Nutrition / Recovery
Johann CSCS
December 26, 2024
Suspension trainers like the TRX system offer a unique mix of instability, core engagement, and full-body strength training—but they have limits. Unlike free weights or barbell training, TRX workouts rely on bodyweight resistance, angles, and leverage rather than progressive overload with heavy weights.
Does this mean TRX training is ineffective? Absolutely not. But if you’re looking for raw muscle hypertrophy (muscle size growth), TRX alone won’t cut it.
What TRX excels at is:
Strengthening movement patterns—key for calisthenics, combat sports, and functional strength.
Targeting stabilizer muscles—crucial for core, shoulders, and posterior chain development.
Building sub-maximal strength and endurance—great for fighters, athletes, and mobility-focused training.
Enhancing mobility and control—excellent for Pilates-based training and corrective work.
TRX is also one of the best tools for enhancing core endurance, balance, and injury prevention. It allows you to train across multiple planes of motion, reinforcing the kind of body control that carries over into real-world movements, including combat sports, gymnastics, and athletic performance. However, TRX alone has limitations in raw strength development since it lacks progressive mechanical overload—which is why it works best when integrated with traditional weight training and explosive plyometrics.
If you integrate TRX training with barbell lifts, kettlebells, and plyometrics, you get a brutal but effective hybrid program that develops strength, mobility, and athleticism in ways traditional weightlifting does not.
1️⃣. Adjust the Angle to Add Intensity
2️⃣. Your Core Is Always Under Tension
3️⃣. Expect a Plyometric Component
4️⃣. You Can Use It to Enhance Bodyweight Strength
5️⃣. It Mimics Pilates for Core Strength
6️⃣. TRX Alone Won’t Build Muscle Mass
This progressive TRX routine is built around strength, core control, and power development.
Before jumping into explosive movements and heavy resistance exercises, it’s critical to develop a foundation of stability and control. Without this, the body compensates in ways that can lead to injury, inefficiency, and stalled progress. TRX training is uniquely effective at challenging the body’s ability to stabilize through movement, engaging both large muscle groups and the smaller stabilizers that are often neglected in traditional weightlifting.
In this phase, the primary focus is on joint control, posture, and muscular coordination to create a strong base for power and endurance development. These exercises emphasize unilateral movement, balance, and core engagement, all of which enhance functional strength that translates into better athletic performance, reduced risk of injury, and improved movement efficiency. Mastering these fundamentals ensures that future phases, which incorporate plyometrics and advanced resistance exercises, will be performed with maximum effectiveness.
Focus on hinging from the hips while keeping the TRX handle lightly for balance.
This builds posterior chain strength, ankle stability, and core engagement.
Maintain a slow, controlled descent to enhance proprioception and minimize compensatory movements.
Progression: Reduce reliance on the TRX by holding the handles with minimal tension and focusing on true unilateral balance.
Key Benefit: Improves hamstring flexibility, glute activation, and single-leg strength, all crucial for running, jumping, and lower-body athletic performance.
TRX removes pressure from the back knee, allowing for a deeper range of motion.
Increase difficulty: Elevate your rear foot for Bulgarian-style lunges, increasing hip flexor mobility and quad activation.
Maintain an upright torso while engaging the glutes and quads to prevent excessive knee strain.
Key Benefit: Strengthens single-leg stability, knee control, and overall lower body endurance, supporting explosive power and injury resilience.
Advanced Variation: Hold a kettlebell in one hand while using TRX with the opposite hand for added core engagement.
Developing strength and stability with TRX ensures that your body is primed for complex movements that require balance, power, and mobility. By mastering these fundamental movement patterns, you create a strong base for explosive performance in sprinting, jumping, and combat sports. Additionally, focusing on joint control and unilateral strength reduces the risk of muscle imbalances and compensatory injuries, keeping you in peak condition for long-term training success.
Before advancing to high-intensity TRX movements, solidifying core-controlled stability is essential. This phase sets the groundwork for better energy transfer, improved movement mechanics, and greater overall athletic ability in subsequent training phases.
Focus on hinging from the hips while keeping the TRX handle lightly for balance.
This builds posterior chain strength, ankle stability, and core engagement.
TRX removes pressure from the back knee, allowing for a deeper range of motion.
Increase difficulty: Elevate your rear foot for Bulgarian-style lunges.
A powerful core is the foundation of all athletic movement. Whether you’re sprinting, throwing punches, or lifting weights, your ability to transfer force efficiently starts in the core. This phase focuses on dynamic movements that challenge the abs, obliques, and hip flexors to improve overall body control, rotational strength, and power output. Unlike traditional core exercises, TRX movements require you to stabilize while moving through multiple planes of motion, reinforcing real-world strength that carries over into sports and everyday activities.
Explosiveness in the core is essential for fighters, athletes, and anyone looking to improve speed, agility, and force production. These exercises are designed to help develop faster reaction times, better hip engagement, and stronger trunk stability. By training your core with both power and endurance in mind, you can enhance quick directional changes, striking power, and overall movement efficiency.
A core-dominant exercise that forces the abs and obliques to contract dynamically while maintaining balance and coordination.
Targets the lower abs, obliques, and hip flexors with full-body control, increasing both flexibility and power in hip-driven movements.
Keep the legs straight as they move in and out to maximize core activation.
Advanced Version: Slow down movement tempo to increase difficulty, forcing the muscles to work harder against momentum.
Key Benefit: Enhances total-body coordination, explosive core strength, and flexibility, making it a highly effective movement for combat sports and functional training.
A more advanced variation that challenges greater shoulder and triceps stability, improving upper-body endurance while maintaining core integrity.
Focus on maintaining a neutral spine and tight core engagement throughout the movement to avoid excessive lower-back strain.
Progression: Add a pause at the top of the pike movement to maximize time under tension, further strengthening the deep core stabilizers.
Key Benefit: Increases full-body synchronization, making it a perfect drill for athletes needing stronger rotational control and midsection endurance.
A strong and explosive core enhances your ability to generate rapid force and control rotational movement, which is essential for nearly every sport. Fighters need it for delivering powerful punches and kicks, while athletes require it for speed, agility, and lateral movement. Additionally, a well-trained core reduces the likelihood of injury by supporting spinal alignment and maintaining stability under stress.
This phase is not just about abdominal strength; it’s about building a core that can react, stabilize, and generate power in a split second. Mastering these TRX movements will improve your overall athleticism, balance, and ability to transfer power through the entire kinetic chain. Before moving on to upper-body strength exercises, ensuring your core is explosive and stable will dramatically improve overall performance and efficiency.
Targets the lower abs, obliques, and hip flexors with full-body control.
More advanced: Requires greater shoulder and triceps stability.
Upper body strength is a key factor in athletic performance, functional fitness, and injury prevention. Whether you’re a fighter, a strength athlete, or someone looking to improve their overall fitness, muscle control and stability in the upper body are essential for maximizing force production and efficiency. Unlike machines or free weights, TRX training forces the body to engage stabilizing muscles while moving through multiple planes of motion. This not only strengthens the primary movers—the back, shoulders, chest, and arms—but also enhances coordination, grip endurance, and muscular resilience.
In this phase, the focus is on scapular control, pressing strength, and upper body endurance. These exercises will reinforce pulling and pushing power, ensuring that the body moves efficiently and remains injury-resistant. By integrating TRX-based pulling and pressing movements, you will develop balanced upper-body strength, which carries over into athletic performance, combat sports, and general physical preparedness.
Builds lat strength similar to a pullover machine but requires full control over movement.
Targets the lats, rear delts, and triceps, improving overall upper-body coordination.
Maintain a neutral spine and engage the core throughout the movement to prevent excessive lower-back strain.
Advanced Progression: Slow down the eccentric phase and pause at full extension to maximize tension.
Key Benefit: Strengthens posterior chain muscles, enhances scapular stability, and reinforces controlled pulling strength.
Hybrid movement combining lower-body drive and upper-body pulling power.
Works the posterior chain, grip strength, and mid-back stabilizers.
Increase intensity by pausing at the top of the row and engaging the core fully before lowering.
Key Benefit: Enhances postural strength, scapular retraction, and pulling endurance—crucial for combat athletes and climbers.
Building a strong upper body isn’t just about developing aesthetic muscle—it’s about control, endurance, and injury prevention. TRX training helps reinforce joint stability, which is especially important for combat athletes and individuals involved in high-impact sports. Additionally, focusing on slow and controlled movements allows for greater time under tension, leading to enhanced muscle engagement and endurance.
Mastering these TRX exercises will improve pressing power, pulling efficiency, and core integration, ensuring that the body can generate functional strength in all movement patterns. Before progressing into explosive movements or calisthenics-based training, developing upper-body control is essential for maintaining longevity and minimizing the risk of shoulder and elbow injuries.
Builds lat strength similar to a pullover machine but requires full control.
Hybrid movement combining lower-body drive and upper-body pulling power.
Strong, stable shoulders are essential for upper-body performance, whether in combat sports, weightlifting, or general fitness. The shoulders serve as the link between the arms and the torso, playing a key role in pushing, pulling, and stabilizing movement. TRX training challenges the shoulders to work dynamically, engaging both the deltoids and stabilizer muscles in ways that traditional weightlifting often neglects.
The focus of this phase is to build overhead strength, pressing stability, and scapular control, ensuring the shoulders can handle load while remaining resilient against injury. Shoulder durability is especially important for fighters, grapplers, and athletes who rely on upper-body endurance for striking, throwing, or bracing against resistance.
By incorporating pressing variations and overhead movements, this phase reinforces proper shoulder mechanics while also challenging mobility, endurance, and core engagement.
Builds overhead pressing strength while reinforcing core engagement.
Focuses on scapular control and stability, preventing excess strain on the rotator cuff.
Progression: Decrease wall assistance over time, eventually performing full TRX-supported handstand push-ups.
Key Benefit: Develops shoulder endurance, triceps strength, and total-body stability, crucial for explosive pressing power.
Focuses on scapular retraction and lat engagement, crucial for pull-ups and climbing.
Strengthens shoulder girdle stability and control, improving overhead positioning.
Progression: Increase time under tension by slowing down the eccentric (lowering) phase.
Key Benefit: Enhances lat activation, upper-body pulling power, and postural alignment.
Shoulders are one of the most injury-prone areas in strength training and sports. Developing strong, mobile, and stable shoulders not only improves performance in pressing movements, throwing power, and striking endurance, but also reduces injury risk. TRX training allows for greater range of motion and control, reinforcing shoulder durability without excessive joint strain.
Mastering shoulder pressing and pulling movements with TRX will improve upper-body control, rotational strength, and endurance, ensuring a balanced and powerful kinetic chain. Before progressing into advanced calisthenic movements or plyometric pressing, ensuring shoulder stability will help build a foundation of strength and injury prevention.
Builds overhead pressing strength while reinforcing core engagement.
Focuses on scapular retraction and lat engagement, crucial for pull-ups and climbing.
As you progress through the earlier phases, your body adapts to strength, endurance, and coordination challenges. The final phase focuses on calisthenic progressions, integrating TRX-assisted movements that push your upper body, core, and lower body beyond conventional limitations. This phase is crucial for those looking to build control, explosiveness, and bodyweight mastery, helping athletes transition into advanced gymnastic-style training or enhancing fight-specific conditioning.
TRX allows for gradual progressions into difficult bodyweight exercises, making it an ideal tool for developing unilateral strength, grip endurance, and coordination. These exercises challenge core engagement, balance, and movement efficiency, ensuring that you can perform complex calisthenics movements safely and effectively.
TRX can mimic the muscle-up transition, teaching control and explosive pull strength.
Enhances scapular retraction, pulling explosiveness, and wrist stability.
Progression: Gradually increase the angle and reduce TRX assistance over time to work towards a full muscle-up.
Key Benefit: Builds functional upper body strength necessary for gymnastic and combat-sport applications.
Core remains engaged while targeting triceps strength and stabilizer muscles.
Strengthens elbow joint resilience for pressing, punching, and grappling movements.
Progression: Elevate the feet to increase resistance and core activation.
Key Benefit: Develops lockout strength and control, essential for pushing power.
A more bicep-involved version, helping with pull-up endurance and overall elbow health.
Enhances grip strength and forearm stability, crucial for clinching, gripping, and combat sport maneuvers.
Progression: Slow down the eccentric phase and add a pause to intensify the movement.
Key Benefit: Increases upper body pulling strength, preventing common imbalances between pushing and pulling movements.
Calisthenics-based training emphasizes full-body integration, control, and real-world strength. Mastering these TRX progressions will enhance athletic durability, mobility, and movement precision. Whether your goal is to transition into freestanding muscle-ups, improve functional power, or develop elite-level body control, this phase ensures that your body is prepared for advanced training demands.
Before moving on to full gymnastic strength training or extreme calisthenics, solidifying these foundational TRX movements will improve body awareness, increase tendon strength, and optimize force transfer, leading to well-rounded, long-term athletic performance.
TRX can mimic the muscle-up transition, teaching control and explosive pull strength.
Core remains engaged while targeting triceps strength.
A more bicep-involved version, helping with pull-up endurance.
| Phase | Focus | Key Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: Strength & Stability | Joint control, balance, core engagement | Builds foundational strength, prevents injuries |
| Phase 2: Core Power | Explosive movements, rotational strength | Enhances power transfer, agility, and core endurance |
| Phase 3: Upper Body Strength | Pressing and pulling mechanics | Develops muscle endurance and scapular control |
| Phase 4: Shoulder Strength | Overhead pressing, shoulder stability | Reduces injury risk, improves upper-body control |
| Phase 5: Calisthenic Progression | Bodyweight mastery, movement efficiency | Builds elite-level body control, grip strength, and coordination |
The TRX suspension trainer is an elite tool for strength, endurance, and athletic control, but it’s not a standalone hypertrophy system. It excels in functional fitness, mobility, and stability but should be combined with weights for complete muscle development.
TRX training provides an unparalleled opportunity to develop core strength, balance, and movement efficiency, making it an excellent tool for fighters, athletes, and general fitness enthusiasts alike. Unlike traditional weightlifting, which focuses on isolated muscle groups, TRX movements require full-body integration, which translates directly into real-world strength and improved athletic performance.
For the best results, progressively overload TRX movements by adjusting angles, adding pauses, or integrating explosive reps. Use it for stability, athletic carryover, and core development, but supplement with heavy lifts for true maximal strength.
If you train combat sports, TRX can enhance fight-specific endurance, rotational power, and durability—making it a valuable tool in any fighter’s program. Additionally, if your goal is to develop greater body control, TRX progressions will help refine your movement mechanics, leading to long-term gains in strength and coordination.
TRX isn’t just about suspension training; it’s a system that, when used strategically, can elevate your strength, mobility, and athletic potential. By integrating it into a comprehensive program, you’ll unlock new levels of performance, injury resilience, and full-body control. No matter your fitness goal—whether it’s athletic development, injury prevention, or functional strength—TRX training can be a key component in building a body that performs at its peak.
TRX is excellent for functional strength, mobility, and endurance but lacks progressive overload. For muscle hypertrophy, it should be combined with traditional weightlifting.
Yes! The adjustable angles allow for different levels of difficulty, making it accessible for all fitness levels.
3-4 times a week is ideal, depending on your overall training plan. It can be used as a standalone workout or supplementary training.
Yes, especially when combined with high-intensity circuits. It engages multiple muscle groups, increasing caloric expenditure.
Adjust the angle, slow down reps, increase time under tension, or combine with weights to create progressive overload.
Absolutely. It enhances core strength, balance, and body control, all essential for combat sports, gymnastics, and overall athleticism.
coachjohanncscs.com only uses primary research and scholarly studies as references over secondary sites. Other references are primarily from reputable social media accounts of experts only in the fields of health, nutrition, sports science, physiology, psychology, and physical therapy.
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Eskandari, Z., Moradi, M., & Mirmoezzi, M. (2023). Effect of TRX suspension training on balance, mobility, lower limb muscle strength, and fear of falling in older men. Scientific Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine.
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Full URL: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Javad-Shavikloo/publication/335789840_Does_TRX_Training_Reduce_Injury_Rates_in_Futsal_Athletes_as_Measured_by_the_Functional_Movement_Screening_Test/links/5d7b49c6299bf1d5a970c068/Does-TRX-Training-Reduce-Injury-Rates-in-Futsal-Athletes-as-Measured-by-the-Functional-Movement-Screening-Test.pdf
Kosmata, A. (2014). Functional exercise training with the TRX suspension trainer in a dysfunctional, elderly population. CORE.ac.uk.
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Blasco, J. M., Domínguez-Navarro, F., & Tolsada-Velasco, C. (2023). The effects of suspension training on dynamic, static balance, and stability: An interventional study. Medicina.
Full URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/60/1/47/pdf
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