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Bars versus Rings

If you are a beginner I would recommend you perform your foundational work on the single and parallel bars. When you have built up some basic strength such as support holds, pull ups and dips, it’s time to move to the rings. Due to their instability, they will take your workout to unparalleled levels. For you bioengineering heads, the rings are extremely unstable because they move on an almost frictionless, horizontal plane and it’s mostly your shoulders that have to stabilize them.

Anything done hanging below the rings (like pull ups and skin the cats) are not much more difficult than a bar. However, anything done above the rings, like support holds, dips, and shoulderstands are tremendously harder. For example, here’s a video of me holding RTO Support for 60seconds. It looks super easy but it’s extremely deceiving how hard it is and took many weeks to get to this simple level:

One anomaly about the rings is that while they are more difficult, they’re nice that they move independently of each other and move to whatever position is neutral for you. (I’ll take a German Hang on the rings over the bar any day.) Luckily in this day and age, a pair of wooden rings are going for dirt cheap these days. You could hang them anywhere and have a blast! Also, while I’m at it, since I’m talking about rings (my favorite apparatus), I think if people knew how to use them, they’d realize they wouldn’t need ANYTHING else for their upper body. (Gyms hate me!)

Of course, if you are ever having too much trouble with an exercise on the rings, you can always go back to the bars. On my deload weeks, I may opt to do dips on the parallel bars instead of the rings because the stress on the body is significantly less.

Surface choice for hand balancing:

A solid, flat floor with no slope provides the most consistency. Grass is hit or miss. Sometimes grass helps you grip better but other times it seems to be a little too quirky. However, I like grass though because if you fall out of any headstand or handstand, it’s squishy and it’s very nice to do a forward roll out on grass. Sand is the most challenging for hand balancing because it’s always shifting underneath you, so it’s definitely not recommended to practice on otherwise it’ll get too frustrating. For example, holding crow pose (aka frog stand) on the carpet at home may be easy for you, but next time you go to the beach, test your max hold on the sand and you’ll find it gets unusually harder to stay up there, much faster than usual.

Use parallel bars, parallettes or sloped handstand blocks to give your wrists a break:

The wrists are made of very small joints that weren’t intended to deal with the entire weight of the body so they take a long time to catch up to the stress that handstands and planches require. However, when you use pushup bars, paralletes or sloped handstand blocks, they ease off a lot of pressure from your wrists and allow for more quality practice. (The same goes when practicing L-sits and V-sits, but please start practicing your L-sits on the floor to properly train your shoulder-depression and hip-flexion. When you could do L-sits on the floor, you could do them on the parallel bars and rings. The inverse is not true.)