Gymnastics is a competitive sport, which involves boys, girls, women and men.
Gymnastics helps you to keep fit; it helps your body to become healthier.
Supplement strengthens your muscles. The stronger you are the more moves
you would learn. Gymnastics involves pieces of apparatus; there are horses
for vaulting over, mats for routines and for rolling and somersaulting on,
the wall bar and ropes for climbing on, a beam for balancing on which is
used by girls and boys would use the pommel horse.
The equipment used by girls is: balance beam, vault, asymmetric bars and the floor exercise.
The equipment used by boys is: pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars,
horizontal bar and the floor exercise.
Being a gymnast you would need to be flexible, which involves strengthening various parts of
the body from your shoulders to your feet. Before starting your gymnastics session you would
need to warm up by doing various types of exercises, strengthening parts of the body, so there
is less chance of strain or injury.
A gymnast needs to learn basic moves such as rolls, cartwheels, handstands, backward walkovers
and learning to balance and practising to land steady and strong.
This sport is built and in the main judgement is on the movement of the body and the skills on
all the apparatus before competing. Balancing the body should show tension; as if the muscles
were relaxed then you would wobble and have less control of what you're doing.
These gymnasts show balance and control using their strength
There are different moves as they could be fast for example round off back flip,
which continues a couple of times getting the height and getting ready to land.
These moves are performed on the floor using mats to perform the routine on.
There are other moves not as fast; these are forward rolls, backward rolls,
as you would start off doing these moves if you are a beginner and then move
onto the harder moves.
Other movements, which include jumps, cartwheels, one-hand cartwheel or no hand
cartwheel this would need to be performed with lots of practice and strength
there are also walkovers, which you would need to be flexible and have stamina.
Gymnasts would need to control their balances on all apparatus; floor, beam -
performing handstands or headstands.
The main part you would need to be able to do is conditioning regularly which would make
your whole body stronger.
This gymnast shows strenght and height
and the jump shows power and stamina
The sport of gymnastics throughout the world is divided into two main sections, which are:
artistic and rhythmic gymnastics. Most historians who traced the history of gymnastics from
the ancient Greece over were 2000 years ago. In ancient Egypt and Rome gymnastics was performed
by doing activities.
The name of gymnastics was from the greek gymnasiums as many people gathered to practise
the sport while also combining art, music and philosophy together. Many of the greek
people believed a healthy body is important as an intelligent mind. The gymnastic
exercises were used as strength training for other popular sports such as wrestling,
boxing and ancient track and field activities.
The sport of gymnastics began to fall of the roman empire and was kept going for
several centuries by other acts, which include: acrobats, jugglers and tumblers.
Early History of Gymnastics
Gymnastics has become a sport for the very young, as the sport is still very old. The
early times of gymnastics was found in the art of ancient Egypt. Gymnastics was
introduced in the early Greek civilisation to help bodily development through a
series of activities that involved running, swimming, throwing, wrestling and weightlifting.
The physical fitness was highly valued in ancient Greece for men and women.
The Romans after the conquest of Greece, as they adopted gymnastics as
there own, and then developed it into more formal sport.
Gymnastics in the 19th Century
Physical activities became respectable during the times of renaissance, by the late 18th
century a gymnastics handbook was published by the Germans and then was translated into several languages.
Basic Knowledge on Gymnastics
