you need more explosive momentum going up . That way you launch your upper body past the point where your fore arms are horizontal into the pushing position . Stick to regular pull ups but see if you can get your chest past the bar with momentum . <| sep |> Love obama <| sep |> Peep Show , the smartest comedy that ' s ever been on TV . <| sep |> This is a topic without much agreement between marxists . Some of the best books outlinig the debates are The Brenner Debate Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Preindustrial Europe D 4 C 478 E 73 BE 659 F 0 E 65 B 9 EF 8 FF 505 A 67 The Origin of Capitalism A Longer View 497 D 56 F 4 BB 24 D 1 D 6 EE 5 E 7791 EACA 54 C 9 <| sep |> Dear HelpInPlainEnglish , Thank you for your considered response . This is the longer answer I promised . It had to wait until Thanksgiving break . My objections to the video break down into two types linguistic and pedagogic . Linguistic As soon as you are talking about vowels , consonants , and syllables , you are entering the world of phonology , where your concern is the sounds of language . Spelling is merely a cultural construction that tries to represent sounds , and doesn ' t always succeed on a onetoone basis . A good example is the English word should . It has six letters but only three sounds . To talk about sh as being a sequence of two consonants would only make sense if you are talking about spelling , not pronunciation the two letters form a single sound , or phoneme . The same goes for the Spanish rr . It is a single phoneme that happens to be written with two letters . So the statement in your video that the rr of burrito shows two consonants working together to start a syllable raise serious linguistic hackles ! Another linguistic problem is that stress is a property of syllables , not vowels . We write accent marks on vowels but you could imagine other ways of expressing stress via spelling . For example , in phonetic transcriptions a little stress mark looks like an apostrophe is inserted just before the stressed syllable . Your rule of stress the vowel before the last consonant is certainly shorter than the traditional rule of stress the last syllable if the word ends in a consonant , and the nexttolast syllable if the word ends in a vowel . That ' s why I called it cute . But I take linguistic issue with it for two reasons . One is that , as I mentioned above , stress is a property of syllables , not vowels . Additionally , looking at languages around the world , stress is often affected by differences between heavy or light syllables , which often though not always corresponds to whether a syllable ends in a consonant or a vowel . This means that the traditional rule is fundamentally TRUE , because it refers to syllable weight , while your formulation is just CONVENIENT . It happens to work because Spanish stress happens to be very simple . Your approach would fall down , for example , if you were teaching Latin instead of Spanish . In Latin stress fell on the nexttolast syllable unless it was light , in which case it falls on the previous syllable . Since Latin syllables that contained a long vowel which I ' ve indicated here with a capital letter instead of the usual macron were considered heavy , this explains why debEre , which became deber in Spanish , had penultimate stress in Latin , while vIridis , which became verde , had antepenultimate stress the middle i was lost over time precisely because it was unstressed . The Latin rule is a fairly simple variation of the traditional Spanish rule , but it would be hard to express it using some adaptation of your rule . Even within Spanish , the traditional , syllablebased rule is superior for words like museo . As soon as one learns that an eo combination doesn ' t form a single syllable , the correct stress pattern follows automatically . No need to posit an invisible consonant . PedagogicYour video is gorgeous ! And beautifully made it ' s slick ! But I think it simultaneously teaches too much and too little . Too much From the beginning of the video , you are drawing attention to the structure of clusters to the left of the stressed syllable , like the cr of crema versus the ns of ensalada . This has nothing to do with stress placement in the specific words you are explaining , so it ' s pretty distracting at this point . I understand , though , that you are laying the groundwork for further discussion of syllable structure . You soon introduce the idea of a weak vowel in sequences like the ai as in vainilla . While irrelevant for stress placement in vainilla , the difference between strong and weak vowels is , of course , relevant in explaining the accent mark in words like da . But IMHO it is a more advanced topic that should be postponed . I didn ' t learn it as an explicit rule until I ' d been studying Spanish for years . It ' s easier to explain the accent on da , contina , etc . as marking exceptions to the general though not perfect rule that twovowel sequences normally form the nucleus of a single syllable , with the second vowel bearing the syllable ' s stress if any . This is easier to say as in Spanish , you usually stress the second of two vowels in sequence . The squares and circles instead of C and V in your video are a TERRIFIC way to illustrate clusters , and the difference between strong and weak vowels within a vowel cluster . However , as described above , beginning students don ' t need to know much about the internal structure of consonant and vowel clusters . For this reason the shapes strike me overkill . Too little A beginning student typically makes two types of accent mark mistakes omitting lapiz or adding hzlo accents on words that break versus follow the basic stress rule , and omitting tu eres or adding t libro accents on homophones . For this reason I think it ' s essential to address homophones in any lesson for beginners . This is much more important to correct use of accent marks than the strongweak vowel distinction , for example . How I teach accent marks I teach the traditional rule . To explain it , I show lists of increasingly long words that end with vowels e . g . HEcho , partiCIpa , todopodeROso , desafortunadaMENte versus consonants e . g . feLIZ , elemenTAL , estereotiPAR , inconstitucionaliDAD , using capital letters to show the stressed syllables . I then add s and n to some of these words participa is a good one to show how they don ' t ' count ' as consonants here . For homophones , I explain that the one that gets an accent mark tends to receive heavier stress within a sentence , and can even stand on its own . S vs . si is a good pair to illustrate this with . In my bookbook , I link these two uses of accent marks to the accent in words like da . In all three cases , the mark acts as an indication of irregular or heightened stress . within a syllable , word , or sentence . Since I generally teach beginners , I haven ' t had the opportunity to put this principle into pedagogical practice . Having said all this , it is entirely possible that your rule is easier to learn , or to remember , than the traditional rule , for the basics of stress placement and hence about half of Spanish accent marks according to a little textual analysis I did for my book . That ' s an empirical question , and I ' d be curious to see what an actual research study would show about this . However , if I were teaching your rule , I would leave out the consonant and vowel cluster complications , and just use C and V notation . I would also present it as a convenient shorthand for the actual rule . Again , congratulations on making your video , and good luck with all your teaching !