Distinct’s Ultimate Health & Conditioning

I found this awesome primer on gymastic skills in my bookmarks this afternoon. It’s from dragondoor.com, which has a lot of great stuff on it such as Pavel Tsatsouline and his kettlebells, serious stuff!

Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning

by Christopher Sommer

We have all seen them on television during the Olympics; these powerful men performing amazing skills with ease and grace. Watching them perform the question inevitably arises – are they as powerful as they look? And the answer is – yes. What will probably be even more surprising to you is that they build their strength and physiques almost entirely with various bodyweight exercises.

The list of requirements is long and can be rather daunting to prepare a world class athlete: passive flexibility, active flexibility, joint preparation, static strength, dynamic strength etc. etc. and is probably only interesting in detail to those of us involved with the physical preparation of champions. There are of course some supplemental exercises where weight is added (i.e. weighted leg lifts), however the central premise remains; these amazing athletes have built the vast majority of their strength and power through the use of bodyweight conditioning. Read the rest! –>