wildman-skill-trees

How to learn Kettlebells, Clubs, and Maces the Wildman way, visualised.

Mark Wildman is the best online coach I know, and has shared vast amounts of his knowledge and experience with Kettlebells, Clubs and Maces via YouTube and Instagram. In particular, he has shared his personal approach to teaching these tools, and building towards complex movements and skills.

This is my humble attempt to coalesce this semi-implicit knowledge into structures that fit my brain. This can be considered a fan work, in that these diagrams contain as little innovation or deviation from Wildman's guidance as possible. They are shared in the hopes that they might also be useful to you.

Features

Skill progressions arranged into progressive tree structure.
Use of GraphViz allows easy extension and remixing.
Includes links back to Wildman videos and playlists with full instructions.
Bootstrap programs for incrementally learning and practicing new skills [Experimental!]
Full CSV lists of sequences, useful for your own experiments

Limitations

Movement is infinitely complex, these models are not. Legibility has been preferred over strict accuracy.
Mark is constantly publishing new material, and these diagrams are likely to fall out of date.
The URL links to each video will only be present on SVG renderings. You can open a downloaded SVG diagram directly in most browsers.

Possible Uses

Coaches planning a curriculum for student athletes.
Self-teaching guide.
Near-endless drill variations to freshen a program.

The Diagrams
Bootstrap Programs - Experimental
- Kettlebell Bootstrap Program
- Two-Handed Heavy Club Bootstrap Program
Sequence Lists
Contributing
License

The Diagrams

The format includes the Wildman index order of recommended progression, the Wildman name for the drill (and alternative common names), and an optional field that notes the key idea or skill that should be established by the drill before moving onto more complex drills.

For the SVG version of the diagrams, links to the video and the playlist it belongs to have been included where possible. Save the SVG locally and open it in a web browser to take advantage of its scalability and links.

For size considerations, we do not store the PNG versions in the repo directly, but do offer recent releases that include PNG renders.

Kettlebell Basic Skill Progression

The Kettlebell skill tree can be viewed in a single diagram or broken down into four parts (scroll below the full progression to view the parts).

Here is the full progression, to the best of my abilities. It's quite a lot to take in all at once.

Source	SVG
`/src/kb/kb_progression_ALL.puml`	`/dist/kb_progression_ALL.svg`

Because any single diagram will eventually become too complicated to use, I am breaking the KB Basic Skill progression into roughly the order presented, organised by theme (and whim).

Part 1, Covers #1 to #23

Covers Wildman's Kettlebell Basic Instruction from #1 to #23.

I have chosen to colour the drills that are specifically highlighted as useful warmup movements (orange), and what I call 'auxiliary' drills that are unlikely to be included in workouts long-term after the core idea has been digested.

Source	SVG
`/src/kb/kb_progression_1.puml`	`/dist/kb_progression_1.svg`

Part 2, Covers #24 to #38, and #42 (TGU)

Once the basics have been established, Wildman moves into developing the precursor skills for the Turkish Get-Up and Turkish Get-Down. Wildman prefers to alternate between the getup and getdown lessons to keep it fresh.

Source	SVG
`/src/kb/kb_progression_2_tgu.puml`	`/dist/kb_progression_2_tgu.svg`

Part 3

Covers #39 to #55, as well as a cheeky #72, the Deck Squat. This is mostly related to improving squat and getup technique, with a sidebar for performance with the Push Press and Thruster.

Source	SVG
`/src/kb/kb_progression_3.puml`	`/dist/kb_progression_3.svg`

Part 4

Covers #56 to #73, minus the Deck Squat. Here, the snatch is developed, as well as a range of double KB drills.

Source	SVG
`/src/kb/kb_progression_4.puml`	`/dist/kb_progression_4.svg`

Two-Handed Heavy Club Skill Progression

Here, we've grouped the sequenced drills into logical clusters, not quite the Seven movements that Wildman speaks of. I've excluded the unsequenced drills for simplicity.

Source	SVG
`/src/hc/hc_2h_progression_ALL.puml`	`/dist/hc_2h_progression_ALL.svg`

First Steps

In this diagram we focus on the drills of the first part of the progression, to make it simpler to get started from scratch.

Source	SVG
`/src/hc/hc_2h_progression_1.puml`	`/dist/hc_2h_progression_1.svg`

ALT View

I'm experimenting with an alternative view of the full 2HHC graph with the following decisions:

Colour gradient from light yellow to dark green to indicate where in the sequence the drill falls
Remove unsequenced drills, simplified dependencies
Simplified vertical layout focused on grouping layers together

Source	SVG
`/src/hc/hc_2h_progression_ALT.puml`	`/dist/hc_2h_progression_ALT.svg`

Single-Arm Heavy Club Skill Progression

Single-arm Heavy Club is generally developed after two-handed heavy club so that the athlete learns to rotate their body correctly. As such, the precursor two-handed skills are included in green to indicate how single-arm heavy club proceeds from them.

Source	SVG
`/src/hc/hc_sa_progression.puml`	`/dist/hc_sa_progression.svg`

Mace Progression

This steel mace/macebell progression is a WIP, currently covering ~30 movements of a listed 107. Because this was the first attempt at sequencing that MW put out, it's a bit different from the rest:

Many videos cover multiple variations on a movement; in these cases we use XX-X to indicate index + variation.
The focus rapidly moves to building complex, integrated movements
Both single hand and two-handed movements are covered in the same sequence

Source	SVG
`/src/mace/mace_progression_ALL.puml`	`/dist/mace_progression_ALL.svg`

Single Arm

Once stance changes are added, the single-arm movements start to warrant their own diagram. Here we are experimenting with grouping by non-standing stance - it makes the diagram less pretty but maybe helps with clarity.

Source	SVG
`/src/mace/mace_progression_sa.puml`	`/dist/mace_progression_sa.svg`

Warrior Stance Sub-Sequence

As an experiment, I've broken out the warrior stance mace movements into their own sub-sequence in order make this particular set more legible.

Source	SVG
`/src/mace/mace_warrior_subsequence.puml`	`/dist/mace_warrior_subsequence.svg`

Bootstrap Programs

Using the skill progression sequences, I've built a couple of experimental programs that one could use to start from scratch with kettlebells or heavy clubs and develop confidence as one learns increasingly complex skills.

The focus is not on increasing work capacity. While they are (light) real workouts, the idea is to complete the program ready to begin something like MW's Mill Squat program or the Wildfan Free 2H club program.

The programs are arranged in "levels" based on consecutive blocks of the sequenced drills for each tool, and I am using the level interlacing idea MW presents for his Slam Ball program to approximate a progressive wave of difficulty.

Caveats and Disclaimers:

This is currently a WIP and being actively tested. The programs may have major flaws and need drastic changes.
No warranty, express or implied, is offered by yours truly.
Because this is still an experiment, only the bare minimum of formatting has been applied to the Excel spreadsheets. No manual is provided, so it might take a minute to orient yourself.

That said, guinea pigs are more than welcome to assist in proving out the concept with me. If you do try out these ideas, please find me on the Wildfan Discord and let me know how it goes!

Kettlebell Bootstrap Program

Because of the incremental nature of this idea, the early workouts cannot be described as "full-body", focusing instead on the core movements that might add the most to anyone's existing practice.

The KB program starts its Level 1 with warmups and the two-handed swing and then begins to alternate with Level 2's introduction to the Clean and Overhead Press (as separate drills). Level 3 introduces the combined Clean & Press and four Squat variations, allowing us to model the AB program of MW's first Tetris of Training video. A proposed Level 4 would then move onto Turkish Getup preparatory movements.

Rep count is used as a rough guide to track increased work volume over the program. Multiply this by weight to track work capacity.

Download the program as a spreadsheet here: /src/kb/kb_bootstrap_program.xlsx

Two-Handed Heavy Club Bootstrap Program

The key organising idea for the heavy club program is for every workout to cover as much of seven movement families as possible: squat, side swing, clean & press, lunge, mill, swipe, and getup.

Drills are performed for Time Under Tension, 30 seconds of activity followed by 30 seconds of rest, repeated for two rounds, leading to a workout of between 8 to 12 minutes.

Download the program as a spreadsheet here: /src/hc/2hhc_bootstrap_program.xlsx

Sequence Lists

In order to keep track of the totality of the movements, I have created structured lists that one could import as a spreadsheet or use in a script or... whatever. I offer this - as-is - as a kind of bonus feature for other nerds who might want to build upon my work.

Each row contains, at a minimum:

ID - index ID of the movement e.g. 2HHC-25
Graph_Name - Programmatic handle e.g. mov_25_mill
Label - Text label (with line breaks)
URL - This may contain standalone or playlist links but by default should be standalone.

Some contain additional fields that may or may not be useful to you. These are easy to strip using Excel or Libre Calc.

Sequence	File
Kettlebell	`/src/kb/kb_progression.csv`
Two-handed Heavy Club	`/src/hc/hc_2h_progression.csv`
Single-arm Heavy Club	`/src/hc/hc_sa_drills.csv`
Mace	`/src/mace/mace_progression.csv`

If you use these for your own project, do let me know!

Contributing

The diagrams are created using GraphViz's Dot language as supported by the PlantUML toolset. Dot supports many image formats and this is also true of the PlantUML wrapper, so if the existing built formats do not suit, it should be easy to render the diagrams into your format of choice.

The reason for PlantUML rather than straight GraphViz is the prevalence of good PlantUML tool integration with tools like VS Code.

Building

I use the Powershell build automation tool, psake, to run PlantUML render steps.

> Invoke-Psake .\psakefile.ps1

The following top-level targets are currently available:

Quick - Only build SVG diagrams (default)
Full - Build everything for release
Clean - Delete all files from Dist directory

To see the full list of tasks, run the docs command:

> Invoke-Psake -docs .\psakefile.ps1

Additional/alternative formats can be rendered by overriding the $OutputFormats property:

> Invoke-Psake .\psakefile.ps1 -properties @{"OutputFormats"=@("svg","png")}

License

For full terms, see the LICENSE file.

dznz / wildman-skill-trees