Gymnastics carryover to cardio

[De_LosSantos]

Does gymnastics strength routines (WOD) have carryover to cardio? And by cardio I mean things like running, rope jumping.

I'm doing hill sprints, 2/3 times a week, and I'm wondering if gymnastics also helps in terms of conditioning?

[Neal Winkler]

Some of coaches leg workouts do require a bit of endurance, so if you are especially deconditioned, then yes you will see some carryover. Some of the upper body workouts (the ones that say "4 rounds of") also require some endurance. These will help less but will still help some for the deconditioned individual as they will somewhat improve central factors for endurance performance. The leg workouts will improve both central and peripheral factors.

In the training of a world class gymnast, they train for many hours a day and they will see even more benefit to endurance.

Look into the S.A.I.D. principle. You are obviously lacking in basic knowledge of physiology.

[Chris Hansen]

Not gymnastics but deadlifting helped my running.

[Joshua Naterman]

It completely depends on how your training is structured. Cardio is not the same thing as endurance, and sometimes endurance isn't endurance. I know, I just stepped off the deep end. Check this out:

If you train your body to become HIGHLY efficient at producing force quickly, you will be spending less time under tension and getting more out of your effort. This means you can spend LESS energy while maintaining any given speed, which means you need LESS endurance to perform intense "cardiovascular" work at the same workload when you become more powerful.

One of the hallmarks of gymnastic floor routines is incredible efficiency in producing force quickly. The more powerful you become, through proper joint conditioning and true plyometric work combined with whatever other power methods you choose to employ, the more "cardio" you will be able to do. So yes, properly trained all-around gymnasts should have remarkably high performance in "cardio" tests because their power output is so high. This will of course vary according to training methods applied to each athlete, but the general trend will be that capacity appears to be extremely high. In reality, it is efficiency that is so incredibly high.

The WODs here produce something of an intermediary response in both power and endurance. Because of the relatively long times under tension present in many WODs we WILL increase our anaerobic endurance, and because of the relatively short rest times employed and the time each round takes we will increase our aerobic capacity. The WODs resemble interval training, which is a very fast way to increase aerobic capacity. The interesting thing about this is that part of this increased "capacity" is actually due to efficiency increases. The actual performance of our biological aerobic energy system does not increase nearly as much as event performance does, and this shows how much improvement is actually due to efficiency of movement and efficiency of force production.

For maximal power development A) you can't have a set that lasts more than 10-15s because at that point you're entering into Glycolysis and maximal force development is purely ATP/CP, and B) you must never perform a rep that is slower than your maximal speed. This limits you, naturally, to that 10s maximum time window, which in turn limits reps according to a composite of total time under tension (TUT) and maximum reps performed perfectly. Perfect reps will never exceed 10s of total TUT, and are usually less than that.

Clearly then, we do not develop absolute maximal potential power with many of the workouts here, but there is more to gymnastics than maximal power output so that is fitting for the goal overall.