Overview
Steven Low’s book titled “Overcoming Gravity: A Systematic Approach to Gymnastics and Bodyweight Strength” is an independently published work influenced by gymnastics training which can be incorporated into a person’s bodyweight training regime. In a sense the book is not fully complete. The independent publishing of the work does occasionally show through and a lack of refinement can be seen. Very minor window dressing factors such as the occasional spelling or grammatical mistake can be found and the author would do well to release further editions where such matters are attended to. Having said that, it seems perverse that such a piece of work should go professionally unpublished. With widespread customer satisfaction and the unbelievable attention to detail shown, this book is a great resource for bodyweight training using gymnastics as part of your main routine.
Overcoming Gravity manages to supply a great amount of support around a whole training routine. The breathtaking detail it gives has you informed and briefed on every separate part of a workout routine including prehab, rehab and nutrition. The best accounts in the book are the parts which go into detail about the idea of bodyweight progressions and also injury prevention, another key aspect of a main calisthenics philosophy.
Part of the incredible user-friendly support is the opportunity in Overcoming Gravity to schedule your own routine from your choice of exercises and progressions in the book. The assistance with this is also great as it provides you with a vast array of information on how to choose your exercises and how to balance them so that you may see the optimum results in terms of strength, condition and flexibility. This information is coupled with a very valuable and bountiful set of citations and references to other works.
To add to the user-friendly and helpful nature of this book, Steven Low almost effortlessly makes his work accessible, readable and inviting to all readers. It is commonly seen when an author of a training book is trying to appeal to many different readers while concentrating on his or her own specific training discipline (see also Never Gymless by Ross Enamait) that the work seems too geared towards that discipline thus alienating many of the readers with endless jargon and narrow-minded philosophies. This does not happen in Overcoming Gravity. The only thing which may seem strange to a lot of people is the lack of leg exercises in the book due to the required concentration on upper body muscle groups in gymnastics. Some may find this book more useful when used in conjunction with another bodyweight training book, but for the most part, this book will bring you great results without making you feel too overly inclined to focus on the gymnastics background of the book and author.
Countless references to gymnastics are made by bodyweight trainers to do with the impressive feats which can be achieved with calisthenics instead of using free weights. Overcoming Gravity takes these references to the next level with this well-detailed and extremely useful book which is easily one of the best in bodyweight training literature.