Get your core kipping ready
Want to improve your gymnastics? Make sure your core is kipping ready!
Do you struggle to increase your max sets of muscle ups, pull ups or toes to bar?
Do you struggle to link a few reps together and feel your kip quickly gets out of rhythm?
Do you feel you lose all speed and power at the bottom of your kip?
Do you get lower back or shoulder pain when kipping?
Do you do the chicken wing when performing a muscle Up?
If your answer is YES to one or more of those questions, chances are your core and how you train it is what is holding you back. Core work is not flashy — you will rarely see someone posting a max L-sit hold PB on Instagram - but it is a crucial part of your performance, and a key element to keep you injury free in any sport and in CrossFit in particular.
Potential gaps in your training appear when the techniques or exercises you are performing to improve a specific movement are not congruent with its mechanical requirements. When this occurs, loss in performance and/or injuries are often the outcome.
When it comes to kipping movements in gymnastics, a key element is to develop an effective kip, for which core function is fundamental. How you train your core is crucial, as it needs to ensure that your core mechanics are up to the task but there are some critical aspects that may be missing in your usual routine.
Forces at work and muscle function
Kipping muscle ups, C2B/pull ups or toes to bar place an incredible amount of force through your body during the backswing phase. The backswing is the phase that initiates when you are in the support position, arms locked out at the top of the movement on the bar or rings during a muscle-up, or when your chin or chest are over the bar during a pull up, or when your toes are in contact with the rig during a toes to bar. The phase ends when you reach the arch position below the rings or bar, that C shape where your arms and legs are behind your torso and hips.
During this phase, your entire body (or the legs only for a toes to bar) is travelling downward under the effect of gravity, while at the same time your upper body is travelling forward and your legs are travelling backward, all whilst gathering momentum and speed. This creates a situation where significant forces of opposite directions are going through the main joints where the motions occur: the shoulders, spine and hips. Although the directions are opposite to one another in the backswing, they act together to drive the same motion in the relevant joints and by doing so at the same time, magnify the load going through them. The forward movement of your upper body is driving shoulder flexion and spine extension from the top down when at the same time the backward movement of the legs is driving hip and spine extension from the bottom up.
In the backswing like in any other movement, the function of your muscles is to control the motions your bones and joints are going through. They lengthen and load to counteract a force (such as gravity) applied to a bone to then shorten and explode in order to control, slow down or initiate the motion of a bone. The best way to think about it is to think about a muscle like a piece of elastic. It lengthens and loads as you pull its ends further apart before springing back as you release. Here in the backswing, the relevant muscles are loading to decelerate the shoulder flexion and the spine and hip extension before exploding to initiate the next repetition. Your core in particular is controlling and decelerating the extension occurring around your midsection before exploding to create flexion (for the next rep). Those are the biomechanical demands of the kip and the elements which your training should prepare your body for.
The role of training
The role of your training is indeed to teach your body to understand the motions it will go through during specific movement(s) and to be able to perform them as safely and efficiently as possible both from a mechanical and a physiological point of view. To this end, a substantial part of your training will of course consist in performing the movements themselves. It will also include some additional training protocols and exercises to help you develop and improve key features of the movement(s) you are training for, either by lowering the skill demand and targeting a specific part of the movement (for example some drills to better acquire the technique) or by performing some specific work to improve your mechanics (if you are interested to learn more about this, I recommend listening to this podcast on the functional continuum).
Core training for kipping gymnastics should be looked at from this perspective.
Common gaps in core training
Very often core training will consist in some sort of static holds (hollow holds/rock, planks, planche or lever progressions etc) or more dynamic flexion/extension exercises performed on the floor or hanging (dead bug, sit ups, tuck ups, V-ups, candlesticks, strict toes to bar, etc). Those are all very important exercises to practise and master. They will carry over perfectly to strict gymnastics movements, because they develop your ability to stabilise and statically control your body and help you acquire the pre-requisite level of strength and stamina to perform more dynamic gymnastics movements.
However those exercises are missing a major element to make them specifically relevant to the kipping gymnastics movements. They are keeping you in a FLEXED/NEUTRAL position of the thoracic spine and hips. They are not training you in the entire range of motion required by those kipping movements and THIS IS CRITICAL. I am talking about building the control and strength in the positions you are going through during the backswing phase of the kip, phase in which your thoracic spine and hips are extending all the way to the bottom of the kip in a position where they are EXTENDED with your arms and feet behind your torso and hips.
Where we often go wrong is thinking that we are training those positions through typical exercises like arch holds or rocks where the stomach and hips are on the floor. Yes they LOOK like the same positions but the demands placed on the body and the amount of abdominal loading are completely different.
During those ‘arch’ position exercises, the body is working to create and maintain core extension while resisting gravity which is driving your arms and legs towards a more neutral core position (i.e. you are working to keep arms and legs off the floor whilst gravity is pushing them down to make you lie flat on the floor). This is the opposite to what happens during the arch position at the bottom of a kip where the body is working to resist, decelerate and control the core extension driven by the directions of travel of your head, torso and legs we described previously.
Let me illustrate my point for a second. Stand up for me. Now push your hips forward and let you head and shoulder lean back…do you feel your abs working? Try with your hands overhead…yes now things are starting to shake! This is similar to the position you are in at the bottom of your kip. Does that feel anything like what you feel you do arch ups or arch holds lying down on the floor? Not really, no. To put it in simple terms, it does not feel the same because, rather than loading your lower back and glutes isometrically to hold the arch/C shape on the floor, in the experiment you’ve just done your abdominal muscles are loading and working to protect your spine from bending too far backwards.
Imagine a piece of plastic, like a credit card, and you try to bend it by pulling both ends towards one another, what happens? If the plastic is too rigid, and the forces are great enough, it will have minimal flexion before it snaps in two. If the plastic is too weak and malleable, it will be unable to resist the forces and will fold in half, and potentially will be unable to spring back to its initial shape. In the backswing phase of kipping movements, if your abdominals are not trained to absorb and decelerate the directional forces, things will go wrong: positions and mechanics will break down, you expend more energy than required to perform the movements, leading to a decrease in your movement efficiency. Or worse, where the movements are done repeatedly without the appropriate core mechanics, your shoulders or lower back will start to hurt or get injured as they are put under higher pressure or forced through a greater range of motion than they should because the core is not doing its share of work.
Performance, injuries and the biomechanical continuum
Movement efficiency, performance and injuries are all part of the same biomechanical continuum. The extent of the biomechanical limitation is what will dictate your place on the continuum, whether you are wasting energy, experiencing pain or on your way to get injured. Great biomechanics is a prerequisite for great technique and this combination is what brings optimal movement efficiency. Any mechanical limitation has a cost in terms of technique and energy expenditure to accomplish the same task. In CrossFit (and in many other sports), this cost is often the difference between winning and losing. When this limitation is greater, it may translate into joints or bones being out of position by a few centimeters or even millimeters from where they should be, creating a changes in angles and levers and increasing drastically the load going through the relevant joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments and often the cause of the pain or injury. For a deep dive into leverage and mechanical force check out Phil and James’ podcast on this.
Whether you are looking to improve your movement efficiency when doing kipping gymnastics movements or you want to make sure your body is generally as bulletproof as possible, you will want to include some core exercises that target and develop your strength and control in the entire range of motion of those movements, making sure they include going in and out of thoracic and hip extension at varying speeds.
Here are a few favourites:
Plank with forward hip drive in and out (aka floor humps)
Ring roll outs and Barbell roll outs with neutral pelvis position and driving thoracic extension (not ribcage down or hollow position)
Ring or Rower Pike Ups making sure you fully open the hips at the bottom
Overhead medicine ball throw from tall kneeling position - make sure you keep the arm straight
Just a few last words from me. Remember that techniques and exercise prescription are just tools. They are only relevant once you have assessed the demands of the movements or the sport you are training for. Don’t apply them blindly. Step out of your hollow and make sure you train your core to be kipping ready. Oh and one last thing, training your core to be strong in extension will also improve your overhead/handstand movements and squats…SAY WHAT?!!