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The Gymnastic Bodies Coach Sommer Interview | The Cloudfoot Diaries #67

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Christopher Sommer Gymnastic Bodies

Coach Sommer
doesn’t really need an introduction from me. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s worth your time checking him out. In a nutshell, he’s coached a load of gymnasts to championship level over a few decades and knows what it takes to build a real gymnastic body – one that can function and perform to a high level but can also adapt and manage day-to-day realities and challenges. Sans bullshit.

Tim Ferriss did a wicked interview with Sommer, questioning him lots on the training process and various important points surrounding it.

A personal favourite takeaway from the interview was that it takes 211(+/-) days for soft tissue to adapt to a stimulus, apparently. I didn’t know it took that long for a change to be made but it makes sense when you realise muscle adapts nearly twice as fast compared to other softer tissues.

In terms of your own experience, what’s easier to build in less time, guns or range of motion?

It’s always been guns for me.

What are we told, is the more important of the two? Well, I’ve been marketed to since I was about 10, the importance big biceps have to play in the day-to-day support of a man’s life. So what does that tell you what is really the most important of the two? Definitely not guns. And what does it reveal about the nature of our egos?

The more I delve into the realms of the corporal, the more I’m concluding that one should look to train the body from the inside working outwards, starting and focusing on weaknesses and working to turn them in to strengths.
(This is the exact opposite of the mainstream’s thought process; working your body from the outside in, enhancing its weaknesses and your own ego’s, so that you may look good and eat whatever you want during your week’s holiday to the beach.)

On another guns-related point, Sommer reckons that straight-arm strength work was one of the biggest bicep mass-builders he used in his arsenal as an Olympic coach. Figure that one out; building biceps of a ring gymnast without much arm bending at all. Now go out and laugh at everyone doing curls. Everyone.

And lastly, your shoulder extension probably sucks. Mine does, too. My shoulder extension range decreases rapidly the more time I spend on strength training and muscle building protocols. Listening to Sommer rant about the importance of shoulder extension and how it carries over into so many movements and patterns, caught my attention. On a related note, shoulder dislocates are an exercise I see 95% of people perform wrongly and yet could be regarded as one of the most valuable and useful mobility exercises in existence.

My ego was also discouraged when I heard Sommer casually say it would be sensible to spend two thirds of my time training mobility and one third training for strength and skills. As it stands, my ratio is the opposite.

If elements of this interview don’t suprise you, I will be surprised.

 

 

The post The Gymnastic Bodies Coach Sommer Interview | The Cloudfoot Diaries #67 appeared first on harrycloudfoot.


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