Frontflip Attempts + Other Skills

[Craig Wilson]

I would appreciate advice on my front flipping attempts.

Other skills I captured on video (any advice regarding these would be appreciated as well):

[Sune]

This is just gonna be a quick reply. You got loads of power in what you are doing, so small adjustments in your technique will probably improve your skills a lot.

Frontflip: You need to imagine yourself standing in front of a bar rack (like the one in the background) with a bar at chest height. By standing close to the bar you need to jump straight up and curl your upper body (like in a sit-up) down around the bar in order to initiate the flip. The vertical jump and the curling of the upper body is the primary mover when initiating the flip. The leg tucking is initiated right after the beforementioned movements, here you can try and reach for the middle section of your shins instead of grabbing the knees. Imagining an invisible bar in front of the chest when doing standing front flips has helped me a lot at least.

Back handspring and front handspring: They need to be longer in general, and make sure to keep a tight arc in the back without bending hips or legs.

Backflip: Try and extend your hips fully when taking off. Imagining a string attached to your sternum that pulls you towards the ceiling as you take off is a fine way of achieving the right positions. Just be careful not to drop your head to much back, and remember the differences between BHS and backflip.

All in all, it looks like you won't have to much trouble mastering these skills; what is your background experience?. I look forward to seing your progress.

[Craig Wilson]

Thanks for the reply, Sune.

In regards to:

Frontflip attempts - I will try this. I didn't realize how far forward I was landing before recording my attempts.

Back/Front handsprings - As I mentioned in the description on the video, these aren't the best back handsprings that I feel I've done. I was doing them much better on a consistent basis a while ago, and then one day when I was tired from insufficient amounts of sleep, I had a horrible day with backhandsprings, and it subsequently reverted me to a level that was worse than when I first tried and successfully learned to do them. In short, it put the whammy on me. I'm still getting them back up to where they were and will be trying to implement what you've suggested for both variations of handsprings.

Backflips - Will do.

My background experience condensed into a long, rambling run-on sentence: some tae kwon do as a kid, skateboarding as a teen, lots of reading of whatever I could find on the internet that piques my interest, joined a gym for a short stint several years ago of trying to follow one of the WS4SB templates, dabbling with some Olympic lifts using various pieces of equipment, a boxing class for a semester, about a year of judo, working out from home for a while with an adjustable sandbag, a pullup bar with rings, and some other equipment, focusing on handstand and ring work, then I joined another gym and started doing a Stronglifts and rings training hybrid, migrated to a much better gym where I'm currently training and these videos were shot, continued doing a hybrid of barbell work plus gymnastics with lots of volume for a while, along with dabbling in more Olympic lifting and other odds and ends, acquiring backflips followed by back handsprings, discovering some (short in height) parallel bars at the park on which to practice, and lately I've reduced/spread out the volume of my efforts over the week, incorporating a wider selection of movements, and I've been doing GB WODs more often as of late.