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Black belt karate expert Billy Macagnone says athletes may want to hide from their rivals the fact that they practise the Gyrotonic Method. Photo: Handout

Gyrotonic Method: is this the best-kept training secret among Tokyo Olympic athletes?

  • Hong Kong’s Olympic karate hope Grace Lau, tennis player Andy Murray, diver Tom Daley, Tiger Woods and singer Lady Gaga have used the Gyrotonic Method
  • American karate veteran and Gyrotonic Method coach Billy Macagnone says the system is about movement and ensuring your bones and joints move in harmony

Britain’s Andy Murray, the former Olympic gold medallist and two-time Wimbledon champion, has practised it. So has golfer Tiger Woods and singer Lady Gaga. British two-time Olympic bronze medallist diver Tom Daley said he was also a fan and, recently, Hong Kong’s karate medal hope Grace Lau Mo-sheung revealed that she was using it in her preparations for the Tokyo Games.

The Gyrotonic Method – a relatively recent exercise regime derived from dance and yoga, among others – is growing around the world and its practitioners swear by it. However, it may be something many Olympic athletes are reluctant to advertise, preferring to keep it hush-hush for now given the intense scrutiny and competition they face from rivals.

“To tell the truth, some of them, they really don’t want people to know about it because it’s so competitive and they don’t want people to know what they are doing to improve their skills and technique,” said Billy Macagnone, an American karate black belt who runs a number of studios in New York.

“They don’t want to give away their secrets. But we know for sure Andy Murray used it, he won a bunch of tournaments. His back was out of it and he did Gyrotonic and went out and won some tournaments.

“Tiger Woods, [NBA star] Shaquille O’Neal, NFL players and lot of soccer players in Europe are using this. It is much more popular in the dance world but more and more athletes are using it.”

The Gyrotonic Method was developed in the 1970s by Romanian Juliu Horvath, a former dancer. Having been hampered by injuries for years, Horvath looked at yoga as a way to help dancers heal.

He continued to develop the system and fine-tune it, using principles of nature, the movement of the human spine and bones until he came up with the Gyrotonic Method.

Billy Macagnone says his leg extensions have improved after he started using the Gyrotonic Method. Photo: Handout

The exercise, aimed to increase suppleness and strength, uses a Pulley Tower as its standard piece of equipment. Studios dedicated to the system, and other programmes, have sprouted around the world, including Hong Kong. The Pulley Tower is designed in such a way to promote circular motion, treating your body as if it was a gyroscope.

Macagnone, 59, said most fitness-related programmes were centred on strength and cardiovascular development whereas few would focus on movement and the spine, which can move it six ways – bend forward, bend backward, lean right, lean left, twist right and twist left – plus one undulation.

“It’s about kinaesthetic awareness of how all the bones and joints are moving in harmony with the correct articulations and the correct amount of space between them all,” said Macagnone. “That’s the first thing that’s important. When we now understand that that’s what we’re looking for, the first way we approach it is through an energetic concept, so Gyronotic, like everything, is an energy system.

“So we’re approaching that movement by making sure our energies are flowing through are body correctly.

Great Britain's diving star Tom Daley said in 2017 that he uses the Gyrotonic Method. Photo: AFP

“So energetically speaking, your spine is a conductor for our body so the main emphasis is on the spine to make sure it is articulating properly with the right amount of spaces between all the vertebrae and the discs. And of course when the energy is moving up and down the spine it is spiralling so in Gyro everything has to be circular in motion, in a kind of spiralling fashion.”

Macagnone has vast experience in karate’s kata, the discipline in which Hong Kong’s Lau is hoping to win a medal at the Tokyo Games. Lau revealed in an interview in May that she was using the Gyrotonic Method in her training for the Olympics.

“Doing Gyro is very good for adjusting my body structure, which helps to enhance my performances a lot,” Lau said during a Zoom conference with Hong Kong media before leaving for Tokyo. “It also helps me to recover from injuries by performing specific movements and training.”

Hong Kong’s Grace Lau says the Gyrotonic Method is a key part of her training for the Olympics. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Macagnone said he came across the Gyrotonic Method when he was in his late 30s. He saw how some of the karate experts he looked up to were slowing down and he wanted to find something new to maintain his suppleness as he aged.

Friends who were dancers and gymnasts introduced him to the system at Horvath’s White Cloud Studio but it was not an immediate love affair. It’s only when he accidentally kicked opponents in the face during points combat karate did he realise he was on to something.

“I took a few sessions with some trainers and it was not immediate right off the bat,” said Macagnone. “I was like, ‘er, this is not for me’. But then something was feeling better. I’m breathing better, there’s a little decompression going on in my body, I don’t feel tight and little by little, it’s like the seed was planted.

“Then all of a sudden, I saw in my training my extension started to get better. My fluidity and combinations started coming off much easier and the pains that I was having in my body started getting less and less.

“In points karate, you extend the leg and show your opponent you could kick him without kicking him by pulling back. But my extension got way better and I hadn’t learned to control it because I was kicking people and knocking their head back and I’m like ‘oh, I’m sorry’. And that was Gyrotonic. So I had to relearn my extension.

“But just the freedom I started to find in moving, it gave me such a better enjoyment of martial arts. I started redoing katas and everything was coming off so much easier. Hips were snapping much better, better alignment, easier to stay in a stance longer. I mean, it was just incredible, it went through the roof.”

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