Madruškaš, Giedrius

Giedrius Karōlis Madruškāš is a lithuanian street workout athlete known for his crazy feats of strength and the invention of many street workout combinations and moves, all of which are characterized by having the name "gie" within them.

## Biography

Most of the elements on this page are extracted from his autobiography "FROM LITHUANIA", that released in 2021 under the publishing house Remcaus Writings.

According to his parents, Gie was a difficult birth: indeed, when he was a baby, his arms already had this weird incapacity of being unable to bend, and getting them out of his mother's womb was hard. *"He wanted to stay, but was performing a weird motion of inverted butterfly to stay inside."* Being able to compete with a human male's strength while just being born, Gie was meant to be a freak of nature.

Gie grew up a troubled child. Although he was unable to bend his arms, he always felt more comfortable walking on his hands. He learnt to walk on his hands after 3 months.

When he was 4 years old, his parents inscripted him to gymnastics class, but he hated it because the other children were making fun of his arms, and he thought gymnastics was for girls.

Fast forward 9 years, Gie watches the Rio Olympic Games, especially the rings events finals. That's when he decided to start his journey, amazed by the insane strength of the athletes. He takes some rings classes in Kaunas, Lithuania. Gie officially started training someday between August and September of 2016.

Gie is estimated to be a pioneer in posterior straight arm strength. Sadly he was never allowed to compete in gymnastics, because of his never-seen before condition that caused problems for swinging skills. The Gie skills are therefore non official.

Clips of Gie are very rare, and some collectors are ready to pay thousands of dollars to obtain them: indeed, he *"train[s] next to a mirror".*

Gie is considered to be more than twice as strong as most elite athletes.

## Training Evolution

Gie started training in Autumn of 2016, where he quickly progressed. Since he has a discapacity that makes it very difficult for him to bend his arms, he had to look for many alternatives to basic exercises. He would do planche leans and each time lean slightly more instead of normal pushups, explosive scapular shrugs instead of pull ups and so forth. Gie would always look for a workaround for exercises with his condition.

#### 2016

* In **december of 2016**, he unlocked front lever (ending the year with a solid 20s hold) and also unlocked straddle planche, creating a good base for what's to come. When beginning his skills he did not train rings too much as he decided to focus more on building his base outside of rings.

#### 2017

* In **february of 2017**, he held a 5s full planche and did 15 front lever raises. Eventually he decides that front lever became too easy for him and decides to start training victorian on p-bars.
* Upon deciding to start to train new skills other than Planche and Front Lever, gie starts to take the rings more serious, where he managed to unlock Iron Cross by **July of 2017,** he also begins to think and train about combinations he could do on rings. By this point, the rings become his main training apparatus. At this point, gie has 10s of Supinated Planche, 10s of wide p-bars victorian and starts training maltese.
* In **october of 2017**, he unlocks victorian cross and starts training for butterfly. He is able to hold an iron cross for around 20s now, and is able to perform nakayamas and pinedas.
* By **december of 2017**, he is able to perfrom the butterfly and sets his eyes on more ambitious rings skills. By this point he is perfecting his victorian cross, which he can now hold for around 8s, as well as other rings skills. One of the skills that called gie's attention the most was inverted cross.

#### 2018

* For gie, **2018** was largely unactive due to the tendon pains he started to get when training inverted cross, as well as back lever to maltese. He had developed tendonitis, which cycled between being cured and coming back within a few weeks of training. Due to his injuries 2018 was not a year of a lot of progress, save for the end of it, where he stopped training completely in summer of 2018, only to be able to slowly come back to training in autumn. He resumed his trainings somewhere in **august of 2018**, where he quickly came back to his level. During his time out of training he began to think of elements that were not done before, one of them being the Gie cross, which is his signature element, in essence a manna handstand as wide as possible on rings.

#### 2019

* In **March of 2019** marks an important month of gie's training as he unlocks 3 skills that would later become key parts in his training, these being back lever to maltese, inverted cross and his signature move, gie cross. Due to focusing on these three movements he stops training other movements he was once interested in.
* In **June of 2019** he unlocks Zanetti and Van Gelder, and shortly after (First week of July) he unlocks Carmona. He begins to experiment with advanced combinations with Gie Cross, however he finds that they are very hard and decides to focus more on building his base and training related elements. Around this time, Gie begins to find fun in training higher reps and mainly focuses his training on advanced statics he can do a lot of reps of. He also becomes convinced that he lacks the strength base for harder combinations with even more advanced skills, so he begins to condition them by training in this manner.
* By **November 2019**, he manages to achieve the following: 18 planche presses, 8 maltese press on the ground, 38s iron cross, 6 butterfly, 12 nakayama and 12 pineda in the same set, 25 nakayama, 15 supinated maltese elevation, 10 dead planche pushups + press, 3 back lever to maltese to zanetti to 3 planche to maltese, 12s inverted cross, 5 inverted cross press, 7s gie cross and more. By this point he decides that he already has a strong enough base to train those movements he thought of earlier in the year.
* **Within a few days from the end of 2019**, gie unlocks inverted butterfly

#### 2020

* Upon seeing Manuel Caruso's movement, gie begins to gain more interest in pull skills. Due to his level in pull, he is able to learn the caruso within days of practice. This opened his mind to new possibilities of pull movements in the rings. Caruso's movements around this time (such as straight arm impossible dip and the caruso) inspired gie for a lot of combinations involving victorian cross, reverse planche and other elements. Elements he once got bored of training and thought of as relatively easy suddenly become interesting to him.
* In the span of **April of 2020 and October of 2020** he invents and achieves a wide range of combinations involving pull skills and inverted cross, such as Reverse Planche on rings, Davtyan directly to inverted cross (Gie 4), Victorian Cross to Gie Cross (Gie 3, or Gie Raise), Kowalik Dip on rings with straight arms (Victorian to Reverse Planche, Gie 5), Davtyan to Reverse Planche (Gie 7) and so forth.

#### 2021

* By **January 2021** Gie had become slightly burned out of training Gie Cross so he decided to try other elements (mainly inverted Cross related) & work on harder combinations of elements that were easier to him. Many records such as his iconic 32s floor maltese were achieved during this era (winter 2021).
* In **summer of 2021**, gie experiments more with no false and cripta grip, inspired by his friend Elias Page, where he tries his usual rings skills with a layer of difficulty. In this period, his most notable achievement was 2 cripta carmonas + an inverted cross hold, 15 no false caruso pulls, and an 8s hold of victorian cross with extremely low false.
* By **Autumn 2021**, he tried cripta inverted butterfly, however he had a small wrist injury while trying to do this, which prompted him to leave inverted skills for a while and also lead him to think that cripta grip was a bit of a waste of time. He mainly trained volume with his static skills by doing long combos and a lot of reps on the rings.

#### 2022

* In **January of 2022**, gie decided to continue training inverted skills, where he invented a lot of other skills by combining swings and other elements with inverted butterfly.

* In Late **april of 2022** he created arguably his hardest skill, the Gie 16 (inverted butterfly to gie cross).

* In **may of 2022**, during an inverted cross combination set (Gie 14 to Gie Raise to Gie 2)x5 he got terrible tendon pains (elbows and shoulders) and had to stop training. 2022 has been largely inactive for him, however he spent his time thinking of new training methods and training ideas.
* In **October of 2022**, he resumed training but is recovering little by little since his tendon pains still bother him.

## Religion

Gie is considered an icon by a hidden sect known as the "Gielievers". They consider "FROM LITHUANIA" as their own Bible and extract their teachings from it. He's not considered a god but rather as a "First Man", a pioneer of human strength.

Many people don't consider Gie as real, or his incapacity to bend his arms, which adds to his transcendantal dimension.

Several living prophets of this religion exist: Nawful the awful, or Consiak the Wise.

## Extracts of "FROM LITHUANIA"

*"Yellow band is paid actor"* Chapter 17, Verse 78

*"They joked about it, saying it was impossible and I was losing my time. So I did it, not for the glory, but to prove them wrong"* Chapter 12, Verse 53

*"Walking, fucking prostitutes, in my store, AND THEY BRING THIS FILTH ALL OVER MY FLOOR!!!"* Chapter 28, Verse 37

"tf is this belgian blue lookin ass" Chapter 1, Verse 66

"YOU DON'T JACK OFF A SHOTGUN RAHIL!!" Chapter 25, Verse 58, moments before the "Rahil incident"