Friday Feat: Your Shoulders (And Fingers) Will Hurt Just Watching This

Jo Neame, 22, tackles a skin the cat on a 6 millimeter edge… ouch!

A skin the cat, in case you were wondering, is an exercise in which you hang from something and thread your legs back through your arms. It’s great for strengthening the core and mobilizing the shoulders. In “A Hog on Ice,” Charles Earle Funk wrote of the exercise “to skin the cat refers to a boy’s gymnastic trick… One can’t be sure why the operation was called ‘skinning the cat,’ but maybe some mother, seeing it for the first time, saw in it some resemblance to the physical operation of removing the pelt from a cat, first from the forelegs and down over the body.”

Gruesome, but somehow fitting with just how hard this exercise actually is.

Happy Friday!

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