It seems like these people represent exceptions to the rule more often than what is achievable by ordinary people within an ordinary time period. If I had as my goal to bench press 400 lbs within 2-3 years I wouldn't rely on body weight exercises alone.
There are ways to get incredibly strong using only body weight exercises (inmates and yoga practitioners do it, after all), but to my knowledge these all require a greater time investment due to the higher number of reps, and the results materialize over a much longer time span. I imagine that most HN readers are more interested in a time-efficient form of exercise.
Unless you want to avoid sports or paying for a gym membership entirely, the only real benefit seems to be that you can move up very slowly and conservatively, with little risk of injury.
> It seems like these people represent exceptions to the rule
Basically this.
I was a gymnast for 18 years (from 2 - 20 years old). Obviously, it wasn't professional level the entire time, but starting a bit before high school, workouts would be 5 or 6 times a week, for 4-5 hours. There was never any weightlifting, only body weight exercises. Those guys you see on TV doing Still Rings, Pommel Horse, etc., they didn't get that strong through weight training. It's just hours and hours of practice and so-called 'endurance' conditioning. I say 'so-called endurance' because most gymnasts that I met were pretty bad endurance wise, judging on ability to run for awhile. A lot of us topped out at a couple of miles, before we needed to walk.
Gymnastics is a sport that isn't assisted by weight training. There are a few exercises that use weights, like wrist therapy using 5-10 pound free weights. But all those physiques you see on TV are just thousands of hours of work, and those hours make for some of the leanest, strongest people.
Here are two videos of some good, professional-level routines:
You literally can not learn to do that through weightlifting. You cannot gain the strength those two use through weightlifting. It's not because the positions themselves are difficult, those are usually the easy parts to train and practice. It's the transitions between two different positions that is difficult, and cannot be trained by weightlifting. Gymnastics is a dynamic sport, weightlifting is a static exercise. The best that weightlifting can do is make the holds a bit easier, but that isn't really necessary, because those aren't as hard to train as the fluid transitions.
I admire and respect the difficulty of gymnastics, but people are good at what they do most of. Give me a gymnast and powerlifter who weigh the same and I expect that the PLer will smoke the gymnast at bench press and the gymnast will smoke the PLer at planche pushups.
> Gymnastics is a dynamic sport, weightlifting is a static exercise.
I dunno, man. The snatch seems to happen fairly quickly.
There are ways to get incredibly strong using only body weight exercises (inmates and yoga practitioners do it, after all), but to my knowledge these all require a greater time investment due to the higher number of reps, and the results materialize over a much longer time span. I imagine that most HN readers are more interested in a time-efficient form of exercise.
Unless you want to avoid sports or paying for a gym membership entirely, the only real benefit seems to be that you can move up very slowly and conservatively, with little risk of injury.