WHY GYMNASTIC’S BUILD MUSCLE!
You CAN build muscle without weights!
It almost seems like an oxymoron. But believe it or not, you can. I’m going to cover why gymnastics are so effective at adding muscle. This is going to be specific to the upper body. Future blog posts will dive into why gymnastics are probably inferior for lower body strength and hypertrophy.
USE THE FORCE!
While there are differences in load application between barbells/dumbbells and bodyweight exercises, muscular force is muscular force. The key concept behind getting a bigger and stronger muscle is progressive overload.
Generally speaking you must progressively add more weight to the barbell as you adapt. Likewise with gymnastics, you must find a way to make the exercise more difficult in order to progressively overload the body. A lack of knowledge on proper progressions is really what prevents more people from utilizing gymnastics more frequently in their training. If you are interested in learning more about proper gymnastics progressions, you’ll love my newsletter.
Still think you can’t get more muscular from gymnastics? Actual remote client 👇
LEVERAGE IS THE NAME OF THE GAME
A see-saw is a simple form of a lever. If you place a skinny person on one side and a fat person (am I allowed to call people fat in 2022?) on the other end, the see saw will obviously tip towards the bigger individual. BUT, if the fatty moves closer to the middle, it decreases the mechanical advantage of the weight difference.
With gymnastics, as we advance the movement we want to decrease our leverage, which reduces the mechanical advantage the muscles have during the exercise, which increases the demand of force on the muscles.
There are 2 ways we can decrease leverage
Body Position
Muscle Length
Body Position
I’m going to use the planche to illustrate my point here. As we change our body position in the planche, it progressively becomes more difficult. With the planche, as we open up our hips, our center of mass (roughly our belly button) shifts further away from our shoulders. This increases the torque on the shoulders, which is the force applied. The illustration below is the simplest way to understand torque.
Muscle Length
Muscles are going to be strongest at their resting length due to the number of cross bridges. This means if you place a muscle in a stretched position, it becomes weaker because there is less overlap of contractile fibers. Let’ look at two different examples of curls to illustrate our point. In the pelican curl, our shoulder is being stretched so we are weaker. As opposed to a standing curl where our muscle is at its resting length, so it’s stronger. Simply put, this is why you can standing curl more weight than you can pelican curl (or incline curl)!
Closing Thoughts
And that right there was physics for dummies! This is also why gymnastics’s continue to be the foundation for all my remote clients training; whether their goal is to become stronger, more muscular or get out of pain!
