General Principles of Training Acrobatics

by Flosha, 16.04.2025 - 20.08.2025

Physical Preparation, Load Management & Recovery

In the physical preparation of acrobatic gymnasts, “load management” is crucial for the progress of the athletes and for injury prevention. Load management is a complex topic in strength training already, where it can be measured relatively easy; in gymnastics it becomes so complex that without substantial knowledge in biomechanics one may not really be able to understand the load that their athletes are exposed to.

But what is load management?
You can only load any structure to a specific point, beyond which the structure will break down. The body, in order to become stronger, has to be regularly exposed to load and the load has to be increased progressively (= progressive overload) for positive adaptations to occur. If the load is too much the body will not be able to recover, there will be no positive adaptation and injury will inevitably occur sooner or later. If the load is not enough, there will be no adaptation either, as the body has no reason to change. Thus, in order to make progress and to prevent injury, load has to be managed.

Load management is not only and not primarily about the question how much load one is exposed to in one specific exercise or skill (which is also important, because a single such instance of loading way too much can already mean an injury), but about the question how much load one is exposed to in his training as a whole on a daily and weekly basis.

What does the load consist of or is influenced by?

Load can be managed by changing one or more of the above mentioned factors. It can be managed by changing…

I consider these five factors to be the most important and in descending order. Very often people only change the intensity, the volume or the frequency when trying to manage load. These are important factors to consider. But even more important is exercise selection and technique.

Exercise selection has two different aspects.

(1) At first we have to ask, which exercises we do. Which exercise is right for you and at your current “level” (of coordination, strength, flexibility etc.)? Does it serve your needs? This may not be too difficult to decide in strength training, but is a very complex topic in acrobatics.
If an exercise is not right for you, influencing any of the other factors won’t change that you are working on an exercise which may be too early to do for you and is ineffective or puts too much strain on your body, no matter how you do it. For example: When you are weighing 160kg and cannot do a Plank on your hands for 1min without your wrists hurting, you cannot train handstands no matter the technique, intensity, volume or frequency. This exercise is just not right for you at this moment. We have to choose the right ones. But exercise selection is not only about choosing specific exercises in isolation.

(2) It is also about which exercises you choose to combine in your programme. The first task is to choose exercises appropriate to your level. The second task it to choose exercises appropriate to balance each other out. This is of the utmost importance. Why? Simply: Doing a specific exercise at a specific intensity, volume and frequency may be too much for you if you are only ever doing this exercise or other ones that aren’t balancing out the load that this exercise puts on your body. But doing that same exercise may not be too much for you at that very same intensity, volume and frequency, if you also do specific other exercises that balance out that load. Thus, before we are thinking about changing intensity, volume or frequency, we have to think about if we aren’t simply missing something in our training that could help our body to sustain that load.

Then comes the technique: How do you perform the exercise? How do you distribute the load on your body while performing the exercise? Can you perform it well and with solid technique? Because if you cannot do it with correct technique you can influence the intensity, volume and frequency as much as you want. In the end it doesn’t matter; if your technique stays the same you will eventually run into problems again if you try to increase the frequency, volume or intensity again.

Intensity can be influenced by using more or less weight, more or less speed and more or less conscious muscle tension or “intent”.

Volume can be influenced by changing how much is done weekly, daily or per set of total training or of training of specific exercises, movement patterns or muscle groups.

Frequency can be influenced by changing how often we train in total every week or by how often we train specific exercises or muscle groups or movement patterns (if not doing the same everyday).

While we can influence and think of these factors in isolation, they are strongly linked. Not only in the sense that obviously when doing higher intensity, you will do so with less volume and when working with higher volume you will work with less intensity. It also is a huge, but often overlooked factor in training how much you work with high intensity (and lower volume) in relation to how much you work with low intensity and high volume.

Sometimes people are working always with high intensity, and just adjust the intensity and volume of the exercises done at high intensity if they feel that they need to reduce or increase the load in some way.

Other people sometimes are working always with low intensity, and just adjust the volume and frequency of the exercises done at low intensity if they feel they need to reduce or increase the load in some way (an approach which may be fine if you are a pure endurance athlete, but we won’t deal with this here).

But rarely do they consistently practice both high intensity exercises and high volume, low intensity exercises on a daily or otherwise regular basis. Rarely are they aware of the importance of both and see the relevance of the ratio between these two forms of training, the first of which we call strength training, the second of which we call conditioning. Strength & Conditioning may be one “complex”, but they’re not the same. Both have to be practiced and balanced in order to progress in a safe and injury-free manner. How much of and how often we do both of them is another lever by which we can manage load.

Principles of Load Management or of Balanced Training

As a summary of the explanations above:

(1) All training puts load on the body of an athlete. (1a) If it is not enough, the athlete won’t have positive adaptation; he may become weaker or stand still. (1b) If it is too much, he will have no positive adaptation either and will sooner or later be injured. (1c) In order to have positive adaptation (= injury free progress in training), a programming has to be developed that ensures the correct balance between “not enough” and “too much”.

(2) Balanced training is a spectrum that can reach from “just enough”, for a slow and safe progression in small steps (ensuring to not fall under the border of “not enough”), to “as much as possible”, for a faster progression in bigger steps (ensuring to not exceed the border of “too much”). (2a) Everything on this spectrum can be considered as a balanced training. Different athletes and different times may require or enable one to lean more towards one side of the spectrum. But as long as we manage to stay within, we ensure progress.

(3) Training is balanced by modifying the exercises, the technique, the intensity, the volume or the frequency. (3a) Of these 5 factors, exercise selection is the most important, technique is the second most important and so forth. (3b) How exercises should be selected is a topic complex enough for an article on its own, but in short: A simple way of approaching it is through essential movement patterns and of making sure that all of them are trained; but this alone does not ensure a balanced programme. Acro and its demands are too complex to reduce them to five or so movement patterns such as Hinging, Squatting etc. Instead we think of our joints. Balanced training is first and foremost about keeping our joints healthy. All the joints have different functions. If we train one particular join e.g. in a way that can be described as “flexion”, we have to train the same joint in “extension”. If we train a movement that is essentially anti-extension, we balance it out with a movement that is essentially anti-flexion. A balanced training starts by a balanced exercise selection and a balanced exercise selection means balancing out the opposites.

(4) Another factor of balanced training and another factor of exercise selection is exercise variety. The more variety, the less effects overuse by repetition of the same; but the more important factor is ensuring to properly train the opposites; variety comes second and with advantages on its own, that have less to do with injury prevention than with technical progression, coordination and the development of a broad, general movement repertoire that makes learning any new skill easier.

(4) The best and fastest progress is always ensured by starting low and easy and increasing any one of the five factors at a time. Slow and steady is fast, and consistency is more important than any other factor after ensuring training in a balanced way. Because no matter how well you manage the load through technique, intensity, volume or frequency, there will be no progress without training consistently.

(5) It is essential to not only find the right balance between intensity, volume and frequency, but to find a balance between higher intensity lower volume work (strength) and lower intensity higher volume work (conditioning) and to practice both consistently. (5a) Real progress is to keep building strength to such a degree, that the intensity that has been strength training before, becomed as easy that it turns into conditioning. What is conditioning now has been strength training before. (5b) As acrobats we do not have to strive for strength endlessly, if we do not want to, as it is not our goal to prove more and more strength output, but better performance. As an acrobat we can at some point be “strong enough”. This point is reached, if everything that we perform and want to perform in acrobatics with our partner has become so easy strength-wise, that all we do is mere conditioning; we aim to reach this point. But reaching this point requires substantial amounts of strength and more and more so the less ideal the weight ratio to our partner(s) is.

Two Approaches to Training

For the above mentioned process of managing load or simply in the training process, we may identify two very different approaches.

Some coaches swear by excessive planning, sometimes years ahead, including periodisation, rated perceived exertion (RPE) and lots of measurements and written records. Others aren’t doing almost any planning at all, have no written record, neither of the athletes progress nor of their training programme and go by intuition day by day. Contrary to what one might expect: Both approaches have been proven (and keep proving) to lead to successful results by innumerable athletes and both approaches keep being practiced by different coaches with their distinct training philosophies.

The first approach I may describe as the “scientific way”. It is the preferred practice by the coaches that I described as being more “modern” in character in my article on the two philosophies of training. The second approach I would describe as the “intuitive way” and in my experience the more “traditional” coaches are practicing it more often.

The intuitive approach is not less professional. We may rather say that it requires more experience in order to be done effectively. Going by intuition should not be an approach for beginners (although many do it this way and fail in lack of knowledge and experience): The less knowledge one has and the less insight into the physical and mental state of their athletes and the less one understands the synergy of specific areas of training or how to balance out the load on a day by day basis, the more trouble will be caused by a lack of planning and the more planning will be needed to prevent overuse injury. The efficiency of the intuitive approach depends on the knowledge and experience of the coach (and at some point of the athletes themselves, their own responsibility) and the structure of their training.

While the more “modern” coaches are “providing” training to their athletes and adjust the training programme constantly, adjust the work load according to the perceived needs of their athletes etc., more traditional coaches, having more focus on the work, the training itself, instead of on the individual, are convinced that their training programme, if it is structured well enough (as they often do intuitively based on their knowledge and experience), will not lead to overuse injury. It is because the work load, after being developed to a specific point, stays very consistent, increasements in load are done very slowly and the different training systems that their training consists of can balance out the different kinds of load (which might lead to injury when practiced in isolation) and thus keep the athletes healthy.

Independent of the question which of these approaches may be more effective, there are a few general guidelines, some of self-evident character, some well researched and easy to follow, that we can point out and implement with much less detailed knowledge required and in a very straightforward approach.

Beyond any measurements, planning and complex regulation methods there are some principles of general validity:

  1. Putting in the work. Without working consistently and hard enough, nothing will come out of it. In order to make any kind of progress there has to be consistent work and progressive overload of the work in constant, incremental steps.
    1. Ensuring progress: In order to ensure progress through overload some kind of recognition or measurement of ones abilities and progress has to take place (recognising increased strength by more reps or perceiving decreases in difficulty of an exercise or by sensing quality of movement or endurance or by deeper angles in flexibiliy etc.). This recognition of ones abilities or progess can either take place intuitively by just remembering ones performance, perception etc. and the ability to feel ones body well or by actual measurement and tracking of performance and perception.
      1. The simpler, more straightforward and more standardized the training is, the easier it will be to track progress and perception of exhaustion by memory and intuition. The more complex, diverse, varied the training is (e.g. doing different exercises in every training), the more difficult (if not impossible) it will be and the more obligatory measuring and tracking will become. / This makes it relatively easy for pure strength athletes. If, for example, they follow a simple programme where they are doing the same main lifts over and over again and just a few accessories and they are always aiming e.g. for a specific rep range for a time and then use a simple method like RIR (reps in reserve) to not exhaust themselves too much when training with high frequency and/or volume, it will totally be possible to have (or gain over time) a good overview of ones abilities, ones physical readiness and track ones progress by memory, enabling progressive overload without any written record.
      2. While it is very beneficial to focus on a few exercises and to practice them as long as they are still leading to more progress (both in weightlifting as well as in gymnastic skill training), and while it is also useful to do so in order to prevent someone from just doing way too many exercises without actually making progress in any of the most important lifts/skills - we cannot change the fact that variety and complexity in exercises is very important in gymnastics. Not even so much for motivation of children (which is also an important factor), but for the development of the broad basis of skills that they need as well as for injury prevention. If the same kind of load is placed on the joints in the same way and in the same angles all the time, instead of loading in all kinds of angles through varied exercises, injury risk increases. If that is the case - will we need to go the route of written records and measurement or is there another way? In order to clarify this we will at first have to consider what acrobatic gymnasts actually have to train and which kind of load is placed on them in which kind of training, which leads us to a second principle:
  2. Balance Intensity, Volume and Frequency. High intensity is necessary to become stronger, but is inevitably causing damage and can lead to injury and negatively impact joint health if not managed properly and done with too much volume. It may not be done daily. Low intensity with high volume on the other hand is healing, can heal injuries, can improve joint health and can be done a lot (like daily) without running into problems. The second enables and compensates for the first. Training too one-sided with high intensiy and low volume will not ensure joint health. Training too one-sided with high volume and low intensity will not ensure progress in strength.
    1. Simplicity in Intensity, Variety in Volume. If those exercises which are varied a lot all fall into the category of low intensity exercises with high volume, they will be able to contribute to healing and joint health, provide the necessary variety to prevent overuse injury and a broad foundation of movement skills and do not have to be tracked too rigidly because they will not impact recovery as much (or even influence recovery positively). In this case the high intensity exercises can be much less varied, more straightforward, with fixed rep ranges and thus be simple to overload and track intuitively. Based on this we may categorise acrobatic training into three categories based on intensity and volume:
      1. High intensity, low volume, low frequency, low variety: Heavy strength training with weights or partners, just a few selected lifts.
      2. Medium intensity, medium volume, high frequency, medium variety: Pair/group practice of elements, including partner conditioning like Tempos.
      3. Low intensity, high volume, medium frequency, high variety: Conditioning, Agility, Dance.
    2. Slow, consistent increase in load: Any sudden increase in load is a completely unnecessary risk. Load (in frequency, volume or intensity) should be increased slowly, in small, incremental steps which provides the greatest safety, the least risk and makes sure that the level of physical preperation acquired rests on a solid foundation.
      1. Progress slowly after period of inactivity: The rule above has also and especially to be followed after every kind of prolonged period without training, such as one week of being sick, a forced stop due to an injury or a week of vacation. One week may not seem like much, but when one trains consistently 4-6 times a week for months, then suddenly not at all for a week and then starts doing so again 4 times a week all of a sudden, this will not only impact performance, it can also already lead to injury. Ideally the work should continue non-stop. The intensity of the work should be adjusted and reduced at times, but it should never stop for a prolonged period of time, where “prolonged” means more than a few days.
      2. Do not stop training even when injured, but do never train through joint pain: When you are injured in a particular part of the body (like an arm or an ancle or a wrist), there is no need to stop training, but of course there is a need to not train anything that aggravates the injury: Continuing to train will make sure that you won’t loose too much strength & skills, provides an opportunity to work on things you otherwise work less on (e.g. more leg work if you cannot train your arms as much) and there are almost always things you can do in training for the injury itself to make it feel and heal better. But when feeling any kind of joint pain in an exercise which is caused or made worse by this exercise, stop doing what you’re doing. Either you did something wrong and have to adjust the exercise or you simply did too much too soon and have to back off, give the hurting joint some rest or restorative exercises (e.g. low intensity, high volume stuff) and then start loading it again in smaller, incremental steps.
  3. Recovery: Without proper nourishment and rest there will be no progress (or it won’t be there for long and won’t be sustainable). Thus, after putting in the work and working in a balanced way, fueling the body and sleeping well and enough is of the utmost importance for recovery. As a base aiming to build more muscle, imagine: If you don’t eat enough you waste your time in strength training. Only if you put in enough fuel can the body use the opportunity to build more mass. And in this context, there is another guideline that is important to understand:
    1. It is much less common that someone is “over-training”, than that one is under-fueled and/or under-rested (for the amount of training one is doing). Thus: If you are in training and you are feeling exhausted and weak, before asking if you train too much you should ask if you are nourished enough and slept enough. These are the first and by far most important variables to be fixed. Before you haven’t fixed them there is no reason to even think about less important stuff like supplementation.

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