If you want to viciously stimulate muscle growth, pack on size in your upper body, and torch unwanted fat then what I’m about to show you will have you dribbling with excitement.
Here’s what it’s all about…
Gymnastic rings are one of the most potent bits of gear you could use when it comes to increasing upper body muscle.
When you understand how to use the ring training you’ll never waste your time or do ineffective workouts.
And here’s more good news…
In this fast to read, yet valuable article I’ll show how to use the rings, some of the best exercises for building muscles, and a few need to know things so you get faster results.
When you’re done here, you’ll be armed with a clear understanding of how to build muscles with the rings, and you’ll have a simple yet effective program to get you started.
Sound good to you?
Great. Let’s take a look.
Can You Build Muscle With Gymnastic Rings?
Watch some footage of Olympic gymnasts using the rings and you’ll see the kind of muscles you can build with gymnastic rings.
To build muscles you need progressive overload and you must challenge your muscles in different ways, and that’s why the rings are so potent.
Here’s a scientific explain by Oxford University about progressive overload:
“According to this basic training principle, training must include overload and progression to be successful. The body must be overloaded so that it has to work harder than normal.
As the body adapts to a particular workload, the person should progress to a higher work level. For example, to gain strength, the muscles must be loaded beyond the point at which they are normally loaded.
As the muscles become stronger, the load has to be increased to stimulate further strength increases. The load should be increased gradually over a long period of training. If the load is too high, there is a risk of overtraining and overuse injuries.”
So yes, you can build muscles with the gymnastic rings. Even with just a handful of exercises you’ll see noticeable results within 60-days.
What Are The Benefits Of Training With Gymnastic Rings?
- With bodyweight exercises and gymnastic rings, you can target, work, and enhance all muscles in your upper body when training with gymnastic rings.
- There’s no time wasting and there’s endless progressions you can do with ring exercises, so even the most stubborn or muscles have no other option but to grow bigger.
- The gym isn’t the only way to build muscle. With gymnastic rings, kettlebells or some dumbbells you build muscles.
- And you can work out anytime you want, anywhere you want.
Get a set of rings and you’ll never get sick and tried of looking at your ripped body and neither will others.
What Are The Best Gymnastic Rings To Buy?
Wooden rings feel good in your hands as opposed to plastic produced rings.
Here’s what you’ve got to look for when buying a set of rings…
- Look at the stitching on the straps, is there a good amount of stitching?
- You don’t want the straps to tear apart.
- You can get rings of two different size diameters, 28mm and 32mm. 28mm is standard Olympic size. 32mm feels chunkier in your hands. Some like the thicker grip.
- Check for the rated breaking strain of the straps. You want straps that have a high breaking point. 300kg+ breaking point means it’d take a lot to break your straps. 500kg even better.
- Look at the buckles that will hold the straps in place. You want tough, robust buckles. There’s nothing more annoying than straps that keep sliding through the buckle because the buckle is weak and cheap. You want your rings to stay even when you’re using them.
How To Set Up Gymnastic Rings (How To Hang Rings)
Whatever you hang your straps over, it must be able to hold your bodyweight and more.
Where you can hang your straps:
- Swings in a park
- Monkey bars
- Over a beam in your house
- Over chin-up bar set up in a doorway
- Over a thick branch on a tree
- Over a pull up bar
If you’re attaching your rings to the roof of your garage, make sure whatever your using can support your weight.
If you can train outdoors with your rings go for it. The fresh air does wonders for you. Even in the dead of winter outdoors is great for your physical and mental strength.
How To Get Started With The Rings
If you’ve spent time on social media you’ve see guys doing all sorts of advanced routine movements that look impressive. And some moves are impressive because they take an incredible amount of strength to do them.
When you’re starting out there’s no need to worry about advanced ring training movements. If you struggle to bust out 12+ reps each of exercises like ring pull-ups, dips, and rings rows then you got to build strength.
Understand, you’ve got to get the foundations right first, build a solid strength base, otherwise you’re wasting your time, and worse you’ll injure yourself.
When First Using The Rings:
- Get used to holding your own bodyweight you’ll notice you wobble around a lot
- If pulling or pushing exercises with just your bodyweight are too hard for you, get yourself some resistance bands, because with many of the exercises you can do band-assisted exercises.
- Get stronger muscles using some foundation movements. Ring chin-ups, dips, rows and face-pulls. When you get strong with these 4 movements you’ll find you build muscles and you can progress to some of the more advanced ring movements.
- If you try to do advanced moves before you build a solid strength base you’ll hurt your shoulder joints.
How You Can Use Progression Exercises:
The rings are challenging. An exercise might look easy until you try it and quickly realise you can’t do it. That’s okay, we use progressions to get you there.
Example…
Ring Fly: It’s like dumbbell flys however you’re doing it with the rings. The setup is rings down near the ground and your body in the push-up position. But this might be impossible for you to do the movement.
If that’s the case here’s a progression you’d use.
You’d set your rings up much higher, so you’re in a standing position with your body on an angle.
You’re still doing flys however, when you increase the angle for this movement it makes the exercise easier to do.
As you get stronger and can do more reps, you lower the rings. Over time you’ll build a bigger, stronger, chest and end up doing your ring flys down at ground level.
A progression approach can get used with ring push-ups…
If you can’t do push-ups with your rings set up just above ground height, that’s fine. Here’s what you do…
- Bring your rings up higher
- Grab hold of your rings and have your body so it’s on an angle
- Now go down then push up
- Keep your body rigid and don’t let your hips drop down towards the ground
- What your doing is changing the angle to make the movement a little easier for you
- As you get stronger you drop your rings down lower
7 Muscle Growing Gymnastic Ring Exercises… Get Bigger Faster
Let me lay it out for you…
Right here are 7 exercises you can use in a workout, if you get super-strong at these movements your body grows, your muscles get hard, and you get noticeable gains.
- Dips
- Push-Ups With Chest Squeeze
- Ring Rows
- Ring Face Pulls
- Pull Ups
- Chest Fly
- Ring Push Ups
Understand in your program, you should have push and pull exercises. If you do more push than pull exercises you’ll end up with strong front muscles and weak puny back muscles, and your core strength suffers.
Sets Reps And Temp With Your Training
If you do the same number of reps and the same number of sets week in, week out you won’t increase strength or muscle size.
You’ve got to mix things up.
Example workout…
You do 3 sets of Dips and you get 8 reps out each set. That’s 24 reps in total.
To make this harder and mix things up in next week’s workout you could do as many reps as you can for your first set, as many reps as you could for your second and third sets.
Your numbers could end up, 12, 9, 7. That’s 28 reps which is 3 more reps than last week. Nice work.
Or you could slow the tempo down.
You lower yourself down on a count of 3 seconds then drive back up. If you get 8 reps out that’s 24 seconds of muscle under tension. Do this for 3-4 reps in your workout.
When you slow things down, you’ll find it harder to get reps out because your muscle is under tension for longer periods of time.
About The Number Of Sets And Reps…
Some folks get all caught up on exact numbers. “Exactly how many sets and reps do I do?”
Numbers are a guideline, a starting point because here’s the thing…
If I say do 3 sets of 8 reps and you do that and do it easy, you’ve made no progression. If you get a little more understating about training and you see a few examples like I just showed you. Then you get a better feel and understanding of what you need to do to get results. Never just blindly follow a program.
Here’s something else to think about…
If the first set was easy and you could have done more, and you feel like your muscles had plenty left in the tank.
Go harder on the second set.
Then on the third set you might slow your reps down and keep your muscles under tension for longer.
Get caught up in the mind body connection and feeling your muscles work.
Here’s one more example:
Wk1: Sets 3 Reps 12-14
Wk2: Sets 4 Reps 10-12
To make Wk2 harder you might slow down the temp of your reps.
Example, ring chin ups. Pull up on a count of 1,2,3 than lower yourself down on 1, then repeat.
Can You Train Rings Every Day?
What’s important for you is your age, health, and your background.
Here’s the thing…
You can smash your body and get away with a lot more at 25 than you can at 42 years of age. I know this from firsthand experience. My 42-year-old body recovers differently from training than it did at 25.
If you’ve got any old sporting injuries or injuries from the work you’ve done over your life, like shoulder issues, or elbow issues that type of thing. Then training with the rings every day may upset and injure your body.
Let me show you what I mean…
I purchased a program off a guy online who really knows his stuff. He’s much younger than me. The program says to train 4 x upper body days a week, push day and pull day, and 2 x lower-body days.
I worked on gas drilling rigs for a few years and the constant repetition from lifting and throwing heavy tools for 12 hours a day took a toll on my elbow joints.
Before I started the new program, I was training upper x 2 times a week and lower x 2 times a week and that worked great.
With the new program training my upper body 4 x times a week was too much. After 2 weeks my joints were killing me.
So, I reduced the days back to 2 x upper and did a mix of push and pull exercises, and 2 x lower body days. My elbow issues stopped.
Here’s another little thought…
If you train with rings every day when does your body get time to recover and grow?
Recovery is just as important as the training. When you’re young, full or energy and feel invincible, rest days seem like a waste of your time. They aren’t.
There’s no need to smash and wear your joints out training with the rings every day. You don’t need to train every day to get results.
Can You Do Pull-Ups With Rings?
Sure can, there’s a few different ways you can do them…
- You can do pull-ups with rings, close grip and wide grip with your palms facing away from you
- You can do chin-ups with your palms facing you
- And you can do neutral grip pull-ups, that’s where you grip the rings so your elbows are close to your body and your palms face it other.
I use a neutral grip because I find it doesn’t upset my elbows I nearly destroyed working on the rigs. Find a pull-up grip that works best for you.
Build Muscles With Gymnastic Rings…. And Feel And Look Great Naked
Using gymnastic rings you can build strength, increase muscle mass and you can do it using just a handful of gymnastic ring exercises to start with.
- Ring dips
- Ring Chin/pull-ups
- Ring Rows
- Ring push-ups all do the job.
Once you’re strength training on a regular basis, you’re feeling strong with these movements and you can see visible results in your body, then you can try some of the harder movements you might want to do.
Get the basics right first, I say this because a lot of people give up on the rings very early because they don’t see any progression. The problem is they don’t give themselves enough time, and they’re trying to do advanced movements when they haven’t even advanced with the fundamental movements.
When it comes to packing on noticeable muscle strength training gymnastics rings do the job.
