Eli5: Why body builders can’t carry their bodies like gymnastics or calisthenics do ?
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Ex-level 10 male gymnast here. There are really big differences in how we trained vs how a body builder trains. The primary objective is to keep body weight down, keep muscle tone high, and flexibility high. The shorter and lighter you are the easier it is to learn the skills (most of the time). We spent most of our time learning how to throw around our body weight and only spent a short amount of time with weights. Most of the guys on my team didn’t spend time bulking up because it wasn’t helpful. The only guys that did this ended up specializing in pummel horse or rings, because it’s heavy upper body. For me, I was an all around gymnast, so I only weighed 120 pounds, with basically zero fat. I could easily lift my body around, flip easily on any surface, and run up walls as if you turned the gravity off, because of the way we trained. We would work out 5 days a week for 4 hours everyday. Half of that time was learning skills and the other half was doing mostly body weight only exercises and some isometric conditioning training. I was always a pretty toned muscular guy, but you’d never say I was big or jacked.
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