I'm learning ring muscle-ups and having a bit of a struggle getting the timing right. So, I started thinking about drills that could help me, but I realized I didn't have a great understanding of every detail of the movement. Therefore, I thought it might be worthwhile to break down a ring muscle-up into a sequence of movements to help me isolate subsequences of the full movement into drills that may help me improve. Perhaps this breakdown can also help someone else.
To teach someone a complex movement, such as gymnastics or Olympic weightlifting movements, what do we do? We break up each of the movements into drills that isolate a specific part of the movement. Then we work on each of these drills until good technique becomes muscle memory. After that, we work on bringing each of those isolated parts back together into the full movement. The challenging part in this last step is timing because we have to work to ensure that each phase is as good as it is when it's isolated.
A complex movement can be viewed as a sequence of small movements linked together via actions. Over the course of the movement, the athlete's body enters different states or what I will call phases. Moving from one phase to the next can be described by transitions that are described by an action, which must be completed before the athlete is able to enter the next phase. In computer science, phases and transitions make up what are called state machines; these are used to describe complex processes.
As an example consider the initial two phases of a ring muscle up which corresponds to a kip swing from the rings:
Phase 1: The Arch Transition 1: Pull Rings forward → swing using shoulders and hips → Smooth into toe drive Phase 2: The Hollow
We start in the arch with pulling the rings forward, but then we swing using our shoulders and hips which causes our toes to smoothly move upward putting us into the hollow. We can see that a phase corresponds to the positioning of the athlete’s body if they were to hold that state statically. Then transitions describe how to go from one state to the next. The descriptions can be as detailed as we need them to be.
Using this new way to describe movements we can break down the ring muscle up as follows:
Phase 1: The Arch Transition 1: Pull rings forward → swing using shoulders and hips → Smooth into toe drive Phase 2: The Hollow Transition 2: Toes flow up to appropriate height → Toes stop Phase 3: The Drive Transition 3: Drive pointed toes outward to initiate hips → hips take over and drive upward giving body momentum Phase 4: The Turnover Transition 4: Hips fully extended → flick torso + head upward using momentum from hip drive + pull back hard on rings → explosive sit-up to transition onto the rings Phases 5: The Press Out
The nice thing about the description above is that we can now use it to construct drills to help use isolate parts that we are having trouble with. For example, the low ring banded ring muscle up drill corresponds to the following submovement:
Transition 2: Toes flow up to appropriate height → Toes stop Phase 3: The Drive Transition 3: Drive pointed toes outward to initiate hips → hips take over and drive upward giving body momentum Phase 4: The Turnover Transition 4: Hips fully extended → flick torso + head upward using momentum from hip drive + pull back hard on rings → explosive sit-up to transition onto the rings Phases 5: The Press Out
The video below demonstrates this drill.
The Toe Target Drive Drill allows us to practice the following:
Phase 1: The Arch Transition 1: Pull rings forward → Smooth into toe drive Phase 2: The Hollow Transition 2: Toes flow up to appropriate height → Toes stop Phase 3: The Drive Transition 3: Drive pointed toes outward to initiate hips → hips take over and drive upward giving body momentum
In this drill we setup a target at the hight of the athlete’s bully button when they hang from the rings and place this target at a distance equal to that where the athletes toes come in contact with the target at the end of Transition 1. Then the athlete will initiate Phase 3 and Transition 3 right when the toes come into contact with the target. This is an excellent drill for practicing toe drive into hip drive. The video below demonstrates this drill.
The takeaway is that we should learn how to breakdown movements we are working on so that we can isolate the portions of the movement that we need to hone.
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