What is a Gainer?

Martial arts is a sport that involves a sequence of movements and exercises that require strength and flexibility. Typical martial arts moves include punches, kicks, rolls, tucks, somersaults, flips, and other acrobatic maneuvers. Competitive martial arts, like those in the Olympics, take a lot of dedication and practice. There are many types of martial arts but the farther one advances in any of them the more acrobatic moves they learn.

In this series of videos, you will learn more about martial arts and how to do a gainer. Our expert teaches you different exercises and tips on how to do one correctly and safely. Get tips on doing the perfect gainer and other variations of one. It is important to learn beginning martial arts positions or stances first. You can also learn more advanced moves including eye-hand-coordination with your arms and legs. Get tips on warm-ups and stretches as well from our expert martial artist!

"OK so today we're going to be focusing and learning how to do a gainer. Let's just go into basically an introduction of the gainer. The description of it would be a couple of steps running and jumping, going backwards while kicking out one leg and the other leg following it and landing on either one or both feet. The reason it's called a gainer is because you're moving forward while still going backwards at the same time, so you're gaining or therefore the move is called a gainer. Also, if you're able to do a gainer pretty well from a standing, some people call that maybe a flash kick. So let's take a look at a gainer from this side. I'm going to cheat it a little bit by giving a little extra step but let's just take a look. So notice how it was going backwards, yet still moving in a forwards direction. People can also do a gainer by running straight forward and going back and landing into the gainer. Today though for the sake of this instructional video we're basically going to go over a gainer by running in a circle, because that helps your momentum and is a little bit easier to focus on for today as we learn the gainer. And then we can also focus on some additional steps and variations of the gainer."