Body By Rings Review from Fitness FAQ - Calisthenics Worldwide (2024)

If you’re looking for a transformation of your body, then the Body by Rings program by FitnessFAQs may be just the thing for you. This down to earth, no frills and strings attached (pun intended) program will see your body undergo a drastic change. But is it for the good or for the worse? After our own 18 weeks experience with the sometimes simple but always grueling Body by Rings fitness program, we can bring you the results. We’ll explain what this fitness program is and what it takes to get some of the same results we’ve been getting with the Body by Rings program. So, sit back, drink some juice or a shake and get ready to learn about your next step in calisthenics, because we were certainly thrilled to try this out.

What is the Body by Rings Routine?

The Body by Rings program is a hypertrophy routine of repetitive interval training and usesGymnastic Ringsto gain tremendous results. The program was carefully crafted by Daniel Vadnal, a licensed and experienced physiotherapist and coach. He is also coincidentally an immensely popular YouTube influencer. He designed the Body by Rings routine to be safe and give you superior results in as short a time span as is safely possible. Fromhis websitewe can glean the results from real, ordinary people like you and me. They’re not models, some are complete amateurs; others are devout hobbyists. The message is clear: Anyone can achieve these results if you follow the 18-week Body by Rings program. All you need is a set of calisthenic rings, the course itself and the will to complete the course.

The Training at First Glace

Our Body by Rings review starts with a quick overview of what we got in mailbox. Hard but certainly not impossible, that’s our first take when looking at this training program. Body by Rings has you work out 4 times a week for 1 to 1.5 hours each session. That’s not too much and leaves enough time for your body to recuperate. At the same time, you’ll more than likely still be kind of sore from the last session in the beginning. This the hypertrophy at work. The Body by Rings program itself sets you the following benchmarks before you start:

• 5 Pull-Ups
• 5 Dips
• 10 Push-Ups

If you can do these in a row, you can participate the Body by Rings program and expect good results. This leads us to believe that this program is cyclical. Beginner, intermediary or advanced calisthenics practitioners can get in on it and follow along at their own pace. The beginner will do fewer repetitions, as many as they can tolerate. After a first full 18-week course, the course can be repeated in the future for even greater results.

Hypertrophy means Bigger Muscles

Hypertrophy means the rapid breakdown and rebuilding off muscle tissue. As you may know, the way you gain muscle is by purposefully overloading them in small increments. The resulting microscopic damages to the muscle fibers are filled up with new muscle tissue (that’s the soreness you feel). The results are bigger, stronger muscles. There are many calisthenics programs which focus on weight reduction and fat loss. The Body by Rings program is not such a program. Instead, you will gain weight through added muscle. The program is optimized to encourage rapid muscle growth over a short amount of time.

What do You Get with the Body by Rings Program?

The Body by Rings program comes with a complete 18 weeks course detailing training schedules and all exercises. The program is laid out nicely and well organized. It comes with a wealth of information which is understandable to even the novice calisthenics practitioner. Added to this is an e-book and a whole host of training instructions from which you can learn exactly what you need to do and how you need to do it. This makes the Body by Rings program a good starting point for the beginner who wants to improve their calisthenics with the use of gymnastic rings. Gymnastic rings can be a challenge to master so it is definitely a major advantage of having all that information available to you in one package.

Apart from the absolutely enlightening reading material, which looks gorgeous by the way, you also get printable PDF’s and Excel sheets with which you can track your own progress over time.

So, in a nutshell the Body by Rings program includes:

• An 18-week training program from beginner to advanced practitioner focusing on repetitive interval training.
• An e-book containing everything you need to know about the program and exercises, but also the science behind the training and the proper nutrition you need to get those incredible results
• Video tutorials made by a licensed master’s degree physiotherapist and 10-year veteran calisthenics coach

You getlifetimeaccess, including to future updates to the program and access to the forum where you can receive community andprofessionalhelp.

What you do not get are the rings themselves.

The Body by Rings Routine Explained

As we expected, the training comes with set ranges instead of standard sets. You do the number of repetitions of each exercise your body can sustain and you do your best to achieve the minimum of the set range. Say the range is 8 to 12 repetitions, you try your best to achieve 8 but you don’t have to do all 12.

You’ll be doing interval training with periods of rests in between. These resting periods are meant allow your muscles to heal up and get bigger through the restoration of muscle tissue after entropy. Each interval is kept as short as possible on purpose. This means your muscles will be forced to regenerate faster than normal, the so-called hypertrophy. By inducing hypertrophy in your muscles, you can achieve immense results in a short period of time. Hypertrophy isn’t permanently sustainable. After 18 weeks you will allow your body to rest and heal completely, solidifying the results you’ve gained into hard muscle mass.

Stretching and mobility exercises

Each exercise in the Body by Rings routine is started off with stretching and mobility practice. From the get go you’ll be utilizing your gymnastic rings for this. The rings are incorporated into practically all facets of the Body by Rings program. It is important you follow the starting exercises prior to each training session. Stretching and warming up not only helps prevent injury, your muscles can actually grow into a mold if you don’t. If you don’t properly stretch, your muscles will stay confined to too small a space, becoming permanently stiff once the healing period is over.

Set Range exercises

After the warmup you will do a number of exercises for that session. Each exercise consists of a number of sets (usually not more than 1 to 3) with a number of repetitions per set to achieve. As we explained, the number of repetitions fall in a range so you can take it at your own pace. Of course, you should push yourself towards your best performance possible.

All the exercises make full use of the gymnastic rings’ potential and added value to calisthenics. Your work out days are divided into “push” and “pull” days, with doing Push-Up related and Pull-Up related exercises respectively. That way you actuate and overload different muscles every day, minimizing the risk of too much overload and long recuperation times.

Our Experience with the Fitness FAQ Body by Rings program

We all tried our hands at the program, using the excellent and in our opinion best in classGornation Wooden Gymnastic Rings. None of us were particularly bulky but, granted in the spirit of transparency, we are all calisthenics enthusiasts so we easily beat the requirements for 5 Pull-Ups, 5 Dips and 10 Push-Ups. All but one had also used gymnastic rings before. When discussing the Body by Rings program before we started, we of course exchanged knowledge about the use of those gymnastic rings. Not on purpose, it’s just what we like to talk about and it may give us a slight advantage over the complete newcomer.

From our experience we can tell you though that all the provided for media explains every exercise, including how to use the gymnastic rings very well. You shouldn’t have any trouble starting yourself either, even if you’ve never used them before.

The work out is rigorous and really gets you sweating. You feel the muscles working thoroughly throughout the session. We did make most of the minimum reps per set but to our surprise it wasn’t that easy even for our most burly guy.

The first week was the “worst” (or best actually, depending on how you look at it). Our muscles felt tired and sore. Although the program switches muscle groups, the nature of the rings make it that you always tend to use all your muscles even if it’s only a little. After the second week this became a lot better and we could increase our repetitions before we started feeling permanently sore again.

Body by Rings Review: Results after 18 weeks

So, after the 18 weeks of doing the Body by Rings programs, what were our results? We definitely did see muscle growth in our upper body, biceps and triceps. Especially in the arms and shoulders department we saw significant gains. People in the gym commented that we must have upped our repetitions doing curls and pushups. We looked bigger, bulkier and with thicker arms. And yes, we got one accusation that we startedusingsomething recently.

At the end of the 18 weeks all of us were easily beating the minimum number of repetitions and pushing those new boundaries we found. You too should expect to add centimeters if not inches of muscle mass to your body.

The Final Body by Rings Review: Do We Recommend it?

Definitely yes from us. The results for us speak for themselves but there is one caveat. If you’ve done calisthenics before and you got some muscle mass, this is certainly a course you should consider to become stronger and bigger. You’ll get pushed past your plateau in no time. If you’ve only done calisthenics which focusses on weight loss and fitness, this is the perfect entry course into muscle building. Even if you’re already a big guy, this course can extract that much more performance out of you. The real shiners for us though were people who are just into calisthenics, already fit and a little bit toned. For those people, this course will act almost like a multiplier.

So, what is that caveat we talked off? You’re missing out on leg day. You’ll have to fit that in yourself or follow FitnessFAQs’ Limitless Legs program too.

Frequently Asked Questions about Body by Rings from FitnessFAQ

A little strange to be writing a fitness FAQ about FitnessFAQs but we couldn’t fit everything into the scope of one article. We found these little facts and questions to still be important enough to include so we added them here.