"Off Season" Conditioning

[Tumbler97]

I am in serious need of exercises I can do at home or in a gym to help me with different floor skills. I do gymnastics all-year round, but in the summer I only have it once a week. I am also a competitive cheer leader so any jump training or balance drills would help me out alot. Also, I am mainly focusing on arm strength but intend to work on other muscles too - I have very weak arms but pretty strong abs and core. My main event is floor and my second is bars, both level 4. Lastly, I am more worried about strength than flexibility. Any ideas?

 

[profmom]

Do you have one of those pull up bars you can install on a door frame? You can do a lot to build arm strength with one of them.

 

[BlairBob]

If you have access to a gym, do your squats and press overhead or bench press and maybe deadlift be it with a bar or dumbbells. And I don't mean pink 5lb dumbbells. You'll need to actually work challenging weights to get strong.

If you are just conditioning at home, get a pullup bar and do jumping pullups if you can't do regular ones besides lots of leg lifts and L-holds.

For developing your upper body strength, work a lot of HS holds against the wall and master the ability to do a pushups perhaps even working on a handstand pushup. I doubt you are ready for those yet so you will probably have to work on mastering your pushups and lowering yourself slowly from a handstand on the wall to headstand. You can also try doing pushups while you are in a bridge.

For lower body body strength, sprinting on a track or running stairs or uphill runs are fairly decent. One legged running/jumping is another option. Lots of lunging or lunge jumps.

 

[Tumbler97]

Thanks for the help! And don't worry, I usually use 10 pound weights, because my coach is brutal. I will be sure to try those drills.

 

[Tumbler97]

And yes I do have one of those! I didn't even think to use it because it is somewhere in our basement Thank you!

 

[BlairBob]

Well, you look pretty young but I only let the very young or weak girls use the 10lb dumbbells or if their form is poor because they cannot control their core or have weak legs. Most of my L4s and 5s could easily use those the 10 pounders except the few that were just lazy or weak.

We had a 45/50lb bar and one around 65-70 that some of the strongest ones used (the older L5s and L6s).

I think the biggest dumbbells we had were 30 pounders. At that weight, many of the girls could not hold them so I would graduate them to the weighted bar instead on their shoulders. For one of my 9yo L4s, this was basically equal to her bodyweight (she weighed around 50-60lbs).

Of course, perfect form was required and we started with 3 or 5lb dumbbells and went up from there.

My lil guys would commonly use 2 25 pounders for split squats or squats and they weighed 45-55lbs. Erik squatted the 70 pound bar 10 or 15x once.

The take home statement is you would be surprised how strong you can be if you try. However, perfect form is a must. Perfectly upright core and torso with lunges that make right angles in the knees (half of a square).