Through CrossFit, I've recently heard about the benefits of training with gymnastics rings. Today my rings, which I purchased from RingTraining.com (affiliate link) for a pretty reasonable price, arrived - and I've been using them a bit. To get an idea of the kind of strength training you can do with rings, check out this example of the very difficult Iron Cross skill:
The three main exercises I'm interested in performing (or at least, trying to perform) are ring pull-ups, ring dips and the muscle-up. Pull-ups on rings can supposedly be a bit easier on the shoulders than static bar pull-ups, and since the rings move, can require some core strength to stabilise the body. Some people train pull-ups solely on rings because of the shoulder relief they can offer.
Doing dips on the rings is quite a bit harder than doing them on a standard, static gym dip-frame, again because the rings move and you must work a lot harder to maintain stability. I find my arms shaking after doing just a couple of ring dips - something I've only had happen after a few hundred reps on the static bar.
The muscle-up is like a pull-up followed by a dip. According to CrossFit, its roughly equivalent in terms of exertion to three pull-ups and three dips. It can take months or more to develop the strength to do it - I'm certainly not there yet. For more info on the muscle-up, and other skills, check out BeastSkills.com.
Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.
