Basic Gymnastic Ring Training

Gymnastic rings are a brilliant training tool for developing upper body and core strength and stability.

Gymnastic rings are often viewed as an advanced training tool, and while they can certainly be used for advanced exercises, they are suitable for most people to use and one of their benefits is that movements can be modified for a variety of levels of difficulty.

Here are some basic gymnastic ring exercises to get started with:

Ring Push Up

The ring push up allows you to move through a much greater range of motion than a push up on the floor, so not only helps improve mobility and flexibility, but works your body harder.

The unstable nature of the rings provides added benefits:

• Instability = greater activation of stabilising muscles in the core and shoulder = training your body in a way that helps prevent injury.
• Grip strength training – holding onto the rings gives you the added benefit of training your crushing grip to stabilise, and this type of grip strength has good carryover to general pressing strength

The ring push up is very easy to modify for all different strength levels.  As with floor push ups starting on the knees is easiest and this can be progressed to doing push ups on the feet and from there variations such as one foot can be employed to increase the difficulty level.

The other way to modify the difficultly level is to increase or decrease the angle of the body by walking the rings out.  So the steeper the angle (the further from horizontal) the easier the push up will be (just like doing push ups against the wall compared with doing them on the floor).

Ring Roll Out

The ring roll out is a fantastic exercise for strengthening the whole upper body and core – very much like a roll out performed on an ab wheel.

One of the benefits of the ring roll out is that the arms are separated so a more comfortable shoulder position can be maintained (rather than being restricted by the narrow handles of an ab wheel) and the shoulders have to stabilise independently, making them work a little harder and getting greater activation through stabilising muscles such as the rotator cuff.

Again there are a couple of ways to adjust the difficulty of the ring roll out.  As with the ring push up you can start on your knees and progress to feet or change the angle of your body.

Ring Row

The ring row is a great upper back exercise (the perfect complement to the ring push up).  As with the push up, the rings allow you to go through a greater range of motion than you would doing a row using a bar, which means more comfort and greater muscle activation.

To adjust the difficulty you can bend the knees, progress to straight legs, elevate the legs and play with balancing on one foot.  You can also change the angle of your body as with the other ring exercises.