Gymnastic rings are also known as workout rings, wooden rings or calisthenics rings. They can be used in many different ways. Gymnastic rings are a great tool to use in your calisthenics training. In this article we are going in-depth to explain all the benefits of working out gymnastic rings in calisthenics. If you are interested in a beginner’s guide for calisthenics rings click here to read our blog about training with gymnastic rings.
1. You Can Train Your Whole Body
With gymnastic rings you can perform over 100 exercises in your training. You can do push-up variations, dip variations, muscle-ups, ring rows and pull-ups. Moreover, there are also more than 30 pull-up variations to perform. For example, chin-ups, archer pull-ups, resistance band assisted pull-ups (for beginners), negative pull-ups and so on.
You can even put your legs in the rings, stand in a push-up position and do some plank knee raises to target your six-pack. As another unique example, you can lay on your back, put your feet through the rings and do a bridge exercise. In fact, there are 10 variations to this one exercise alone!
To conclude: training with gymnastic rings has a huge number of exercise possibilities for your whole body.
2. Gymanstic Rings are Cheap
Gymnastic rings are the best and cheapest calisthenics equipment if you want to start with calisthenics. If you do not know if calisthenics is something for you, buying a good pull-up bar will burn the money in your pockets. It is quite unfortunate if you bought a €130 pull-up bar and then you discover calisthenics isn’t for you. But buying gymnastic rings is a cheap option to start with calisthenics. They come in different price categories. You can buy them for as little €24,90. That saves money and as a beginner in calisthenics you could even do more exercises with rings than on a simple pull-up bar.
Just to be clear, we at Calisthenics Worldwide do favour a proper pull-up bar if you want to continue with calisthenics. If you are just starting to train with a pull-up bar, you should consider getting some resistance bands to make it easier for yourself. In short, if you are a beginner in calisthenics, gymnastic rings give you the best kickstart into your calisthenics journey.
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3. Gymnastic Rings Allow You to Train Anywhere
Gymnastic rings are easy to use everywhere you go. Our team loves to travel all around the world and we tried it on many different places. Many different pull-up bars are easy to take with you on a trip, but are too heavy to take with you in an airplane. This is where gymnastic rings show their benefit. Rings are small, lightweight and easily fit into your backpack or travel case.
You can attach gymnastic rings to a tree on the beach, on a monkey bar in a playground for kids, under a bridge and even on a staircase.
4. Rings Increase Your Mobility
If you used gymnastic rings before, you may have noticed that during your workout the rings will rotate your shoulders constantly. For example, if you do the ring row exercise you could keep your arms still or you could add some internal and external rotation components for you increasing shoulder mobility. Moreover, you could target specific ring exercises for increased mobility. One of them is the skinned cat. We are currently working on a complete guide to show you almost every mobility exercise for gymnastic rings. So be sure to stay tuned for that.
5. Gymnastic Rings Target Your (Core) Stabilization Muscle
To understand why you train your core stability a lot faster you need to understand the concept of “open chain exersices” and “closed chain exersies”.
Closed chain exercises are performed while your body stays 100% connected to the floor. There is no unstable underground or anything wobbly. The easiest example is a simple push-up. You place your hands on the ground or maybe some low calisthenics parallettes but this is connected to the ground which makes it easier for your body to target your chest.
On the other hand, there are open chain exercises. These exercises consist of a variety of exercises where you body is not connected to the floor or just semi-connected to the floor. To use the example of the push-up again, we will explain the gymnastic rings push-up. Of course this push-up variation targets your chest muscles, but your hands do not touch the ground. They touch the gymnastic rings, which hang above the floor. This is an unstable surface and your stabilization muscles need to work harder than during a normal push-up on the ground.
6. Reduce Injuries
Most of our team consists of physiotherapists and we constantly focus on injury prevention and rehab. Gymnastic rings stimulate a pattern that your body likes. In other words: workout rings will stimulate the natural movement pattern of your body. This will result in less stress on your shoulder, elbows and wrists. Performing these exercises through natural movement patterns will reduce the stress on tendons and ligaments compared to exercising on fixated bars.
7. Training on Gymnastic Rings is Fun!
We feel like this is by far the most important benefit on training with gymnastic rings. Research shows that if you have fun in your daily activities your body produces more positive hormones which will also affect muscle growth. Be creative! As we mentioned earlier, we could easily show you more than 100 exercises for training with gymnastic rings. We challenge you to come-up with more variations.
Takeaway
Using gymnastic rings in exercises will enhance your inner creativity and spirit. This will be a fun proces and will also help you learn about movement and training. You are going to see how to make exercises harder or easier for yourself. This is the most important skill in training. If you know how to change one exercise to maybe 10 exercises with easier or harder variations you are a born personal trainer. Enjoy the proces and let us know how you feel in your comments on our Instagram.
