Floor focus - ring skills still useful?

If one were to focus solely on floor work, is it still useful to train ring and bar skills? I've asked questions of this variety before, but I think I've fine tuned it a bit and now it makes more sense.

I train because it's fun. I have no goals to be any sort of competitor or anything of the sort. That said, I find floor skills (tumbling, handstands, etc) to be significantly more fun than anything else. Because if this, I'd like to shift my training focus there.

So what bar/ring skills are not useful and which ones are? Should I keep training these sorts of things? If so, up to what level? If I still use skin-the-cats as a warmup / mobility sort of thing, is it even worthwhile to train a full-lay back lever?

I have a lot of questions of this sort. Does anyone have some general advice or even specific training they do?

Having done purely yoga, even though to a very high level, I found I had many strength related issues, which I now believe to be at least in part due to lack of any kind of pulling/bar work for many years.

I don't see an issue with you choosing to focus on floor work, it is fun and rewarding. I don't think it's wise to leave out bar work altogether based on experience but you certainly can pare it down to some bare essentials, and work it say 3-5x5r twice a week and be done with it. You can conceivably even progress just doing your strongest Pull Up variant and a straight arm pull.

Do you need to aspire to full lat front lever, of course not all those kinds of goals are a personal choice.

Well, of course you don't need advanced ring strength to be a good tumbler.

But, you still need a good body shape to do tumbling. Your shoulders and arms are of course less important than your legs, but it is still useful to train them for skills like the roundoff or the backhandspring. Another important thing to train, besides your legs, which is obvious, is the core. So, levers, for example, can still be used in your tumbling conditioning.

So yes, you should keep practicing your rings skills to get the generally needed body shape for tumbling and you should not forget your shoulder flexibility, it still stays important.

You don't have to do ring strength all the time, but twice a week seems alright, I guess.

Cole Dano said:

I don't think it's wise to leave out bar work altogether based on experience but you certainly can pare it down to some bare essentials

Yeah, I wouldn't dream of it. Especially now that I'm dealing with some shoulder impingement issues (I'm doing high volume ring rows to help defeat some muscular imbalances).

I'm mostly curious about which skills would have the best and least carry over - what skills are really good ideas (I'm a big fan of Tick-Tocks in the book - I feel there's some press HS carry over), and which are not (one armed chin probably has no place).

I tend to see the exercises from the book, the basics.. From here you can go to anywhere. It's like a basic foundation...

Shoulder strength and flexibility will help floor exercises, core will help everything in life basically.. So, at least FSP you can still train (and should in my opinion...)

Rings will help your functional strength and that will carry over everything you will do... More balanced body, pull and press stuff, left and right, all that will help you go a little further in every thing you will do.

Bruno Cochofel said:

I tend to see the exercises from the book, the basics.. From here you can go to anywhere. It's like a basic foundation...

Shoulder strength and flexibility will help floor exercises, core will help everything in life basically.. So, at least FSP you can still train (and should in my opinion...)

Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world I'd master All The Things. But that's just not the way it works. I'll be 30 in a month, and I have a wife, and martial arts classes and all that jazz. What I want to do is attempt to figure out things that I can safely remove from my training that, while cool in their own rights, aren't directly related to my goals.

Bruno is right in the sense that the book basically starts from a few basics and as one gets stronger the next step comes.

If you don't worry about the end goal and build from your strongest pull and straight body core exercise from the book. If it takes too much time to do both then 2x/week bent arm pull 1x/week straight body core.

That's the beauty of the Kilroy style program it's actually very simple and adaptable. Once you get a consistent 5x5 you can try the next exercise on the list, or if you're content just maintain what you have.

I'm sure that will carry over to your martial arts and floor work very well and you feel it was worth it.

phrak said:

Bruno Cochofel said:

I tend to see the exercises from the book, the basics.. From here you can go to anywhere. It's like a basic foundation...

Shoulder strength and flexibility will help floor exercises, core will help everything in life basically.. So, at least FSP you can still train (and should in my opinion...)

Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world I'd master All The Things. But that's just not the way it works. I'll be 30 in a month, and I have a wife, and martial arts classes and all that jazz. What I want to do is attempt to figure out things that I can safely remove from my training that, while cool in their own rights, aren't directly related to my goals.

You can train 2 FSP in a circuit, like BL and FL, 4 sets of 15s, it will take you about 10m... Is more a question of planning, I wasn't saying go for all the tricks, but FSP (fundamental static positions) are call that way for a reason, they are fundamental.

That's how I understood you Bruno. It really can be done pretty quick.

I think a good short answer is this: Ring strength carries over into a variety of other strengths. Much like if you have good Hollow Holds and L-sits, that strength carries over into a lot of different aspects as well. I would not drop it altogether.