Through CrossFit, I've recently heard about the benefits of training with gymnastics rings. Today my rings, which I purchased from RingTraining.com (affiliate link) for a pretty reasonable price, arrived - and I've been using them a bit. To get an idea of the kind of strength training you can do with rings, check out this example of the very difficult Iron Cross skill:
The three main exercises I'm interested in performing (or at least, trying to perform) are ring pull-ups, ring dips and the muscle-up. Pull-ups on rings can supposedly be a bit easier on the shoulders than static bar pull-ups, and since the rings move, can require some core strength to stabilise the body. Some people train pull-ups solely on rings because of the shoulder relief they can offer.
Doing dips on the rings is quite a bit harder than doing them on a standard, static gym dip-frame, again because the rings move and you must work a lot harder to maintain stability. I find my arms shaking after doing just a couple of ring dips - something I've only had happen after a few hundred reps on the static bar.
The muscle-up is like a pull-up followed by a dip. According to CrossFit, its roughly equivalent in terms of exertion to three pull-ups and three dips. It can take months or more to develop the strength to do it - I'm certainly not there yet. For more info on the muscle-up, and other skills, check out BeastSkills.com.
Niall O'Higgins is an author, event organizer and software consultant. He wrote the book MongoDB and Python, published by O'Reilly. Events he organizes include We Have Tablets, the #1 Bay Area Tablet Computing Meet-up and PyWebSF. He also offers consulting services for Mobile, Tablet and Cloud Computing.
