I went to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs last month to get a crash course from John Orozco, the reigning national all-around champion who will be competing for Team USA in London. He performed each event while I stood just a few feet away, trying to stave off blinking because I thought I might never stand so close to something this amazing again.
Then he let me take a shot. I’ll put the results this way: When I got a rough draft of the video, I would watch for about 20 seconds, and then take a break from my desk. I repeated until I got through the four minutes. That’s how embarrassed I was.
I’d like to thank Orozco for walking me through most of the all-around – and, perhaps more importantly, for not letting me do the high bar, which could have damaged my body even more than my self-esteem.
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| (Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah gymnast Georgia Dabritz doesn't wear grips, resulting in large callouses on her hands. Thursday February 6, 2014 in Salt Lake City. |
Gymnasts typically use grips on the bars to protect their hands and improve their hold. But Dabritz, who is just 5-foot-1, couldn’t fit her hands into the grips when she was first learning her gymnastics skills.
She tried them again a few years ago and it was a disaster.
"I peeled right off the bar," she said. "After that, I wasn’t dying to try and use them again. I didn’t want to have to relearn all my skills."
Instead, she took the unconventional route and built up callouses on her hands through hours of practicing. There have been plenty of rips and tears through skin, but neither she nor her coaches would have it any other way.
Of course, "traditionally", Romanian, Russian, and Chinese gymnasts at varying points have been reputed to not wear grips. The explanation that seems to be commonly told is that when they are young, they cannot afford the grips; and as they get older and make it onto the international scene by which time you'd think their federation could get them grips, the gymnasts simply aren't used to them and decide to do without."I don’t know of anyone else who does it," Utah coach Greg Marsden said. "It works for her, so we aren’t going to mess with a good thing."
Video description, posted February 2009:
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| Gymnasts' hands sweat as they swing. A mixture of chalk and a drop of honey, syrup or molasses helps some maintain their grip. Geoffrey A. Fowler/The Wall Street Journal |
There's a recipe to winning an Olympic medal on the parallel bars, and the key ingredient is sticky fingers.Gymnasts' hands sweat as they swing, putting them in danger of losing grip of the bar. They dust their hands with gym chalk to abate moisture. But as gymnasts attempt ever-larger swings, they are on the constant hunt for a little extra help holding on to those slippery wooden bars.
That is how the gymnast's arsenal has come to include honey, molasses, Lyle's Golden Syrup or pretty much any other substance one might serve over pancakes.
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most male Americans in the gymnastic competition, which begins Saturday in London, say they are honey men. Competitors from other countries favor sticky stuff ranging from Karo syrup to Coca-Cola.
U.S. gymnast Danell Leyva recalls a competition in France in which a gymnast used a beer-and-sugar concoction. "I smelled it and said, 'Dude what is that'?" says Mr. Leyva. "All right, whatever works for you."Japanese gymnasts mix sweet and savory. Takehiro Kashima, a member of Japan's men's gymnastics teams in the 2004 and 2008 Games, says he experimented with his personal brew by adjusting proportions of sugar and water, then moved on to saltwater. He settled on a smear of honey spritzed with saltwater topped with chalk."It's odd, right?" he says. "But as you perform, you get this feeling of 'gu gu gu' like something is tugging on your hands," he says, using a Japanese onomatopoeia that denotes a sticking sensation.Former U.S. national-team member Trent Wells melted gummy bears for competition in the mid-'90s. He says the idea came to a teammate who noticed the candies would stick to things if moistened and then shot out of a slingshot.
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3-22-2014
Level 3 gymnast reverse-pirouetting one quarter turn at a time. (Note the fingertips-only touchdown; eventually hand on thigh)
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1 :: Because You Have Not Failed Enough
Because you are comfortable in your mediocrity; because you choose not to try.
Because it is easier to talk about learning that new (programming?) language as opposed to actually learning it.
Because you think everything is too hard or too complicated so you will just “sit this one out”, or maybe you’ll, “do-it-tomorrow”!
Because you hate your job but won’t get a new one; because it is easy to reject rejection.
Because while you’re sitting around failing to try, I am out there trying to fail, challenging myself, learning new things and failing as fast as possible.
Because as I fail, I learn, and then adjust my course to make sure my path is always forward. Like the process of annealing steel, I’ve been through the fire and pounded into shape. The shape of a sword with polished edges and a razor sharp blade that will cut you in half if you are not equally hardened.
Thirty times individual JAG athletes took the gold, standing at the top spot of the podium. 94 other times JAG kiddos were on either the silver or bronze spot. (That equals 124 medals for those playing along–quite a haul!)Anne writes:
Academic studies have found that silver medalists are less happy with their reward than the bronze medalists they’ve outperformed. Third-place finishers are thrilled to be on the podium. Silver medalists—particularly those who’ve just lost championship games—are still in the grip of self-recrimination and gold medal envy.
San Francisco State University psychology professor David Matsumoto and Bob Willingham of World of Judo magazine conducted a study of Silver Medal Face by examining photos of judo competitors at the 2004 Athens Games. They found that 13 of 14 gold medalists smiled at the end of their matches. So did 18 of 26 bronze medalists.
The silver medalists were either blank-faced or rueful, and the ones “who displayed something displayed discrete, negative emotions.” On the medal stand, they were much more likely than other athletes to display forced smiles.
Now, a tour of some of the sourest second-place finishers in Olympic history.Guess who's first up? Check out the article.
Psychologists Victoria Medvec and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University, and Scott Madey of the University of Toledo think that this phenomenon can be explained by counterfactual thinking. This means that people compare their objective achievements to what “might have been.”
The most obvious counterfactual thought for the silver medalist might be to focus on almost winning gold. She would focus on the difference between coming in first place, and any other outcome. The bronze medalist, however, might focus their counterfactual thoughts downward towards fourth place.
She would focus on almost not winning a medal at all. The categorical difference, between being a medalist and not winning a medal, does not exist for the comparison between first and second place.
It is because of this incongruous comparison that the bronze medalist, who is objectively worse off, would be more pleased with herself, and happier with her achievement, than the silver medalist.
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| Source: Uncle Tim Talks Men's Gym |
How do you teach yourself to bounce back from mistakes in gymnastics?
After a competition, cool down. Allow yourself to reflect on the whole competition, not just the mistake.
Start thinking about the things you did well in your competition. Did you stick your landings the way you practiced? Did you score really well on vault?
Start talking about the positive things in your performance. If your parents or friends came to watch you compete, tell them how great you felt after you nailed your Arabian double front.
When you are in the middle of a competition, don’t focus on the mistake you made in the last skill. Focus on your current skill. Don’t let the mistake dominate your thinking, tell yourself that you can work on it later, but right now you need to wow the judges with your next skill.
Remember that your performance in gymnastics does not define who you are. Gymnastics is just something you do; you are more than your performance or your mistakes.
Spotting techniques for the Jaeger. Watch a preview of the fourth video of our training on this uneven bars release move. (www.gymneo.tv)
Stage 1 : The spotting technique for the Jaeger salto stretched, completely taken apart.
Stage 2 : The full spotting at normal speed.
Stage 3 : Spotting the Jaeger in hard landing, in a competition situation.
Stage 4 : What do you do when the gymnast doesn’t catch the bar?
Stage 5 : The typical spotting for hard landings.
This excerpt marks the official inauguration of the start of the translation of our trainings and our site into English . . .
6. The path to all great things passes through failure.
You are an ever-changing work in progress. You don’t have to always be right, you just have to not be too worried about being wrong. Screwing up is part of the process. Looking like a fool sometimes is the only way forward. If you try too hard to impress everyone else with your “perfection,” you will stunt your growth. You will spend all your time looking a certain way, instead of living a certain way.
It’s impossible to live without failing sometimes, unless you live so cautiously that you aren’t really living at all – you’re merely existing. If you’re too afraid of failing in front of others, you can’t possibly do what needs to be done to be successful in your own eyes. You have to remember that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail or how messy your journey is, so long as you do not stop taking small steps forward. In the end, those who don’t care that failure is inevitable are the ones that reach their dreams. YOU can be one of them. (Read The Last Lecture.)
7. It’s impossible to please everyone anyway.
Some people will always tell you what you did wrong, and then hesitate to compliment you for what you did right. Don’t be one of them, and don’t put up with them.
When you run into someone who discredits you, disrespects you and treats you poorly for no apparent reason at all, don’t consume yourself with trying to change them or win their approval. And be sure not to leave any space in your heart to hate them. Simply walk away and let karma deal with the things they say and do, because any bit of time you spend on these people will be wasted, and any bit of hate and aggravation in your heart will only hurt you in the end.
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| Chainey said the following after the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, “Standing at the horizontal bar at the 1996 Olympic games with over a million Americans watching, knowing that the hopes and dreams of an Olympic media rested on our team’s effort, I could not help but recall the Olympic motto that was spoken at the opening ceremony. ‘The most important thing in the Olympic Games in not to win, but to take part just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.” |
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| Correction: "This phase will start in the hips, move to the lumbar/trunk area and end in the shoulders (D, E, F)." |
