Gymnastics - Focusing on the fundamentals

My first exposure to gymnastics was watching the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. I remember watching Li Xiaoshuang complete a triple back somersault during his gold medal winning floor routine and I thought - how is that even possible?! Knowing nothing about gymnastics at the time, I couldn't understand how that height and speed of rotation was possible to create 3 somersaults just from the floor. So, where do we even start?

This was performed on a floor that is less springy than the ones used today.

In gymnastics, we start with the fundamentals of learning how to do forward and backward rolls, handstands and cartwheels. The skills needed to do a round-off, back handspring into a triple back somersault start with those 4 foundational skills. In simple terms, a round-off is more dynamic cartwheel that passes through a handstand, a back handspring is the handstand shape but just alternating between a dished and arched shape, and a triple back somersault is really just 3 backward rolls in the air! At Gymnest, we will focus on developing these core skills and will provide the necessary time in each session to make genuine progress. What tends to be the mistake in many recreational gymnastics classes is trying to work on too many skills at once, not giving enough time to each, and not focusing on the most important skills that provide the best results. There is also a worry that it might become boring if there aren't lots of new and different things to try all the time. This might be fun in the very beginning but soon wears off when little progress is made. The most fun is had when we achieve something that we couldn't do before - experiencing the incremental improvements on a single skill is always more fun than trying lots of different things and making very little improvement on any of them.

In 2018/19, I did some training with Ido Portal, who is one of world's leading exponents of movement, and he had a good acronym - the 3 i's - "Isolate, Integrate, Improvise". In learning any complex movements, we first have to isolate and master the individual components of a movement, then we can start to integrate them with other movements, and then we have an inventory to be able to improvise with. The most important part of this sequence though is "isolate" as that is the foundation that everything else is built on and must always be returned to so we can truly master a skill. It's a lot harder to patch up mistakes while doing more complex movements and it's never easy to undo bad habits. Often, inexperienced coaches will rush the process in the hope that the gymnast will be able to acquire advanced skills in quicker time, and hopefully impress others in the process. This however never works and will always result in the skill taking a lot longer to acquire, and can easily result in injury as the body isn't sufficiently prepared for the skill.

To support these fundamentals, it's important to spend time on physical conditioning. In the beginning this will be bodyweight focused strength and flexibility. There is a lot of physical conditioning built into many of the movements within gymnastics and parkour, but focused strength and conditioning can really help increase the speed of skill acquisition, improve body awareness and also provide much more resilience to the body to minimise the risk of injury.

Furthermore, these 4 fundamental movements can be the foundation for most acrobatic movements, whether they are within floor gymnastics or other acrobatic disciplines like Tricking - a movement art which involves a freeform combination of gymnastics, martial arts and breakdancing.