Frequently Asked (or Implied) Questions

Absolutely not. If you want to learn real gymnas­tic sport, you must find a qual­ity instruc­tor and enroll in regu­lar classes. It’s really the only way.

Though Ryan was a compet­i­tive gymnast in his teens, Gold Medal Bodies programs are designed for non-gymnasts to get the bene­fits of gymnastic-like train­ing with­out having to devote them­selves to the sport totally.

We will teach you how to perform some cool skills and build an impres­sive body, but we’ll do it in a way that doesn’t take away from your sport or other activ­i­ties.

More than you might think. You see, most sports (power­lift­ing is one notable excep­tion) rely more on skill than absolute strength. Practicing gymnas­tic move­ments devel­ops your control and coor­di­na­tion, and that trans­lates directly to improved perfor­mance of most sport skills.

Don’t get us wrong - strength is absolutely impor­tant for most sports, but when was the last time you saw a hockey player do anything resem­bling a squat during a game?

The move­ments we’ve chosen for our programs will build loads of strength that can be applied to most sports.

Not unless you want to (and we won’t tell a soul if you do).

Maybe some. We wouldn’t count on losing too much though.

Gold Medal Bodies is about strength and skill. While you can lose a good bit of fat on any of our programs, that’s not neces­sar­ily our main focus. You’ll need a base level of strength to begin most Gold Medal Bodies programs, so they aren’t ideal for people who are very overweight.

But since we want to help as many people as possi­ble, we offer a lot of free train­ing to help you prepare to get the most out of our courses. Sign up to our GMB Posse for access.

Gold Medal Bodies programs are based on train­ing skills to develop attrib­utes like strength, power, and mobil­ity. Since this train­ing can’t replace the skill train­ing for your sport, it works in paral­lel with those skills, support­ing your sport train­ing. In most cases, we recom­mend our first prod­uct, Rings One, as the ideal start­ing point. It seems a little counter-intuitive, but train­ing on rings builds the strength and mobil­ity for perform­ing moves on bars, on the ground, or in the air.

We also real­ize that rings can be a little intim­i­dat­ing and that some people just don’t have anyplace they can hang them. If that’s the case for you, start­ing with Parallettes One or Floor One will be just fine.

As the GMB Curriculum grows, there are going to be a lot more options, but you can always assume that anything with the word ONE is the title is just fine for a first step. All level-one courses will be suit­able for begin­ners.

No. Training does not make you weak.

Unless you’re under ten years old, three months (the length of several of our programs) is not a long time.

If you really want to get a lot out of your train­ing, one of the best things you can do is extend your time­line. Plan to make your health a life­long effort and keep doing phys­i­cal things that you enjoy for the remain­der of your life.

Three months is a very short period to spend focus­ing on improv­ing an area of your abilities.

Many people become fixated on achiev­ing certain outcomes within narrow time frames. That’s just fine, and it’s good to be ambi­tious, but you’ve got to under­stand that making big changes takes time. If you’re over­weight because of years of bad habits, it’s unrea­son­able to expect to undo all that damage in a matter of weeks.

It’s a common miscon­cep­tion that focus­ing on one goal means that every­thing else in your life is going to go to crap. Maybe for extremely disci­plined and narrow-minded people, that’s possi­ble, but who do you know that’s really capa­ble of that kind of dedi­ca­tion? Probably nobody.

Focusing on getting better qual­ity or longer dura­tions of sleep will not have a detri­men­tal impact on what you do for the other sixteen hours in the day. Likewise, work­ing on hand­stands won’t make you fat.

Choose ONE major goal and work ONE program at a time. Then switch to some­thing else.

You can’t achieve perfect balance at any one moment - life is too dynamic - but you can create harmony in your endeav­ors over the long term. If you plan to stay healthy to the end of your days, spend­ing a few months work­ing on a well-crafted train­ing program can only be a step in the right direction.

Seriously, we have no idea where this idea comes from, but we get this ques­tion a lot, and we want to set your mind at ease.

There are two reasons not to worry.

The first one is simply that we know what we’re doing, and it would be pretty stupid of us to make a program that results in uneven or unbal­anced muscle develp­ment. As a matter of fact, you’ll notice that we created an entire add-on module to make sure you build leg strength during the program. No other paral­lettes course has this.

The second reason you can’t relax about being imbal­anced is that push­ing does not make you weak at pulling. Doing pushups won’t weaken your biceps, in fact, it will increase the poten­tial of the bicep to gener­ate force and to grow when you do work it hard.

While there are no true “pulling” move­ments you can do on P-bars, we can stim­u­late the shoul­ders and lats in other ways - primar­ily through scapu­lar depres­sion and retrac­tion. This is the key initi­a­tial move­ment of the pull-up where most people are weak­est, and P1 will help shore that up.

Just to be clear: No, you do not need to add pull-ups to P1. If we thought that was a good idea, we would have included them ourselves.

Seeing an exer­cise is not the same thing as master­ing it.

You’ve prob­a­bly seen push-ups and squats before too, but that doesn’t make them any less excel­lent. That’s why they’re clas­sics - they get the job done.

There’s much, much more to design­ing a train­ing program than just pick­ing out some fancy-looking exer­cises. The value of a train­ing program in is the selec­tion and arrange­ments of move­ments and proto­cols to achieve specific goals.

GMB programs aren’t designed to impress you with our creativ­ity. They’re designed to get you the promised results with mini­mal flash and maxi­mal bang.

If you want show-off work­outs with fifty differ­ent exer­cises, look elsewhere.

Furthermore, there are no magi­cal exer­cises that will make you reach your goals any faster. In fact, almost any exer­cises can make you strong if you have a great program.

The whole point of “train­ing” is to do some­thing repeat­edly, in an orga­nized fash­ion, so you get better at it. Push-ups and bench presses will both build you pecs if you do enough of them, but you’ll never get strong if you don’t have some form of progres­sion in your routine.

GMB programs are designed around progres­sion, so the Level One vari­a­tion of some exer­cises may not look all that tough. That’s OK. You have to master that foun­da­tion so you can progress to the follow­ing steps. Over time, with contin­ued prac­tice, you’ll improve.

This is training.

You may think you “know” an exer­cise in one of our programs, but that’s not the same thing as having trained it the way we teach it in the context of our program­ming and progres­sion. “Empty your cup,” and you’ll learn a lot.

Our advice is to cut out the exer­cise collec­tion and start follow­ing programs.

Of course you can’t. We’ve been prac­tic­ing, and you haven’t… yet.

Just do what you can.

Start at the begin­ning and do the easi­est version of the exer­cise you can. Reduce the range of motion, for eaxam­ple, by only going down half-way (or as far as you can manage with good form) on push-ups until you have the strength to go further.

Be patient with your­self. You can’t expect instant results.

Work with what you have. Do a little more at each session. Don’t give up, and you can achieve your goals.

We all started out as help­less babies, just like you did. We’ve suffered (seri­ous) injuries and had to take months and years to reha­bil­i­tate. We’ve felt stiff and weak and had days we felt like giving up. Just like you.

But we kept train­ing consis­tently. Just like you will.

We’re very glad you asked. Getting updates is easy if you join our GMB Posse. We send out one email a week to members about a vari­ety of topics. Messages include updates and discount notices about new prod­ucts, a monthly newslet­ter full of exclu­sive videos and arti­cles (NOT the fluff and crap you might see in some other email newslet­ters), and notes about the health and train­ing topics that are on our mind.

When you subscribe for updates, we’ll go ahead and send you a free Handstands “The Right Way” Tutorial Video. (We’re just crazy like that.)

The GMB Posse is our general commu­nity of friends, fans, follow­ers, and friendly people who use GMB-style train­ing to build skills and strength. Joining is 100% free and enti­tles you to updates, discounts, and exclu­sive video tutorials.

Alpha Posse is a bit differ­ent. This is a special group within the Posse that enjoys close inter­ac­tion with the GMB Team via out private forums and gets access to special programs and bene­fits we don’t release to the public. It’s kind of like our version of the A-Team, except we meet online instead of riding around in a black van.

We no longer produce DVDs. Instead, all GMB programs are avail­able for imme­di­ate down­load onto your computer, which we find more conve­nient, not to mention ecolog­i­cal (just think of the resources required to manu­fac­ture and ship DVDs and books).

All of our videos are recorded in true HD and edited to main­tain the high­est possi­ble video qual­ity at a reason­able size for down­load­ing. They’re also opti­mized for view­ing in iTunes, so you can load them onto your iPad or other portable media device for porta­bil­ity you can’t get with DVDs. The videos are completely compat­i­ble with both Windows and Mac software.

Training manu­als are deliv­ered in Adobe PDF format, which is the indus­try stan­dard for docu­ment down­loads. Chances are, your computer came pre-installed with the soft­ware neces­sary to view PDF, but if you have any ques­tions about your down­load files, we offer full support in our members’ area.

Once you submit your payment for a GMB program, you’ll be sent to our private members’ site where you can down­load all of your purchases in one place. We keep all our down­loads under one roof, so you can always come back and access your programs, even if you’ve lost your files.

For all our down­loads, you should be able to regis­ter for access imme­di­ately upon payment. If you’re expect­ing a down­load and don’t get sent to a regis­tra­tion page, just drop us a short email, and we’ll hook you up manually.

If you follow the program, it will work. We’ll make sure of it.

Simply put, we’re in the busi­ness of making programs that achieve specific outcomes. If our programs didn’t work, we’d be out of busi­ness in a hurry.

It’s in our best inter­est to be sure that the programs work.

A lot of compa­nies do a “no ques­tions, money back” guar­an­tee. What they’re really telling you is that they don’t care enough about your results to try and help you - they’d rather just give you your money back than actu­ally work with you until you’re successful.

What a crappy way to treat a client.

If you have a ques­tion about imple­ment­ing a GMB program, we’re here to answer it. If you aren’t sure how to do some­thing, we want to explain it. If you’re concerned, we want to hear you and work through it.

Watch the videos and read the manu­als. Follow the sched­ules. Ask questions.

If you don’t feel you’re making progress, show us your train­ing logs (we provide ready-made charts with all our GMB Curriculum programs). We’ll find out where things went wrong and give you concrete actions to make correc­tions to get you moving in the right direc­tion again.

We are commit­ted to your results, and we stand behind that with our time and atten­tion. You deserve better than a buy-off.

We might have to let you down.

If we sere sell­ing cars or socks, we would defi­nitely offer refunds on defec­tive merchan­dise. But you can’t un-download a program once you’ve got it on your hard drive.

Having a system in place to allow speedy and secure trans­ac­tions and reli­able down­loads is not simple or cheap, and using that system incurs a cost. Requesting a refund with­out a very good reason abuses our other clients by driving that cost unnec­es­sar­ily high.

Please allow us to work with you to make sure you receive and can use all of the resources we’ve worked so hard to prepare for you.

We honestly want to see you succeed.

With a good reason, yes. Of course.

If you have exten­u­at­ing circum­stances, we can take things on a case-by-case basis.

If you have an insur­mount­able tech­ni­cal issue (unfore­seen inter­net service prob­lems that completely prevent you from down­load­ing), we will give you a complete and speedy refund.

If you show a program to your doctor or phys­i­cal ther­a­pist who then advises you not to do the exer­cises, we will either help you find alter­na­tives or give you a complete and speedy refund.

If you live in the tundra and don’t have a place to hang gymnas­tic rings in your igloo, we prob­a­bly will not give you a refund on Rings One, because this is a circum­stance you were aware of before you down­loaded the program.

If you change your mind, we will prob­a­bly not give you a refund, because that’s purely your own whim. You can’t go to a restau­rant, order a burger and decide you’re not hungry once it gets to the table. Rather you can, but you still have to pay for the burger.

GMB programs are like a qual­ity burger - meaty and tasty - but if you think you might be a vegan, you shouldn’t be look­ing at that section of the menu to begin with.

No way. We would never resort to sarcasm.

Honestly, as seri­ously as we take our train­ing and the qual­ity of our prod­ucts, we don’t have a lot of serios­ity left over at the end of the day for much else.

Do you really want to get emails full of corpo­rate speak and read manu­als that sound like some­thing an engi­neer would write? We didn’t think so. We’re also assum­ing you don’t like high-pressure sales or insin­cere pitches. That’s cool, because neither do we.

Sometimes we may be smart asses and some­times we may be blunt. But we’ll always be straight with you, and if that’s half as impor­tant to you as it is to us, we’re hoping you’ll forgive any faux pas.

Because we’re not that guy. We’re GMB.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, 50 ways to leave you lover, and at least a thou­sand differ­ent opin­ions on why one or another way of train­ing is The Ultimate Best. Except that no one method is the best for every goal - and anyone trying to convince you other­wise is some­body not to trust.

GMB teaches full-body control and strength you can use for what­ever activ­i­ties you enjoy.

But hey, at the end of the day, it’s just advice. You can do what­ever you want to do.

We’d love that. If there’s anything that makes us feel impor­tant, it’s having some­one ask us ques­tions about ourselves. If you like, we can also talk about train­ing, the kinds of results our clients get, and ways to bring a little more Gold Medal atti­tude to just about anything.

We are avail­able for inter­views via email or Skype. We also write and accept guest blog posts if we think there’s a mutual bene­fit to both audi­ences.

Yes!

Please see our semi­nar page for more details. Note that we don’t do weddings or Bar Mitzvahs, but under the right condi­tions, slum­ber parties may be consid­ered.