Gymnastic bodies vs Ido portal method

[Connor Davies]

- The GB Courses are designed to prepare the human body athletically and are not specific to technical gymnastics.

 

- One the one hand you say that gymnasts will perform the best overall at all different sports and then on the other hand you are trying to claim that Ido's system will prepare people who are better than gymnasts at movement as well as possessing a higher quality.   However I have seen no proof supporting this assertion.

 

- Watch and learn, my friends.  No one moves better than high level gymnasts.  

 

Without a doubt, gymnasts express the potential of the human body for acrobatic movement at its ultimate level; explosive power, agility, balance. All else is but a pale shadow in comparison.  And to try to say otherwise is simply the sheerest unsupported hyperbole.

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

Coach, I meant no disrespect.  And admittedly I should have waited until the forthcoming Movement series comes out before passing judgement on the movement portion of your curriculum.

 

Specifically though I have to question whether gymnastics truly prepares you for all movements.  Can a gymnast perform a textbook Olympic lift, despite never having touched a barbell before?

[Connor Davies]

I doubt is has been tested, but use logic. Rowers cannot do backflips, iron crosses, etc, but gymnasts can obviously row with great power. Gymnasts may not be able to swim with any Olympic swimmer, but can the swimmer compete with the gymnast in the their most basic skills?

Can gymnasts swim at all?  I can't imagine anything in artistic gymnastics that would match those movement patterns.

 

Now diving, on the other hand, is pretty much a gymnasts bread and butter.

[Coach Sommer]

Coach, I meant no disrespect. And admittedly I should have waited until the forthcoming Movement series comes out before passing judgement on the movement portion of your curriculum.

Specifically though I have to question whether gymnastics truly prepares you for all movements. Can a gymnast perform a textbook Olympic lift, despite never having touched a barbell before?

I guess whether or not my athletes have been successful with their occassional experiments with lifting would depend upon your standards and how you feel about a 1.5 bodyweight jerk, a 300lb bench and a triple bodyweight deadlift.

- Not text book form by any means, however the first and only time they ever attempted OL, in only 45 minutes an Olympic Lifting coach had all of my guys jerking 1.5 times bodyweight.

He assured me that their form was terrible and then we both laughed when we began to consider what they would be capable of jerking once they learned proper technique.

- Dillon benched 300lbs at a bodyweight of 145lbs after spending a couple of weeks messing with bench press in college.

- JJ pulled a triple bodyweight deadlift (405lbs at 135lbs bodyweight) his first day of high school weight lifting.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Coach Sommer]

Can gymnasts swim at all?  I can't imagine anything in artistic gymnastics that would match those movement patterns.

 

Now diving, on the other hand, is pretty much a gymnasts bread and butter.

In BUDs training, on their 1000m swims ------- is currently the third out of the water behind two former collegiate swimmers. Yes, he had a bit of a learning curve, but then he pretty much left everyone else behind except for the ex-varsity swimmers. ------ attributes his swim performance improvements to his massive core strength in comparison to everyone else and his highly developed ability for analyzing and breaking down physical movements into their core components from his years of gymnastics with me.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Vincent Stoyas]

Coach, I meant no disrespect.  And admittedly I should have waited until the forthcoming Movement series comes out before passing judgement on the movement portion of your curriculum.

 

Specifically though I have to question whether gymnastics truly prepares you for all movements.  Can a gymnast perform a textbook Olympic lift, despite never having touched a barbell before?

Also, Coach has said this about ------'s BUD/S training,

"------ is not yet at BUDs proper, although he is certainly running more than the average mountain goat; I believe that he is averaging 10-15 miles per day running. He is currenty in week 6 or so of BUDs Prep (an 8 week course). If he continues to pass all of the evaluations (half the class failed the pushup test the other day) then he will head to BUDs Orientation (formerly known as Indoc) for another 4 weeks. If he survives all of this, then he is scheduled to begin BUDs in November.

Everyone else's shins and ankles are trashed from all of the fin work, but ------ feels fine so far.

Picture a steam locomotive in a pool and that is how ------ started out with his swimming. A lot of motion and energy, but very little actual forward movement.

On his last 1,000m swim with fins last week he was third out of the water, just behind a former collegiate swimmer."

[Christian Nogueira]

I doubt is has been tested, but use logic. Rowers cannot do backflips, iron crosses, etc, but gymnasts can obviously row with great power. Gymnasts may not be able to swim with any Olympic swimmer, but can the swimmer compete with the gymnast in the their most basic skills?

Well, I'm a skeptic by disposition .  I do believe that overall, GST is one of the best, if not the best systematic approach there is to fitness for the general population.

 

However I think saying that gymnasts in general will be superior to other athletes in general in ten random sports is a stronger claim. I think it'll depend on the athlete, on the athlete's coach, on the 10 sports chosen. Ultimately I feel it's too strong a claim to feel it can be validated by thought exercises alone.

[Coach Sommer]

Sport specific skills must still be mastered. What GST does so well is build a physical structure that is able to learn those specific skills efficiently and then express those same skills with a great deal of power and coordination.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Joseff Lea]

 I do believe that overall, GST is one of the best, if not the best systematic approach there is to fitness for the general population.

 

However I think saying that gymnasts in general will be superior to other athletes in general in ten random sports is a stronger claim. I think it'll depend on the athlete, on the athlete's coach, on the 10 sports chosen. Ultimately I feel it's too strong a claim to feel it can be validated by thought exercises alone.

Here's your problem you're thinking of: "any given gymnast trained by any given gymnastic coach" compared with:"an exceptional athlete trained by an exceptional coach for another discipline" outliers will always exist for any given method of coaching. What you really need to look at is "average gymnast with average coach" v "average athlete with average coach from another given discipline" 

I do agree that it can't be proved by a thought exercise though, studies however into this kind of thing are hard to conduct and measure with meaningful results

[Coach Sommer]

No doubt!

 

The same could be said for any reputable National Team gymnastics coach.  To be able to compete in the highest levels of competition in gymnastics requires an obsessive demand for perfection in skills and attention to the smallest details.  Allowing a gymnasts to be "almost correct" will later not lead to "almost victory" but instead, certain failures.  Skills build upon one another.

 

I agree completely.  The assertion that Ido is somehow more focused on quality of movement than USA National Team Coaches is ridiculous in the extreme.  

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Joseff Lea]

I'm not entirely sure what my point was with my previous post. I did have one but I lost it midway through typing. Forgive me it's been a long day.
 

Back to the original topic. I imagine that a very closely monitored program (as I believe is what is offered by Ido) will give you much faster results than a more off-hands approach (such as buying foundation) as it can be tailored for your progress/weaknesses, this is of course assuming that your coach knows what the hell he is doing and I do have my doubts as to how well a coach can asses these things over the magic internet.
however I do think that if you were to take Foundation and use the mini mastery check for each progression that you would make very speedy progress, I would imagine a little slower than by using Ido but I doubt by much. The reason I like foundation (don't have the money to train under Ido so I can't really comment on his technique) is because I know it will get me where I want to be in a little time.

 

I believe (pure hypothesis here and please coach do tell me that I'm talking out of my ass if indeed I am... which I strongly suspect) that coaches mastery aims are a little slightly greater than what they strictly speaking need to be*. The reason for this is of course safety, coach cannot oversee everyone personally, that's a ludicrous idea! so he will make damn certain that you can't hurt yourself if you move onto an exercise having mastered the previous progression. This for me is his biggest selling point, yes if I were to train with a coach of his experience in person I would make faster progress but I can't and so I am content to know that if I put the time in I will get there injury free even though it might not be the most efficient way.

*I am in no way condoning doing anything less than mastery, christ I'm on PE2 for most exercises so if you listen to me you're an idiot!

[Connor Davies]

Sport specific skills must still be mastered. What GST does so well is build a physical structure that is able to learn those specific skills efficiently and then express those same skills with a great deal of power and coordination.

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

This.  This is exactly why I'm here.  Your experience with your athletes and the O-lifting coach just proves it.  Even though your athletes didn't have experience with any of the lifts they were still able to do extremely well by anyone's standards, and probably with a great potential to learn the movement patterns quickly.  After all, what's learning one lift compared to learning hundreds of different gymnastics skills?

[ROBERT Burtchell]

I'm pretty new to the forum, and very interested in this topic after seeing an interview with Ido. One thing he made very clear was his respect for gymnast, their movement abilities, and strength. He did say that gymnast do lack leg strength, and looking at foundation, coach has taken care of that as well. I'm new to body weight training, but I managed to get to pistols after three months. I've started foundation 1 and my reps and mobility increased significantly retesting my pistol last week.

[Mark Balsom]

Post from Ido's Facebook page. Kind of resumes some of what has been said.

 

https://www.facebook.com/portal.ido/posts/316079771839707

[FREDERIC DUPONT]

(...) a very closely monitored program (as I believe is what is offered by Ido) will give you much faster results than a more off-hands approach (such as buying foundation)  (...)

 

I strongly suspect that you, and I and most of the members of this community would be wasting both their time and Coach's with requests for a specific program.

As long as we still need to work on foundation 1 or 2 (and maybe 3 & 4), a specific program is likely not as useful as you think.

 

Hands on coaching is a different matter though.

[Coach Sommer]

Sport specific skills must still be mastered. What GST does so well is build a physical structure that is able to learn those specific skills efficiently and then express those same skills with a great deal of power and coordination.

 

Nicodemus Scheelings' post from the link above (December 21, 2012 at 1:23pm via mobile) further illustrates my point regarding the transferability of GST to working with weights:

 

"... I feel like the other sports should try to steal young gymnasts, once the hard work has been laid try and entice them away. It would save a lot of time on talent identification. The current great britain weightlifting team had three ex gymnasts at london ..."

 

Yours in Fitness,

Coach Sommer

[Joseff Lea]

I strongly suspect that you, and I and most of the members of this community would be wasting both their time and Coach's with requests for a specific program.

As long as we still need to work on foundation 1 or 2 (and maybe 3 & 4), a specific program is likely not as useful as you think.

 

Hands on coaching is a different matter though.

Totally agree with you there. Don't misunderstand me, I think for most people the basics needs to look something quite similar to what coach has laid out in Foundation simply by how bio-mechanics work. We have to generalise  before we can specialize.

I'm merely saying that specific weaknesses can be addressed sooner the more feedback you have from an experienced coach, also saying if you were to use the forum and mini mastery for feedback this would speed up results. Of course nothing will beat coaching in person, sadly that's not possible for a lot of us. 

[Michaël Van den Berg]

Just want to add my 2 cents: Ido's coaching program isn't that closely monitored. I was asked to send videos for evaluation once a month, and that was it.

 

I know that Foundation and Handstand aren't true 'online coaching' programs, but if you add the feedback available from the GB team on the forum and the opportunity to submit videos for mastery testing it's actually pretty close to online coaching.

 

And then the main difference between the two online methods becomes very clear: under Ido I was asked to provide a list of five goals (in descending order of importance) to work on (I asked for FL, PL, MUps, bridge and HS). That was it. Whereas the GB program has so much more to offer.

 

My advice would be to:

 

1) follow the online GB curriculum (and visit a seminar, if you can) for allround physical preparation, and complement with skill/movement work of your choice;

2) visit an Ido Portal workshop to broaden your movement horizon. I am sure you will learn a LOT. Do not assume, however, that the full scope of his approach is covered in his online coaching, because it isn't. I believe that, in order to fully benefit from his methodology you will need to visit his workshops on a regular basis.

 

Again, I'm not bashing Ido. He's very good. But I'm fairly sure that the majority of adult fitness enthusiasts will benefit more from the GB method. Ido's method seems more suitable for (semi-)professional athletes that want to add some 'spice' to their own training regimen.