The folks over at RingTraining.com have unveiled a nice looking tool to help ease into advance ring strength moves, the Elite Strength Trainer. There’s good info there, and this was in the e-mail announcement:
I just wanted to let everyone know that the Elite Strength Trainer is now available. It’s selling at a $40 discount till January 1st. It’s a new tool that helps train for the cross, maltese and other advanced ring strength exercises. It works by adjusting the leverage placed on your arms in 10 increments. As you get stronger, you simply move up to the next level. It brings the direct, linear progressions available to weightlifters into the world of bodyweight exercise.
A few months ago, I took a prototype to the national team training center. I met with Kevin Mazeika, head coach of the US Olympic Team, and Jordan Jovtchev, 5-time Olympian, and they both offered me some feedback on the design. Within 15 minutes of setting them up in the gym, I had almost a dozen national and Olympic caliber gymnasts from the American and Japanese teams try it out. They had all used equipment in the past that worked on the same principle, but unanimously preferred the design of the Elite Strength Trainer. They liked that it had a lot of adjustment points, it was quick to adjust and easy to set up and comfortable to use. This is actually a tool that is quite important in the training of a lot of top-level gymnasts. For some of them, it is just for conditioning. But they already have short arms, so it’s almost like they’re already using it! For others, it’s the safest way to get back strength after an injury or to develop new strength skills. For the rest of us, it is a great way to safely and effectively incorporate advanced ring strength moves into our training.
Sorry not to let you know about the sale earlier (which will probably be over by the time you read this), but I didn’t get the announcement until 12/30.
Sorry, been sitting on some of these links for a while...
- Ringtraining's come out with new, improved rings: Elite Rings II. Lovely. I still have my metal version 1.0 ones. These new ones look great, , especially in black (not shown, on that page, but available on ordering). Related, this Crossfit London muscle-up tutorial. Some great exercises demonstrated within. Not sure why the page repeats itself over and over.
- This article makes squash sound like a blast. A good read, but when I check out some squash highlights on YouTube, my enthusiasm dampened a bit. Not a good spectator sport, apparently.
- Conditioning Research embeds a video of a huge jump. My goodness.
- First time poster maverick10 shared a link to the Eccentric Exercise Protocol weblog:
I developed tendinitis in mid-2004 after doing a lot of bicycling over a period of two weeks. The inflammation went away after some time, but I continued to have pain that lasted for several years. After trying everything from accupuncture, physical therapy, massage, chiropractors, pain drugs, lidoderm patches, ointments, etc... the only thing that significantly reduced my pain was "eccentric exercises." I learned about such exercises through reading medical journal articles. However, I had to develop a protocol that worked for me through trial-and-error.
Ties in perfectly with what I know about fixing achilles tendonitis.
Wow, good day on the weblogs for great training ideas on the rings:
P.S. I'll try to post something about Nationals soon. Tourneys give me "hangovers" (not the alcohol kind) where I can't really focus or get motivated, and it's worse for Nationals. And I'm swamped at work. But hey, while we have this quiet moment, maybe this'll be my Nationals post...
Best fields I've ever played on, all the games matter and are hard fought (which is what makes the tourney so special, IMO), and incidentally they get great food vendors, particularly the étouffée and the crepes (mmmm... Nutella and banana filling...).
We underperformed, going 3-4 on the weekend and losing the 9-10 game to Boneyard. Gotta give those guys their due, they took it to us, and their D was both the cleanest AND the most intense we saw all tourney. Losing sucks, but getting beat by clean, hard-nosed D is a pleasure compared with losing to a team whose D is supplemented by grabbing, hacking, the ol' stop-the-continuation-throw bump/tackle, etc. Anyway, nice game, Boneyard!
Interesting situation on Friday, playing our last two pool play games. We were tied with Miami and played them in what we assumed would be the game to advance to quarters, as they had perennial contender Old and In the Way in their final game. Tough game, but we pulled it out. Surprisingly though, Miami rolled Old, and we lost to Big Sky. Can't blame Old for conserving for quarters, and our fate was in our own hands, so no complaints, but it stung nonetheless.
Personally, I had pretty good tourney. Thursday was great. Handful of blocks, no errors. Friday was marred by a couple drops behind the disc in our loss to Big Sky. Saturday was somewhere between the two.
By the way, I was THRILLED to see a few of my old Salt teammates take home the title with DoG! Loved watching that game. Not as much as I would have loved playing in it, but still great vicarious Ultimate, and I couldn't be happier for those guys. If you're reading, congrats DoG!
Update: Speaking of DoG, Jim Parinella's writeup is a fun read, and covers their pool in much more depth than I covered ours.
(The extent of my pool play coverage being an oblique reference to how chippy some of our games were. I should add that while those games were no fun to play, I don't think it made the difference in any outcomes, and it takes two to tango.)
If you've been on the fence about getting a set of rings, perhaps these rings pushup variations (click the video demo link once you get there) will push you over the top. « via MarkFu's Barbarian Blog »
I've posted before about the awesome Traveling Rings (be sure to check out the video). Here's my low budget garage version:
I have six rings (only three shown). I used these playground rings, 12' NRS straps, and 5/16" stainless steel anchor shackles from Home Depot (for attaching each ring to its strap). A few additional notes:
- As you can see, when the rings are set up for me I have lots of extra strap. But the straps allow me to easily lower the rings for my kids.
- Unless your garage is ridiculously tall (in which case you'd want longer straps), the length of each strap doesn't give you much swinging action, but it's still a good workout, and a nice change from pull-ups. My kingdom for an empty barn with big, high rafters (or any other long, strong, high span these could hang from).
- Note that I don't hang the rings directly from the rafters, but rather from a 2x4 running perpendicular to the rafters. This distributes the weight (my wife noticed some worrisome bowing when I hung them each to its own rafter).
- Ideas: regular hand-over-hand, obviously. Pulling yourself up and staying up while going hand-over-hand is a nice challenge. Or do a pull-up, swing to the next, do another pullup, repeat, etc. is a good workout. Skipping rings, setting them further apart, and setting them at different heights opens up all kinds of options.
- You can't spin like mad like you can with true swiveling components, but the straps can twist. Haven't really done much with that (don't yet have the strength yet to hang from one hand for very long).
Anyway, it's no substitute for the real thing, but still a very fun piece of workout equipment.
I got a copy of my Ringtraining.com newsletter yesterday, in which the availability of black rings was announced (nice). Also included was this workout:
10 Ring Pushups
Row 250 meters
Repeat 5 times, as fast as possible.
I figured I'd give it a shot, but of course I forgot to set the clock. Didn't matter, as I didn't finish. My times for the first four 250m:
After that last one my back started to tighten up, and as it's been giving me some trouble I decided not to push it. Or maybe it was the nausea talking.
If you've been thinking about cobbling together some rings, you might want to give PlaysetParts.com a look. In particular, their round trapeze rings, either in uncoated aluminum or Plastisol -coated. A few lengths of chain and a few quick-links and you're good to go.
That said, if you want to buy a set ready to go out of the box, I can't say enough good things about Ringtraining.com. Great products, great service. Their rings have a larger inner diameter (7" instead of 5") and have a thicker grip, I think.
UPDATE: Got a few, ostensibly for the kids, and they are pretty small. Keep that in mind if you have big hands.
Jim at Beast Skills has done it again: fantastic muscle-up tutorial. Make sure you not only watch his embedded video of Andreas Aguilar at the 1991 World Professional Gymnastics Championships on the rings, make sure you watch all the way to the dismount.
Always looking for new things to try with my rings. I think I'll add scarecrows into the mix. « via Straight to the Bar »
Roger Harrell has a good page of exercises to keep you busy on the rings for awhile.
A bit of a link backlog to clear out:
As I mentioned in my Evil Wheel post, the new version of the excellent Power Rings is available for pre-order, and the limited-time price of $55 is fantastic. It's more than $20 cheaper than what I paid for version 1.0 about a month ago. Man, that's always the way: I buy something, and that's a cue to the producer to rollout the new, improved model. Dang.
Anyway, I love my rings, and if you are the least bit tempted you should consider the pre-order. Even if you aren't a gymnast (I'm not, certainly) they are worth it for the pushup variations alone, and you won't find a cheaper (or more challenging) dip station anywhere.
One of the exercises that factors into my current program is standing rollouts on The Evil Wheel. A demo of how standing wheel rollouts should look is towards the end of Ross Enamait's Low-Tech, High Effect video. Ross makes it look easy, but this is an insanely difficult exercise. Not only is the abdominal strain the most intense of any bodyweight exercise I've tried, but it also hits just about every muscle from your shoulders to your shins.
The problem is, how does one progress to such an exercise?
First, safety: stay tight throught your body, and DO NOT let your back arch (i.e. your stomach drops). I haven't done this, but I can feel from the strain in my back as I get close that it would be bad, bad, bad.
As for the progression:
- Do rollouts from your knees to start.
- When you start doing standing rollouts, face a wall. When you rollout, the wheel will hit the wall, catching your descent. You can then reverse the motion.
- As you get more comfortable, move further and further back from the wall.
Power Rings are also a fabulous tool for learning this movement (note that version 2.0 of the rings are available for preorder, and $55 is a great price (limited time offer)). On rings the same move is called a Standing Jackknife. The exercise and progression are simple:
- Position the rings as close to the floor as you want. Bend at the waist, grab the rings, and push them away from you until you are fully laid out.
- To make the exercise easier, raise the rings and/or start with your feet closer to them.
- To make the exercise harder, lower the rings and/or start with your feet further away.
One of the great things about using rings for this is you can vary the resistance mid-set simply by stepping to/from the rings.
After you get 100 mundane pushups, get yourself some rings and try this variation on the workout. Better yet, don't wait. One workout can feed the other. I know I'm looking forward to the off-season when I can start trying some new things, including rings. I may try building my own (scroll down a few posts to the second set of homemade rings, then click "Next Page" for more details), but really when you consider labor (and the fact that I'll screw up at least once and likely unleash toxic PVC fumes on my family) the Power Rings price looks like it hits the sweet spot.
