The reason why we have such big muscles is because most of the things we do requires a ton of strength. People take their own bodyweight for granted it's so funny.
Listen, if you are 150 pounds, you probably take it for granted that you can do something with your own bodyweight because you've been carrying it around with you forever and are used to it. Then someone asks you to do something hard, and you can't do it. Why? Because although you don't think it's that much, 150 pounds is still a lot of weight to be supporting on nothing but your hands.
Your bodyweight doesn't change, but changing the leverage of an exercise can "simulate" adding many more pounds. An example is hanging leg raises. I've almost never seen anyone at a gym do them the way we do them in gymnastics, which is hang straight down and bring your legs up to where your hands are. Everyone just bends their knees up and never progresses. The fact of the matter is, the leverage on the one we do is so minimal that it's much harder and will build your muscles up WAY faster and will get you way stronger. Doing something straight legged is always harder than bent legs and will affect every muscle that's actually doing something (i.e. in this your shoulders).
Okay Let's take even something even like tumbling. Again let's say you're 150 pounds. If you've ever tumbled before, you know you can generate **** loads of power, which is why you see guys doing amazing stunts while tumbling.
Force = mass * acceleration..again, you practice, you might gain some speed, acceleration goes up, which means that force does too and if you don't do it wrong, your muscles will naturally be built by this.
As someone said before, weight lifting isn't the only form of resistance training. In real life, you use tons of muscles in your body at once to do something. Functional strength training is also PROVEN to have a higher strength performance output than just straight up lifting.
P.S. And the people saying stuff about 'gay gymnasts'...I really don't know any gay gymnasts and there aren't that many. Apparently gymnastics is gay because you wear tight stuff while doing things alone that requires tons of strength, balance, flexibility, etc...WHILE wrestling is "Cool" even though you wear tight stuff too and you grab at another guy and lay ontop of him. Grow up guys, seriously. You guys want to know a secret? When I go to my regular gym at my college and do regular warmups before I go do my regular workout, I'll do maybe some planche pushups or something a bit hard with my bodyweight, whatever. Guess what? Women come and talk to me every ****ing time about it and I become friends with them (and sometimes more). How many times have you been benching and a woman comes up "ohh cool bench!" Never happened to me once and I've never seen it at school to anyone else either, and I go there 5 times/week. The fact of the matter is, most women could give a **** less how much you bench, squat, and deadlift if you are looking to impress them. They care about stuff that goes into real life, and I hate to say it, but they look for stuff that says you might be good in bed. And nothing says you might give them a good time in bed if you can move your body around seamlessly. Think about it, why do you think so many women go crazy over male gymnasts?
As an ex girlfriend of mine said about dancing "showing that you can dance well shows you might be good at some other things ;-) and we as women pay attention to that."
Sorry for the rant, but nothing pisses me off more than people assuming someone is gay because they do gymnastics.
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