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'Coach' Christopher Sommers of Gymnastic Bodies - A review
First off, some context for this review. I’m a former GB student, I started with the program when it first launched. I’ve been to two seminars and I have trained directly with several of Christopher’s top athletes. My username on the forum, before I was banned, was ‘thecolin’ (just so ‘Coach’ knows where he can direct his lawyers).
The first thing to address is, why talk about the person and not the program? While this may seem like pure character assassination, you need to first understand that the contents of ‘the program’ (let’s not refer to it by name, I don’t want to get sued after all!) are slim. By his own design, the entire program operates around him, his chosen elite, his seminars and the forum. It’s impossible to talk about ‘the program’ without talking about the man at the center. Without him, all you would have would be a long list of fairly generic gymnastic conditioning exercises, common stretches and basic plyometrics in a slick package.
He has always attempted to position himself as the alpha and the omega of gymnastics information, a conscious decision on his part, with many interlocking layers of resources that you need to pay to see. As such, I feel that talking about him directly is not only fair, but necessary.
Additionally, Christopher has made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want anyone talking about ‘the program’ in less than perfectly favorable terms. https://inetbrown255.weebly.com/blog/soca-2017-free-download-torrent. So in order to educate people about how his company runs, I see no other possibility than to talk about him directly.
I haven’t been involved with ‘the program’ in a fairly long time now. And I had no intention of publishing my opinions after my departure. But after reading about Christopher’s latest tantrum, I realized that there are still many people being seduced by his slick marketing and I think people should understand exactly what they’re getting into.
I know it’s quite popular to throw the word narcissist around these days, labeling anyone who has ever taken a selfie as self-obsessed. But as someone who has never had this tendency to use the term casually, I can think of no other way to more aptly and succinctly describe this man.
It’s interesting to note that Christopher has relatively little knowledge of physiology and training adaption. This is the opinion of several intelligent and educated people in the bodyweight fitness community who have worked closely with him. Like I’ve said, his programs are fairly generic list of gymnastics exercises (this in turn is the opinion of several talented gymnasts I’ve spoke with, who are also well known members of the community. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten anyone’s approval to talk about them by name).
As such, he has a very limited capacity on an individual basis to help students exceed their problems. The overwhelming thrust of the training approach that he pushes is that anyone who is not excelling needs to work harder, work harder, work harder.
This is the first point at which I had my doubts, and started to question what lied behind the curtain and what actually controlled the giant flaming head that is Christopher Sommers.
When I first started to question the program I was waking up before 5am to train most days of the week. I was following the program exactly as it was presented. At a certain point I had dramatically exceeded my ability on a mobility element that was supposed to aid with the ROM on an associated progression within the program, but this simply wasn’t happening. When I started to ask about this on the forum, the response was simply to ‘work harder’. I honestly couldn’t contemplate how that would have been possible at the time. What I now know is that Christopher never provides these answers because he simply doesn’t have any insights on a personal basis.
I had already attended my first seminar. I had noticed that everything was set up very broadly and by the numbers, with little to no comments on the individual attendees. But I hadn’t given it excessive thought as it was introductory and after training alone at 5am in my unheated garage all winter, training with other people was a welcome change!
To his credit some of these flawed progressions were eventually modified and corrected. But in his pathological inability to admit fault, the current contents of the program are always ‘correct’. The flawed program as it was originally presented was not at fault, people’s laziness was the problem. If there is a problem, it is silently modified without any kind of announcement, seemingly pretending that it has always been like that. But he appears to have the idea that if part of his program doesn’t work for 99% of his students, it’s because 99% of his students are too stupid or lazy to figure this out. This is obviously nonsense.
By focusing on ‘hard work’, he can position himself perfectly to be beyond criticism. Nobody can deny the important of consistent hard work in attaining fitness goals. So it’s an excellent point of rhetoric for him to lean on. In practical terms, it means that he will simply gloss over anyone who has genuine limitations in their training, as everyone does to some degree or another, and never allow it to become a comment on his allegedly perfect system.
While it’s positive to focus on hard work, in practice it creates an environment where everyone who doesn’t succeed is lazy unless you injure yourself, then you’ve pushed yourself too much…
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But this also works to his advantage, as Christopher’s true capacities lie in identifying talent. While the mantra is always ‘hard work conquers all’ he has also stated quite plainly that he is so adept at identifying talent that when new children came into his gym in Arizona, all he’d have them do is have them run forwards, and run backwards. From that simple test he already had a good idea of what their potential was. Of course if he were to speak more plainly about individual limitations in such a specialized sport, it would limit his ability to (quite literally) sell the fantasy of ‘the crucible of sport’, personal glory and ‘willpower conquers all’.
https://inetbrown255.weebly.com/blog/full-hd-1080p-hollywood-movies-free-download-torrent. By selling this story to a wide enough audience he can discard anyone who struggles and pick out the talent. And anyone who questions him will be ignored, as he can simply point to one of his (obviously hard working, but obviously talented) athletes and say that they’re his creation, molded from raw clay with his very hands.
What he does have is a world class understanding of technical gymnastics and an ability to train children. In terms of training adults, his approaches are brutish at best.
You’ll notice that all the good, detailed information comes from his top athletes and affiliates, not from him. Download game of thrones season 1 vo. He even went so far as to create a wiki on the forum (I’m unsure if it’s still there) in response to the complete lack of course content. Effectively requiring students who had paid for the course to also be the authors of the content!
And he is ruthless in organizing his stable of athletes. The number of talented, intelligent and interesting people he has exorcised from the community because they have dared to disagree with him is ridiculously long. People who he cannot control are quickly expunged. I think many of the more high profile instances of this are well known.
This anti-social behavior is in stark contrast to his impressive charisma and presence in person. He’s an accomplished salesman, and to anyone who has met him, calling him ‘anti-social’ sounds odd indeed. But it’s this contrast between his charisma and his apparent inability to maintain long term relationships that is so troubling. These are the kinds of people that can be so insidiously toxic.
There is no doubt that he’s in this for money and personal glory. Despite my growing doubts, I decided to attend a second seminar. I thought that with more experience perhaps I could get some more information that I hadn’t caught previously. Unfortunately I was already becoming a slightly vocal critic and had started to look for information from other sources, including from someone that he had already cast out from his circle.
Though he never would call me out by name, I can only imagine it was my less than complete support and ‘fraternizing with the enemy’ that led to him going on an hour long rant about how much money he is making and how successful he is. It was freaking surreal and completely unprecedented, according to some of his staff.
Bear in mind that this is an hour of time from a high priced seminar for people wanting to learn about gymnastics training. But he went on and on about how he’s raking in cash. The new Porsche he bought in cash, and that even though he’s stuck in traffic in his fancy new car, the fact that he owns it signifies to everyone else that he’s ‘won’ (won what, I don’t know). It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered such overtly shallow materialism in person.
The seminar itself was more of the same, a variety of exercises that could be passed on in a 1 minute video and lots of speeches about working harder, pushing yourself more, and working harder. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that although he makes a lot of good speeches, he starts to repeat himself constantly.
Having said all that, I enjoyed my time with the program. There are a lot of smart people that have floated around him from time to time. The community is generally excellent, though it is moderated with an extremely heavy hand. When I was there posts were regularly modified and deleted by the moderators and people were banned, often for petty and selfish reasons.
I got decent results for my own standards and learned a fair bit, but it takes a massive amount of extra work to get anywhere or to understand what you need to do.
Gymnastics style training is a very complicated thing to train. And if he were more modest in his proclamations, providing more help and understanding around the potential pitfalls that everyone eventually faces the program would be far superior. While ‘the program’ provides a useful resource of exercises, expect to pay a lot of money for the information, along with many hours of extra work to figure ways around problems and sticking points.
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