for every 1 muscle-up. The substitution fails to capture the real hard part, though, which is the transition between the two.

The key is in how you hold the rings or the bar, the false grip, where you rest your wrist/base of the palm on the ring or bar to help with the transition from pull-up to dip (see Beast Skills and the CrossFit demos for more information). If you're doing it right, you'll probably get red marks on your wrist where it makes contact with the rings. If you're doing it a little too enthusiastically, then you might end up tearing off a quarter-sized piece of skin. Oops!