How to build a world-class upper body with a set of gymnastics rings

In this video, we outline a simple yet effective system for building upper body strength and muscle in just 25 minutes per week using a set of gymnastics rings. [00:30] The key points are:

• Focus on mastering the fundamental movement patterns (vertical push/pull, horizontal push/pull) rather than trying to do every possible exercise. This allows you to build a comprehensive foundation of strength. [02:47]
• Use scaling techniques to keep the exercises challenging, adjusting the difficulty as needed to match your current level of strength.
• Train each movement pattern once per week, pushing to be a bit stronger than the previous session.
• Stop the workout when it’s no longer enjoyable, as this is a sign you’ve done enough productive work for the week. [07:50]

By following this focused, high-intensity approach, you can make rapid progress in building an impressive upper body physique and functional strength, all in a fraction of the time required by traditional gym-based training. [00:00]

Imagine if you could build all the same upper body muscle and strength that it takes most people hours a week in the gym to do with a cheap piece of equipment that you could fit in your backpack in less than half an hour a week while making not only the same progress with your physique, but actually gaining a bunch of extra functional strength and mobility at the same time. Well, as it happens, you can, and that’s exactly what I’ve done over the last five years to build my dream upper body, hit my lifetime strength goals while teaching dozens of other people to do the same thing, starting from all different levels of ability. But this didn’t just magically happen. You can’t just jump on the rings for 20 minutes a week, randomly cross your fingers and wait to transform. There is a method to this.
There’s a process. You need to be clear on what you’re doing. And so in this video I want to give you the exact simple system that has allowed us to get all these results so you can do it too. So this is the entire system that I’m going to run you through step by step, the end of this video that should all be crystal clear and you’ll know how to use it. First thing we need to avoid the trap so many beginners and intermediates fall into which results in them spending a lot of energy and not driving any tangible progress towards their goal. And when you think about it like this, imagine someone could overhead press their body weight with a barbell. If you haven’t tried doing that, it’s very hard to do. It’s like me getting an 80 kilo barbell pressing it from here over my head.
If someone could do that, do you think they would have any trouble whatsoever doing dumbbell overhead presses or doing machine shoulder presses or doing Arnold presses? Probably not, right? Because they’re so strong at the movement pattern of overhead pressing that any similar task you give them, they’re going to be capable of doing it to a pretty high degree. The truth is we don’t really need a huge list of exercises. We just need to train one movement per basic plane of motion and get our ability on that plane of motion to a high enough level that now we have the strength to do it really, really well. And so that’s what I mean when I say less is more. The fewer movements we have to work on, the more we can put our focus onto actually progressing with them and getting our strength to a really high level.
And this applies regardless of whether your priorities adding raw muscle mass to your body or building up the fanciest body weight skills. In the past, I mucked around for ages doing handstands and handstand press drills. Practising all these calisthenic skills and getting nowhere with it is really frustrating. When I moved into this system and just went away and started putting in the work to add slabs of muscle tissue to my shoulders, but building up my vertical, pushing my overhead pressing motion and got it to a really, really high level, I then came back a few years later and discovered all these skills, handstand presses, handstand pushups, handstands, we’re all there for free because I just built the raw strength. And so with callisthenics in particular, we don’t need to go and practise all these different skills to build an upper body that can do them.
What we need to do is focus on building the raw strength and then we can go apply that however we want. And there’s a beautiful feature here of the human body that makes achieving this so simple and just understanding this will save you years of frustration and wasted time and effort. I wish I’d known this because back in the day I was trying to build things like front levers and I would do specific movements for my core, for my scapular retraction strength, for my straight arm strength, trying to target all these weak links. But when I eventually just pushed through with my level of progression on front lever rows, building the distance, I could push my hands away and then eventually building up to the tuck front lever rows and then more advanced versions of that, all of the weak links caught up. I didn’t have to train any of them specifically.
I didn’t have to go and do specific work to tell my body to build certain things to get stronger in order to be better at that movement. I just built the movement. I just worked on progressing the movement pattern of front lever rowing or rowing and my body went away and did the work to catch up any muscles that were the limiting factor for progressing with that movement. And so we don’t need to overthink this. We don’t need to over-engineer the human body and try and target weak links. If we push for progress in our strength on our basic movement patterns over time, our body’s going to make the adaptations necessary to make that progress by building up whatever muscles are necessary. Thankfully, this takes a lot less time than trying to target everything individually and it actually works. So in terms of our goals and our movements we want to work on, we don’t need to worry about doing every single exercise in existence.
We don’t need to worry about practising all these different skills and we don’t need to worry about specific muscles or reverse engineering our body’s strength. If we can get strong enough on the four basic planes of motion that our upper bodies can move through so it’s vertical pushing and pulling, horizontal pushing and pulling, we can get strong enough on those. We get everything we want. We get the strength to do all the skills possible. We get the muscle mass, and therefore by building that muscle, we allow our bodies to be lean and look fantastic. And so we have the functional aesthetic physique that we want. So that’s it in terms of the goals, building our upper body is actually really simple. If we can shoot for these four goals over time as our north star, then that guides us towards a really high level, really impressive place to get to.
Okay, so you’ve got your goals, you’ve got your movement patterns. How do you actually build, strengthen them? This system I’m about to share with you will allow you to maximise weekly progress in minutes, fit literally any schedule and allow you to even make consistent progress. If you’re on the road travelling, whatever, you have your rings in your backpack 25 minutes a week, you’re good. The basic way this is going to work is each of those movement patterns, you’re going to train once a week for one set. The reason this is possible is because we’re going to scale the difficulty to keep it at constant maximum intensity, maximum effort the whole time this works because with these body weight movements, we can just change. The difficulty is needed to match your level. So the right level is not what I do or someone else does. The right level is your maximum.
Because if you think about if we try to do one of the goals, let’s say one arm chin up, we could start pulling and get nowhere because it’s way too hard for us. So trying to do that’s not useful. And so what we can do here is just add in, help make it easier until we start to be able to move. And that point where we’re just tipping the threshold of being able to pull, that’s your maximum, that’s perfect. Now you can train and start actually doing productive work. As you start to move, now you’re going to realise that the difficulty changes as you go on. So the next thing to understand with scaling is that each point of the rep is going to require its own level of difficulty to optimally challenge you. So say you get halfway up, you get stuck. Cool. Now you can put your feet on the ground and help yourself some more.
And it’s as simple as just seeing when you get stuck, giving yourself some assistance like you’re a kid who’s trying to walk for the first time and you’re just giving yourself, if you start to fall, you give yourself a little helping hand to keep moving, and then you take it away and you see you keep challenging. How much can I do before failure? And you just guide yourself through the movement bit by bit, taking your time, working all the way up to the top and back down to the bottom. And here is a mistake that every single one of my students makes when they start doing this. That is one of the main things we focus on to fix that holds so many people back from getting proper results with this when they train themselves. So the next point here is range of motion. Because we can always help ourselves.
We can always grab both hands and literally take all the load off our little toddling self to make the walking doable. We can always make it zero difficulty. So we could in that one arm chin up example, let our feet take all the weight and make it effortless. If you can actually figure out what full range of motion looks like for each of these patterns and make sure you train every single rep, you’re going to put yourself way ahead of the crowd in terms of how much you’re getting from these sets as you train them. Okay, so you’re training maximum intensity, full range of motion reps. You’re going up, you’re going down. It’s hard. Your eyes look like they’re about to burst out of your skull. How do you know when you’ve done enough? Because I’m saying here, you can maximise results in 25 minutes a week.
This is so different to normal training. How do you actually know when you’ve done sufficient work to maximise progress for the week if there’s no reps or sets to be counting other than the one set a week? Here is the secret that I use to nail this every time and have used to make all this advanced level progress while avoiding injury over the last few years. The beautiful thing about this rule is that it adapts to your body. So if you can listen and get this right, you’ll be able to really easily maximise weekly progress yourself. The mantra is this, when it’s no longer fun, you’re done. If you are training truly at your limit and pushing as hard as possible, as soon as you reach the point in your set where you’re not enjoying it anymore, you don’t want to do another rep, then don’t do another rep.
Your body is really good at sending these signals to tell you what’s productive and what’s not. And although we’re being conditioned to largely ignore these signals, they’re there for a reason. They’re very helpful. And so get to the point where you’re not having fun. You don’t want to do another rep, call it quits, come back next week and be stronger for it. Now, ultimately, with all of this, they’re the goals. That’s the weekly routine. There is one thing that matters, and if you can keep this at the front of your mind throughout your training career, you can get a lot of things wrong. Have your training be technically horrible, make everything up and still get results. On the flip side, if you miss this, it doesn’t matter how perfect your technique or your programming is, you could be like those people training for six hours a week and get nowhere.
And this is honestly the thing that distinguishes my students who rapidly progress through the strength levels and have the fastest physical transformations from the people I see plotting away exercising for five times the amount of weekly time input and getting no results. Aim to be stronger every single time you train. All that matters. Our one thing for guaranteeing progress is ensuring that we are progressing our strength over time. We’re not showing up in order to exercise. We are training. All of this is designed to get a result, and it is building up your strength on those basic movement patterns to the end goals. And so your sole purpose every time you show up to do this is testing the waters to see if you can do things a little bit heavier than you could the week before. If you can push for a slightly harder progression, add slightly more weight to the rings, just see what your strength is currently capable of.
Because if you’re training properly, if you’re applying this well, it should be higher each week that you should have a little bit more in you that you need to find, draw out, and actually use every time you show up and train. Especially in the early days when you’re just getting started with this, it should be quite tangible. And so everything has a whole spectrum of difficulty, right? And the skill with scaling is learning to adjust that as needed to keep it at your max. So over time, when you start fresh the start of your set, you should be seeing that maximum level difficulty that you’re able to use then improve week after week. And so with the pushup, for instance, we might be starting just doing pushups on our knees. Eventually that turns into getting more of the rep in our feet, and as we get stronger, we lean more and more forward with our shoulders bringing our rings further back towards our hips, increasing that horizontal distance between shoulders and hands.
Eventually we start to get our feet off the ground. We get into tuck positions, and eventually as we get stronger, some of our rep, we get our hips level with our shoulders. Eventually from there, we’re getting our hips level with our shoulders. We start to bring our knees out from our chest. Over time, that turns into there’s advanced tuck nine degrees and over more time, we get to the point where we’re fully out. And for some of that rep, we’re able to get into a Ben arm plan position. You’ve got this whole spectrum for all of your movements, this whole spectrum of difficulty of advancement ahead of you. Every time you train, you should be testing if you can inch along that spectrum just a little bit more than you were able to week before. So that’s it. My entire system for building world-class upper body and less than 25 minutes a week with a set of gymnastics rings.
If you want to dive deeper in how this applies in the context of a full training nutrition plan, link to the full free training on how we do things is in the description. Otherwise, I hope this is really useful. Please let me know your questions and the comments below and I chat. You sent. Also, probably worth mentioning in terms of split, because we get asked this a lot, if you need to, yes, you can do all four of these movements on the same day. You could also do your legs with them as well. And so that would be 25 minutes or less of upper body training in a single session. But what I’d suggest, if you have the time in your schedule, the flexibility to train multiple times a week, it actually takes less time total. But it’s more training sessions. I do suggest putting ’em up. So doing antagonist movements on the same day, so you can do your horizontal push and pull on one day. You can do your vertical push and pull another day. You can do your legs training somewhere in between. If you have the ability to spread your training like this over the week, it’s easier. You go harder, you get more recovery. But if you’re in a pinch, say you’re travelling or your schedule’s insane or you’re away for work for most of the week, you can do it all at once. It’s still going to work.