MOVE Gymnastics Inspired Strength Training

🎒➡️🤸‍♂️ School’s out… time to MOVE!

After a day of sitting, learning, and focusing in the classroom, kids can benefit from an opportunity to move their bodies, burn some energy, and have FUN! 💪

At MOVE Gymnastics, after-school classes give kids a positive place to stay active while building strength, coordination, balance, confidence, and new skills alongside other kids.

📚 Work their brains at school.
🤸‍♀️ MOVE their bodies after!

🎉 Ask us about a FREE trial class!

💬 Comment “MOVE KIDS” and we’ll send you more information!

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Quick clarification before we start: this is NOT the hanging front lever you’re picturing from rings or bar work. This is a gymnastics/tumbling front lever — a standing drill — and it might be the most underrated piece of your handstand training.

Here’s how it works: step your front leg forward, bent, arms reaching up (biceps to your ears). Point the back toe, then straighten that back leg and lift it as you engage the glute, pushing through your shoulders. From there, drop your chest and raise your back leg at the same rate, then reverse it coming back up.

Three reasons this matters:

1. It protects your hamstrings. Beginners tend to throw themselves into skills like handstands and cartwheels with a lot of momentum — kicking the back leg up fast instead of controlling it. That’s exactly how hamstrings get strained. This drill teaches your hamstring to stretch and strengthen under control, so it can actually handle that stress later.

2. It pre-builds your hollow body. When you practice this front lever, you’re already finding your hollow body shape on the way down — so when you kick up into a handstand, you’re not scrambling to find that shape mid-air. Skip this, and you’re more likely to kick up with a rounded back and bent legs, then frantically try to organize your body once you’re already upside down.

3. It builds real balance and control. Coordinating your leg with your torso as you descend and ascend — same rate, same control — is exactly the kind of body awareness that carries into everything else in gymnastics.

If your skills have felt wobbly, directionless, or you’ve had some hamstring soreness and haven’t worked this drill in a while, this might be exactly what’s missing.

DM ‘START’ if you want a coach to build this into your training 💪

One of our members did 3 days a week of personal training plus nutrition coaching. In 3 months: +5 lbs of lean mass, -6 lbs of body fat. 📈

That combination — strength training and nutrition working together, with weekly check-ins keeping both dialed in — is exactly why we built a program around it.

Meet the Rebuild Program: personal training and nutrition coaching combined into one package. Here’s what’s included:
→ Initial consult + 2 InBody scans (one at the start, one at the end, so results are measured, not guessed at)
→ Full access to the 1rst Phorm app
→ Weekly calls with your coach
→ 3 months of personal training — choose 2, 3, or 4 days a week

Train with any of our strength coaches (Gabbi, Jorge, Anika, Chase — the results hold either way), and nutrition coaching is with Gabbi or another one of our nutrition coaches.

Payment is flexible too — monthly, weekly, or pay it upfront and save 10%.

This is what happens when strength training and nutrition stop being treated as two separate things. DM ‘START’ to find out what’s possible for you 💪

Most lower body training happens in one direction: straight forward and back. This drill doesn’t. 🦵

Coach Anika walking through a crossover step-up and step-down — outside leg crosses over to step up on the box, then crosses over again to step down. Sounds simple. It’s not, especially the eccentric part (ask us how many shins have been sacrificed to this box).

The real work here is control: a slow, controlled step down instead of just dropping, staying square instead of letting your hips pivot open, and actively pulling the leg across your body with your adductor instead of relying on momentum. That adductor engagement is the whole point — it’s a muscle group that barely gets touched in typical forward/back training, but it’s doing a ton of work every time you cut, pivot, or change direction in real life or sport.

Land facing forward, not turned out. Pull with the adductor, not momentum. Small cues, big difference — you can see it click in real time.

Save this if your lower body training is missing a whole plane of movement 💪

Where you put your skill work in a session actually matters. Coach Gabbi breaks down the order that works. 📋

Here’s the sequence we program: warm-up first, skill work second, strength work last.

Say it’s an upper body pull day. Warm up the usual pulling muscles, get them ready. Then hit your skill work — front lever, back lever, holds, reps, whatever’s on the program that day. THEN move into your strength work — pull-ups, etc.

Same logic on a push day: warm up, then handstand work or shoulder stands, then dips, push-ups, and the rest of your strength session.

The reason this order matters: skills demand precision and control, and that’s hardest to access when you’re already fatigued from strength work. Do the skill first while you’re fresh, then let the strength work finish you off — not the other way around.

Worth checking if this is how your own training is structured. DM ‘START’ if you want a program that actually sequences this correctly 💪

Yes, it’s a real, important hormone — it regulates your stress response, blood sugar, inflammation, and your sleep-wake cycle. But the “high cortisol is ruining your life” narrative all over social media almost always skips the part that actually matters: timing.

In a healthy person, cortisol is supposed to be HIGH in the morning and gradually decline through the day, bottoming out at night. If you’re dragging through mornings and can’t get out of bed, your cortisol probably isn’t too high — it’s too LOW in the morning, often with the pattern reversed: low AM, creeping up at night when it should be winding down.

Here’s the part almost nobody mentions: you genuinely can’t know what’s happening with your cortisol without testing it properly, at multiple points across the day — not a guess based on how tired you feel.

If testing shows a real issue, the fix isn’t jumping straight to adrenal supplements. It’s:

1. Fix your sleep first
2. Get morning sunlight — a walk outside, even when you don’t feel like it
3. Dial in your nutrition to actually match your activity level

Supplements have their place. Just not as a replacement for the foundations.

If you’ve been worried about your cortisol, get it properly tested and work with someone who reads the whole pattern instead of reacting to a scary headline.

DM ‘START’ if you want to talk to a coach about this 💪

ClearwaterFL

Coach of the Month: Jorge Reyes. 🌟

If you’ve trained Group Classes or Fundamentals here, there’s a good chance Jorge’s coached you at some point — but here’s what you might not know: he’s also our Co-Owner and Director of Coaching. The standards you feel in every class? Those come from him.

Jorge’s specialty is the stuff that demands the most from the body — rings, parallel bars, lever progressions. And he coaches all of it from a simple, firm belief: you should own your bodyweight before you even think about adding external load. Not because it’s a “beginner” idea — because it’s actually a performance principle. The strongest, most durable athletes build that way by mastering their own body first.

What makes Jorge good at this isn’t just that he’s mastered these skills himself (he has). It’s the patience he brings to teaching them — whether someone’s working their very first ring row or chasing an iron cross, he holds the same standard and gives it the same care.

If you’ve been coached by Jorge, drop a 🙌 below.