How to harness your own body weight to challenge your strength, endurance and co-ordination to all new extremes!
The rewards and fulfillment are massive gains in functional strength and real-world performance.
Gymnastics is just one of the many different modalities you can use to challenge yourself physically and mentally.
Gymnasts have always been known to have superpowers or super-heroes in context to being strong and well-rounded athletes…
Capable of performing extraordinary physical skills and feats of strength with their bodies or using simple apparatus.
How can mere mortals simply wanting to get in shape tap into the art of gymnastics?
The true magic is in understanding gymnastic movements…
Movement is basically the transition from one position to another.
This is the foundation of all physical performance.
Through experience, I’ve found gymnastic training allows you to adopt very effective practices for progressive skill
development because of it’s complexity and multi-disciplinary demands.
By understanding movement as the process of transitioning between basic body positions…
You can see and appreciate why the foundation for gymnastics training directly relates to core movements, functional strength and conditioning.
Gymnastics gives you a very clear path to success for understanding the true importance of movements in developing your body’s capacity to move freely.
Through the practice of gymnastics trainers and athletes develop a true understanding of body positions…
These body weight exercises translate directly to other movements involving equipment like traditional:
- Weightlifting
- Powerlifting
- Strongman
- Kettlebell
Gymnastics also contributes to the understanding of positional strength applied to endurance sports.
How to put real world value of gymnastics into perspective…
Focus training develops specialized skills and feats of strength, this may or may not be your ultimate goal.
If you want to improve your fitness and athletic performance it starts by prioritizing daily life and personal goals.
Gymnastic movements and skill-sets accomplish the most common goals using body weight exercises like:
- Burpees
- Candlestick roll
- Pistol (single-leg squat)
- Handstand push-up
- Muscle-up…
These body weight exercises are directly relevant to most physical tasks we encounter on a daily basis, whether you’re a stay-at-home parent or a professional athlete.
Burpees is one of the best ways of getting off the ground from a prone or face down position.
The candlestick roll is another more advanced form of getting off the ground from a supine or face-up position.
Start from a standing position, feet together, sit down onto the floor and let momentum carry your legs back until you can point them straight up in the air…
Then kick your heels to your butt as hard as you can and try to stand up, this movement takes some practice.
The pistol or single-leg squat is an expression of unilateral or off-axis loading, directly related to development of human locomotion patterns.
The handstand push-up is a means for training spatial awareness and capacity to apply force through pushing body mechanics…
Spatial awareness is the ability to be aware of oneself in space.
It is an organised knowledge of objects in relation to oneself in that given space.
Spatial awareness also involves understanding the relationship of these objects when there is a change of position.
When doing handstand you’re using your body in new and different ways.
Your muscles and mind need to absorb new spatial awareness, so there are a few elements to make your handstand feel better and flow more smoothly which also causes less stress on your body.
Your legs are together at the beginning, it’s easier to keep your legs taut and straight.
This reduces balance problems and stops flailing…
Brace your abs and keep core contracted as this gives you stability and helps you stay up with less effort.
Keep your head directly between your arms.
Look up slightly which helps your head stay aligned and keeps your back straight.
Your fingers are spread out and positioned towards the front.
Your fingers are actually taking the brunt of handstand so finger position is very important.
Most of the strain is on the area extending from your first set of knuckles to upper part of palm.
If you need to alter your position during a handstand, put weight in the direction of your fingers.
After you master basic handstand, you can branch out to try the different types like a V-shaped handstand.
The muscle-up is another means of training spatial awareness, pulling mechanics and developing capacity to get over obstacles.
If you focus on developing these four different body weight movements by challenging yourself to perform under load with different time limits on different pieces of equipment…
And by learning traditional gymnastics movements and progressions.
After you have gone through the training and mastered the basics, your body becomes stronger, lean and muscled.
Your balance, coordination and flexibility with confidence will brim over and overflow…
Do you strongly believe you can get massive benefits from doing basic gymnastics?
A strong core gives you a lean look and if your fat percentage is low enough you get to see those elusive six-pack abs.
More important, you want your abdominal muscles to be in good shape to improve balance.
Your back, neck and shoulders are properly stabilized with a solid center of gravity, which makes all types of movements easier to do.
Your spine has the stability and strength to stay straighter reducing the risks of lower back injury.
In fact, better balance helps you avoid falls and can actually help you grow new brain cells.
Balance training is considered one of the very best ways for the brain to improve its sense of proprioception.
Spatial awareness, coordination and awareness of your own body.
This in turn helps increase your brain’s capacity to grow between two neurons.
The stronger the connection grows between brain cells and nervous system this leads to better focus, longer attention spans, increased learning ability and better recall.
Gymnastics has stood the test of time and it is proven to be a great way of developing and expanding base of all athletic performance.
Gymnastics has also provided the blueprint to further understanding the skill-transfer principles.
The principles of skill transfer compliments focus and utilizing constantly varied functional movements or unknown and unknowable which results in more power for everyday life…
Gymnastics