Mass Through Bodyweight/Rings

If anyone could explain how gymnasts manage to gain so much mass through pure bodyweight training. From what I've noticed, I doubt they do massive amounts of reps and/or sets to achieve this. I've done pure strength training for quite some time now and barely managed to gain any amount of size from this alone, just recently when I started higher volume instead of focusing on pure strength did I manage to gain any amount of size.

I'd love to find out what the difference is and what exactly causes such insane hypertrophy in every muscle.

Their physique comes from the muscles adapting to the massive forces and stress that they are put under. Coach said somewhere that a planche push up is equivalent to a 2x bodyweight bench press. Now if you were to work to achieve that weight on a bench you would see muscle growth as the relevant muscle adapts to the load put upon it. All of the different movements which a gymnast goes through in training will put this massive stress on different muscle groups and therefore you get the large build in the whole upperbody.

In bodyweight/gymnastic training leverage is used to make a position more challenging like extending from tuck to full lay in a front lever. The equivalent in weight training would be adding more plates when you have adapted to your current weight in a certain movement.

I'm sure slizz or some of the other members will have a more scientific way to explain it but that's it in layman's terms.

They have this neat trick. I'll tell you the secret.

When they are real little they do 60-90m of gymnastics a week. When they are a bit older, they bump this up to 2-3 hours.

So when they are about 10, they are working out 4-5 times a week, 3-4 hours. By their teens, they might be working out 20-25 hours/week.

Besides dedicated strength programming, they have 3 serious apparatus that require a lot of strength. Rings, Pommel, Parallel Bars. Then they tumble and jump a lot on vault and floor. There is also HighBar which requires a lot of swing work.

They have this neat trick. I'll tell you the secret ... When they are real little they do 60-90m of gymnastics a week. When they are a bit older, they bump this up to 2-3 hours ... So when they are about 10, they are working out 4-5 times a week, 3-4 hours. By their teens, they might be working out 20-25 hours/week.

This is both right and wrong.

There are plenty of gymnasts in their teens working that many hours a week who are skinny and weak. The difference is that they have been conditioning incorrectly. Apparatus training alone is insufficient to build high levels of gymnastics strength.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Nutrition is huge (no pun intended) in getting bigger as well, as is genetics to some extent. If the body isn't getting what it needs when it needs it (protein and carbs in the bloodstream within 30 minutes of physical activity) you aren't going to get the massive up-regulation of transcription and translation that causes the majority of increased protein synthesis.

Layman's terms: If you don't have the right nutrients at the right time, you will miss the majority of your growth potential.

I am finding that my chest is growing better with super slow bodyweight XR push ups than it did with weight training. I'm just now able to start doing some of that stuff again, so I have no idea how this will pan out over the long term but combined with growth-oriented nutrition body weight training is excellent for growth.

As far as the kids go, I would suspect that diet is as much of a modifier as anything else. I saw this kind in japan doing handstand presses out in Okinawa and I swear he had better shoulders than I did. It was amazing. I think that Coach is absolutely right that it is all about the conditioning aspect, and that if that is done properly you will see the physique develop and with it athletic abilities.

slizzardman said:

Nutrition is huge (no pun intended) in getting bigger as well

To get big, you have to eat big.

This is both right and wrong.

Yes, I was being a bit facetious there.

A lot of this is gymnastics. For instance there was young guy at UCBerkeley who was pretty small and somewhat cut. Steve is a little taller than me but probably weighed 130lbs. He was their #1 rings guy I think who could do azarian and maltese. Actually, a few of their guys were on or were former senior team USA members. They weren't huge like Yuri or Jotchev, though some didn't have that high of a difficulty on rings. There were a few guys from Stanford that do Maltese that were big like Yuri and Jordan (not as big, but you get the picture).

The point being is not all gymnasts are HUGE. I can remember the picture of UCBerkeley's Men team from 2010-11, which was sort of amusing as many were "striking a pose" and they weren't all Massive.

Kohei Uchimura is argueably one of the best AllAround male gymnasts currently. He has a decent Rings SV but is by no means, a top Rings guy.

He really isn't that BIG, IMO. And yes, there tend to be a big difference between collegiate and Elite gymnastics

Danny Rodrigues, one of the only men ever to compete Victorian and argueably the best one at it isn't very HOOGE, either. He also weighs only 126lbs.

Anyways, the point being is gymnastics come in all shapes and sizes. Jeff from the seminars is fairly huge, while Dillon has a maltese but I wouldn't say he is HOOGE, but very cut and defined.

The strongest gymnasts both do a lot of TUT besides focused strength and conditioning training. A lot of it is their genetics being expressed.

phrak said:

slizzardman said:

Nutrition is huge (no pun intended) in getting bigger as well

To get big, you have to eat big.

Yes, but eating big doesn't mean eating a lot.

What does it then mean?

Eating high yield. Appropriate macro/micro nutrients. Don't just shovel in indiscriminately; create a slight caloric surplus each day with nutrient-dense, quality ingredients.