Self Experimentation Through Gymnastics and Yoga

As of late I have been trying to improve my general fitness and strength using both two things Gymnastics conditioning and Yoga.

I have never been a particularly large person let alone even very strong, what I am though is fairly athletic. For the last few years I have spent most of my attempts at becoming more fit in the weight room trying to get bigger and stronger to match my athleticism .

To give an example I went from 135lbs at the end of my senior year of high school and graduated college with a body weight hovering around 175 to 180lbs, with my heaviest being 185. I always thought if I could reach 200lbs then I would finally be big enough to start making some significant strength gains but through the years of trying to get stronger and bigger I have managed to get a few injuries that took me months to recover from.

The first major one that I can think of is a groin strain I suffered last year likely due to heavy front squats or pressing a beer keg half-full of water over my head.

Now I currently have a pretty bad back injury that I can't quite trace the source of but is most likely due to in one way or another trying to lift something heavy with my back.

So, needless to say I haven't really done much lifting of any sort to work towards my goals in the strength and weight department. But, that doesn't mean that I have given up working out as of late I have been putting a lot of my focus into gymnastics conditioning and Yoga.

It starts with Yoga, I took a yoga class my final semester of college to try and see if I could straighten out some of the kinks in my back for the most part it seemed to work but didn't really cure much of my back pain, of course during this time I was still lifting which was probably a big mistake.

I started rehab for my back and I would leave feeling great but would walk out of the athletic trainers room and into weight room, again I wouldn't recommend this.

One thing I learned that while doing rehab almost all of the exercises I was doing was largely done with body weight with medium sized rep ranges with only about 2 sets. Now, this way of rehab I think would be great if I was someone who wasn't very active already but unfortunately I am extremely active and fit.

So my solution was to get a book called Building a Gymnastics Body which you can buy off of the Gymnastics Bodies website and start utilizing some of the exercises out of that book.

The book has become my new bible for all thing body weight exercises and actually offers some new challenges to test my strength in and some great variations to classics like the push up and dips.

Alongside gymnastics training I have added a much bigger focus on Yoga and stretching and it has now become something I do daily when I wake up after a light warm up.

My results for the most part have been pretty positive, I'm not 100%, but I am starting to feel like I am coming closer to feeling healthy again.