What if you could find a way to lower your chance of injury, bulletproof the body ahead of time, maintain mobility, achieve structural balance, and lower the risk for injury? Rather than waiting until after an injury has occurred to rehab it, be smarter and perform specific movements to avoid getting injured in the first place. This is called prehab!

Coach Christopher Sommer, the creator of the Gymnasticbodies programs, decided to regularly include specific prehabilitation movements in his athletes’ programs so that they would not only help them avoid injury before it happened, but also largely decrease the severity if it did.

Of course, accidents happen, and you can never completely prevent things from going wrong. However, a little bit of prehab goes a long way in terms of protecting your body from the chronic overuse that is so common in sports and activities of all kinds, and, in fact, many of the Gymnasticbodies prehabilitation exercises have a universal life and athletic application.

Fingertip Push-ups are part of the wrist and hand prehab portion of the GB Handstand Series. 

So what does Prehab look like?

Most strength exercises primarily move in very predictable patterns, of forward, backward, and side to side. Now, if we get injured, we usually will get injured in the untrained ranges of motion that follow more rotational, twisting, and circular paths. So, very logically, we have to train these untrained full ranges of motion to bulletproof and prehab our bodies.  

Secondarily, we prehab by using low loads and high repetitions in order to promote blood flow into our more easily damaged connective tissues, tendons, joints, and ligaments.

The stronger you are, the harder you fall

Counter-intuitively, the stronger, tighter and more muscular you are, the more prehabilitation you need. Chinese Olympic rings specialist Yan Mingyong is a prime example of this. He is known to perform roughly two hours of warm-up and prehabilitation exercises every day, which becomes necessary given his ridiculous levels of strength (at a bodyweight of 50 kg, he bench pressed 130 kg).

Show me an example!

Since we previously mentioned Yan Mingyong’s monster bench press, let’s go over an exercise universally applicable to not only bench press, but ring movements like planche as well. This widely used example in the Gymnasticbodies courses is called the “Scap Shrug”.

Scapular Shrugs are a fantastic prehab exercise to strengthen the smaller muscles across the torso and back and will help to strengthen and prepare your body for not only bench press, but also the aforementioned planche as well.

Here’s How

Begin in a plank position with your legs together, knees locked, and core tight. Initiate the shrug by retracting or “pinching” your shoulder blades down and together in the middle of your back as you descend towards the floor.

From the bottom, begin to protract, or “pull”, your shoulder blades apart by spreading them across your back as you fully push back up to your completely protracted (round shouldered), position, do not bend those elbows or arch that lower back!

Find out more about these and other integrated original and athletically universal prehab exercises in the Gymnasticbodies Online Courses!