What do flipping and gripping have in common? Other than the fact each of the words ends with the suffix -ing, and that practitioners of mixed acrobatics are referred to as “tricksters” and practitioners of mixed feats of grip strength are referred to as “gripsters,” (another shared suffix) the actual sports have zero common carryover.
In tricking, floor gymnastics, and acrobatics, there is no use of grip strength. Is this a problem? Do you need to reconcile the two? No! IT IS A GOOD THING that the two have so little in common. Let me explain!
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a multifaceted athlete is interference. Interference is the other side of carryover. Sure, front squats can carry over to something like acrobatic tricking because it can help your jumping, but it can also make you super hungry! This will cause you to eat more than is necessary to maintain an acceptable weight for acrobatics. Not to mention front squatting makes you sore and tired as crap. Front squatting also takes away resources from the same pool used for acrobatics. The worst thing you can do is train front squats before the day you train acrobatics. Actually training them even in the same week is a hard thing to do! How about grip?
EASY! This is the beauty of training two things that have zero common carryover, there is almost zero interference as well! It would be hard to screw it up! You can train grip and flips in virtually any order or frequency, and you wouldn’t have a problem. The only way to screw it up is to absolutely blast your CNS doing a day in, day out “shock week” of high volume/high-intensity acrobatics practice. In that case, everything will be affected because you’ve exhausted your global training reserves (you’ve fried your CNS). You probably won’t be doing any training in any capacity, of any type, but a couple weeks per year like that anyway.
Consider the different training capacities and skills that interest you. Don't be sad if they don’t have much in common, because that just means they won’t get in the way of one another. You know the saying “have your cake and eat it too” ??? Perhaps we can say something like “have your flips and grip train too!” It’s working just fine for me this year. My flips are doing great and my forearms are big as shit from training them. Nice to have both! Easy to train both!
