First off, what you are teaching yourself at the moment is fine but once you get as far as back handsprings you should really take some classes. It is way too easy to end up doing it wrong and getting hurt if you teach yourself. You may actually find at that point that you have some technical problems with some of the more basic skills that you have self taught which you need to clean up before you can do the harder stuff. Doing martial arts should give you an advantage over most people self teaching because you should have better control and more awareness of the position and movement of your body than average. However it is still pretty tricky to know whether you are getting things right because you can't see yourself and the advice you pick up about learning gymnastics skills online can pretty dodgy. However, up to and including round-off you are unlikely to injure yourself provided you don't work on a hard surface.

Regarding the push ups, it sounds like you'd be better doing harder variants rather than doing so many. There's a body weight training programme here:http://www.startbodyweight.com/p/start-b... which I think is quite well suited to gymnastics. You always need to go for maximum controlled range of motion and an explosive lift against gravity followed by a slower controlled lower with gravity. For strength it is better to do fewer, harder exercises. If you can do 100 press ups that's really doing more for your endurance than your strength.

Also you should really be doing arms and upper body every other day. Rest is important in improving strength. That's less true for your core though, you can work that everyday. Sit-ups, V-sits, plank are all good options. You can add weight or do it on a slope to make it harder if needed. I would say do hollow hold and arched hold too because they are good for improving core strength and having those strong shapes is really important in gymnastics.

You might want to do some plyometrics as well: Burpees, box jumps, roll and spring up. The point is to make it punchy so it needs to be short and intense.

Handstands are pretty fundamental to gymnastics so it is definitely something you want to learn. You already pass through one (with straddled legs) in the middle of your cartwheel. How long it will take you to learn on though is a, "how long is a piece of string?" question.

A very basic way to get started with handstands is to do a sort of big bunny hop where you transfer your weight to your hands and your hips come up over your shoulders so that you are in a sort of bent knees handstand position.

Try walking your feet up a wall into handstand (or cartwheel into it.) If you practise holding a handstand facing a wall so you are very close in but with just your feet touching that will help you identify what muscles you need to use and develop the required strength and balance. You need good core strength to maintain feet over hips over shoulders over hands.

When it comes to doing handstand away form the wall it helps that you have a forwards roll because that is your safe get out if you over-balance. Try to allow yourself to overbalance with straight arms for a bit before you go into the roll in order to bring you nearer the floor.

When you kick up take a big lunge forwards with your arms up by your ears and your body in a straight line from your hands down through your torso and back leg to your foot. So you are already in a handstand shape before you go into handstand. Then when you kick up your whole body rotates around the hip of your forwards lunging leg as a lever. This will make kicking up into handstand easier and more controlled.

Later you might want to work towards handstand push ups by doing pike push ups with your feet on a chair or towards press to handstand.

Gymnastics and martial arts don't mix well in a fight.

Hey everyone im a 15 year old guy. I do Taekwondo and I always thought that gymnastics and martial arts went together. Im NOT taking any gymnastics classes at the moment, im kind of teaching myself. I can a front/back roll, cartwheel, bridge and im teaching myself how to do a back bend.

I started practicing doing a handstand on Friday. I weigh about 145-147lbs. Ive been doing 200 push ups a day, 100 normal and 100 incline for the shoulders. I run every other day for 15 minuets and do ab exercises after I run. I am also 1cm off the ground when I do the splits.

I want to be able to do a round off with a series of back hand springs and I heard that a handstand will help so I dont fall on my face.

Any advise from Cheerleader, Gymnasts or any other martial artists?