Street gymnastics seems to be quite popular in Russia and you can find many videos of Russians doing high bar on playground bars. They recently held a festival of street gymnastics in Moscow which you can watch below:
Learn about a couple of lesser known inductees into the hall of fame:
Lyubov Burda competed for the gold medal winning Soviet Union team at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics
Hidenori Fugati is a philanthropist and former president of Aeon and has been the president of the Asian Gymnastics Union, the Japanese Rhythmic Gymnastics Federation and the Japanese Gymnastics Association
The GWS Giants are a professional sports team in Australian Football based in Sydney. They have recently been incorporating gymnastics into their training as a method of injury prevention:
I think this is a great move and hope we see more of it in the future. Gymnastics has a lot of potential in many sports as it builds great co-ordination, balance and agility. The upper body strength from men's gymnastics would also be a great training aid for sports involving upper body strength as it is much more functional than doing weights and also develops muscle stabilisers which can be great in injury prevention. The flexibility side could also have a great benefit in reducing injuries. I can certainly see gymnastics being incorporated more by many high level athletes in the future.
After watching Evolution I was really excited about this format, but this time the Professional Gymnastics Challenge left me a bit disappointed. I still like the format, but ESPN gets a fail for the coverage. This time the meet just didn't flow, camera angles were terrible and the music just didn't fit. Unlike Evolution where skills just flowed from one to the next and it built drama and excitement, this time there were large breaks between skills, there were too many interviews and ESPN decided to do various segments in the middle of events which just broke the flow of the meet. These might work if you do them at half time or at some appropriate break in the meet, but having them halfway through an event was just stupid. The music was also a big fail. It seemed ill thought out and didn't match the skills being tried and at times it was just distracting. Having enjoyed the Evolution event so much I do hope to see this format again, but hopefully next time ESPN can deliver better coverage.
With the Pro Gym Challenge set to air on ESPN tomorrow (and hopefully it will appear on YouTube soon for people like me who don't get the US version of ESPN) I thought it would be good to have a look at the predecessor which was called Evolution. The Pro Gym Challenge have put up a version of Evolution on their YouTube account which you can watch below. Unfortunately the videos seem to stop right before the end so we don't get to find out who won, but nevertheless it was really good to watch. I wasn't sure how this format would work as previously all I knew is that it was skill-for-skill, but with no idea how it would be scored. However, it turned out to be really good. The way it works is that one team gets to choose a skill to do and gets someone to perform it, the other team then has to perform the same skill and the team that does it best gets a point and also gets to choose the next skill. At the end of each apparatus the winner for that apparatus was the team with the most points. It looks like the final winner was decided as the team that won the most apparatus, although the videos don't show the ending. Personally I think it would have been better to accumulate the scores over all events (like in the all-around), nevertheless the scoring still worked quite well, although it could easily lead to 'dead' events if one team gets enough points before the final event. With the inclusion of the rope climb there were 6 events, so once a team gets to 4 they would be unbeatable making any remaining events meaningless. However, it was really good that they showed the scores in the corner of the screen and this is something that should be adopted for more competitions.
Overall, the competition was easy to follow and you could see exactly how each team was going, each skill had meaning and you could see how it contributed to the score. The competition also flowed really well as there wasn't a lot of waiting around for the judges. It was also quite exciting seeing what skills the gymnasts could come up with and to see if the other team could match it.
Evolution also had a few apparatus that are not normally seen. These included the single rail for women's bars (to make it more like men's high bar) and the rope climb. The single rail was cool, but the rope climb was a bit silly and hopefully it doesn't hang around. The competition attire was much also better than in a normal competition, especially for the men, who badly need to get rid of leotards.
The biggest con of the event was the time. Although the YouTube videos go for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes, the actual competition took nearly 4 hours. It sounds like part of the problem was the need to change the apparatus after every event, so the setup might need some tweaking. You could also reduce the time taken by reducing the number of skills per event. I think 1.5 to 2 hours would be the ideal length and certainly it should not be longer than 2 hours.
I'm a bit undecided on the music that was playing. Many competitions have background music playing that just doesn't fit with the gymnastics being performed and often detracts from the competition (sometimes it is so bad I even have to hit mute), but in Evolution it actually worked quite well and complemented many of the skills being performed. On the other hand I love it when the crowd gets involved and roars when someone hits a routine or gasps during a release move, so I think the atmosphere could be worked on to allow for the crowd noise to really contribute to the competition.
The bigger question is how can this format integrate into the gymnastics calendar. Overall there is probably plenty of room in the year for such a format as gymnastics fans are starved of good competitions to watch and outside the top few gymnasts in the world there really aren't enough competitions for the gymnasts to participate in, with the exception being NCAA gymnasts, so it would be great to see more competition opportunities appear. Maybe we could look to cricket which has 3 different formats which it manages to integrate into it's calendar. Could a skill-for-skill format work like the IPL where a month or two is dedicated to this format? This format would certainly work well in a 'league' format where each team gets to compete against all the other teams in the league.
This is an old documentary about the former Australian head coach Ju Ping and how she took the Australian women up the rankings in gymnastics. It is an interesting insight into the old AIS program which sadly no longer exists.
A short news report on Lauren Mitchell. She is still recovering from shoulder surgery, but hopes to get back to full fitness. The great news is she is still considering Rio, which will be great for the sport in Australia and will also hopefully encourage more Aussies to have longer careers as we are now seeing many female gymnasts from other countries continuing until their late 20's, making Lauren, at 21, still very young.
It's not often that we hear anything out of North Korea, but here is a TV feature on insane vaulter Ri Se Gwang. It's in Korean and doesn't have subtitles, but you do get to see some scenes of him training, although it does look more like podium training from a competition rather than a training gym.
Unfortunately most artistic gymnasts have little exposure to rhythmic gymnastics as most gyms don't include a rhythmic program. So, it is great to have a look at what it is like at a Rhythmic club:
IG has just reported that gymnastics legend Uchimura and his wife have just announced the birth of a daughter
World and Olympic all-around champion Kohei Uchimura is enjoying life as a new dad. The gymnastics superstar revealed his daughter was born April 19. "She is very cute," he told media Thursday, describing himself as a "doting dad." Uchimura, who declined to share his daughter's name, was married last fall to a former gymnast.
After taking an unexplained leave of absence from Cal this season, McNeill has now decided to step down as head coach. He will have back surgery before trying to return to elite level coaching.
BERKELEY - Tim McNeill, who has served as Cal's head men's gymnastics coach for the past three seasons, is leaving his position with the University. McNeill plans to undergo back surgery and, following a period of rehabilitation, expects to return to a career in coaching elite gymnastics.
After a great elite career where he was close to making to 2008 Olympic team and had great showing at the 2009 Worlds his own career took a back seat in order to keep the Cal NCAA program alive. It was then a big surprise when he went on leave earlier this year and left assistant coach Colin Christ at the helm, leaving many questions as to why. Hopefully some more details emerge soon to clear things up.
But, to be honest it is kind of hard to work out what he is trying to say. In about 800 words he waffles over a couple of random thoughts but doesn't really say anything. Actually no, he does (poorly) say one thing in a very roundabout way. Basically he is saying, the code of points is not very good, so don't base your training on it.
User-generated MMO gaming site for kids, teens, and adults. Players architect their own worlds. Builders create free online games that simulate the real world.
Watch the video to see gymnastics in the Roblox world:
Former Australian gymnast, Wade Petersen, who also performed in Cirque Du Soleil stars as coach Serge Bielnikov in the short film "The Narcoleptic Gymnast":
A few months ago there was much dismay as Massachusetts decided to drop boys' gymnastics as a high school sport, leaving only a handful of states offering boys gymnastics. But now some of the coaches have been able to get decision reviewed:
Richard Ellis, coach of the Braintree High School boys gymnastics team, and Braintree Athletic Director Michael Denise, presented evidence in support of the sport to the MIAA Executive Board.
In an email to Braintree Patch, Ellis said both "gave compelling reasons to secure the recognition in the Commonwealth."
Epke Zonderland performed a high bar routine during the crowning of the new Dutch King in Amsterdam. It wasn't his full routine, but it was amazing considering the setup.
This is a great amateur documentary about some UK gymnasts.
A film made by Alyssa Patel. This is a short fly on the wall documentary looking into the sport of Gymnastics. It focuses on 3 elite gymnasts that train at the Dynamo School of Gymnastics: Laura Edwards, Kelly Simm and Casey Spry.
British Gymnastics has just conducted a study to find the answer to this question. Overall the findings are what one would expect:
Found it ‘boring/repetitive’ – a lot of people said it became boring partly due to waiting around and partly due to repeating the same sort of warm-up or activities in each session.
“More time doing actual gymnastics, less warm-up and standing around”
“They just did the same thing every week and the classes were very big so it was on a sort of a circuit. So I could see they were getting a bit bored when it was the same thing each week”
Of course, this does provide the challenge to coaches to make classes more interesting for the gymnasts while still developing the required skill, which can be quite difficult.
