You must fail to succeed. Thinking is not enough. You must apply.

A couple of excerpts from Tony Retrosi's blogpost, 10 painfully obvious truths:

4. Some kind of failure always occurs before success.
Most mistakes are unavoidable. Learn to forgive yourself. It’s not a problem to make them. It’s only a problem if you never learn from them.
If you’re too afraid of failure, you can’t possibly do what needs to be done to be successful. The solution to this problem is making friends with failure. You want to know the difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Behind every great piece of art is a thousand failed attempts to make it, but these attempts are simply never shown to us. I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast the other day:
LEVITT: I always tell my students — fail quickly. The quicker you fail the more chances you have to fail at something else before you eventually maybe find the thing that you don’t fail at.

A zen parable comes to mind:

This guy was a well-known Taoist painter, and some rather important official commissioned him to draw him a cat. The painter asked him to return sometime later for the work. The official came back the next day but was told it wasn’t done, so he came back the next week, and the next, then the following month, then that next month…

This went on for about a year, the official wanting just the one drawing of just one darn cat he’d asked for way too long ago, and the painter asking him to return another time. Finally, the official came again for his cat, and the painter sat down at his desk, picked up his brush, and with one single stroke drew a truly spectacular swish of a cat.

The official was… not too happy. He was more surprised than upset, spluttering something about the wait and why didn’t the painter just do that the first day?  The painter apologized that he couldn’t have.

He then stood and opened the door to his cupboard. Out spilled hundreds upon hundreds of drawings of practice cats.

Previously posted

5. Thinking and doing are two very different things.
Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it.
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage to build your life around your answer.
And remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you’ll likely be waiting the rest of your life.

Gymnastics Birling

I thought this would be a fun activity after seeing Rick McCharles' post on air barrel balancing.

Translated GymneoTV DVD Excerpt on Backhandsprings

The quality of not just the content but of the presentation is so good,  I am seriously considering purchasing.

It bothers me that in USAG, compulsory RO BHs require ears covered by the arms.  It's a technique-thing.  Instead of penalizing and making that the restriction (since a short arm-swing is a viable if not superior technique to no-arm swing), I think what should be judged is whether or not the head whips back ahead of the arms in turning over the backhandspring.

The Drop

Not my preferred method of spotting clear hips, but this is one way that I don't see used often (I did it on this occasion, due to the height of the bar and my being too lazy to get a block to stand on).

Swing Big! posted on the importance of the drop, recently.  I agree that the drop is vitally important to a good clear hip.  With a proper drop, the clear hip should just fly up to handstand.

Zari's post lead me to TeamCentralGym's channel that I hadn't seen before.  I like the drill at the beginning of this video for clear hips:

It reminds me of a drill Wade Petersen showed me where the gymnast starts in front support, pushes her body off the bar and drops into a pike sit onto a block, with the bar pushed down toward the knees.

I know some coaches don't teach the clear hip as a pike but as a hollow; but sometimes getting gymnasts to think that way helps keep the hips further away from the bar (over-exaggerated corrections can sometimes get you to the end result).

I remember seeing a gymnast with beautiful clear hips, who was clearly using a piking technique over simply hollowing.  I wish I had bookmarked that, to show.

Sunday Funnies

TGIF Team-Building

I acquired this bit of fun from Amy Smith during our time at BGS.

Twisting Drill from Rebecca Syked

This looks fun:

Also more at Gym Momentum.

Sunday Funnies

51 cast handstands in under 6 minutes...

....From an 8 year old:

The GW 500 Lickity-Splits Race Course

There used to be a YouTube video that had a whole host of slider exercises (longer than the Tumbletrak video).  I'm pretty sure it's since been removed (perhaps it was this one, by John Smith of NASA?).  I still think that Tumbletrak should come up with larger sliders (and perhaps different shapes and handles?).

The other day Coach Kelly had the girls doing split presses on the floor and I showed her and Coach David similar drills using sliders.

For fun, this is what we had the girls try Wednesday night:

Related interest:
Sliders for pirouettes
Flexibility with sliders
Splits training with sliders

Questions to ask your child during that car ride home...

Gym Gab:

“How was gym today?” is a question every gym parent wants to ask their kid on the car ride home. Unfortunately this age-old, open-ended question loses it’s importance when the word “fine” become the oh-so common answer.  Here is a list of 25 questions to ask your athlete (not all in the same day of course), that will provide some welcome variety to you and your athlete!

1. What were you most proud of at gym today?
2. What was the hardest thing you did today?
3. What correction do you remember the most today? And why?
4. What compliment do you remember most today?
5. What muscles do you think worked the hardest today?
6. Were you proud of any of your teammates today?
7. Who was a great example to you today? And why?
8. What was the funniest thing about gymnastics today?

Go to the blog to check out the rest of the list.  Any questions of your own?

I posted this last September:

The 6 words parents should say to child athletes

Work Harder

Proactive Coaching:

At age 13, I went to my dad to complain about a situation where I didn’t think I was being treated fairly by a coach. My dad listened very closely to the whole story and then looked at me and told me something that stuck with me for the rest of my life… He simply said, “Work harder”, and walked away. Lesson learned. Stop whining and get to work. Instead of rescuing, excusing and enabling our kids by blaming others and fighting battles for them, or going immediately to the AD, principal and school board to demand the coach be fired… think about teaching our kids the simple wisdom of taking responsibility for your own situation.

Kacy Catanzaro the American Ninja

A lot of Facebook friends have been posting this one:

Hot Shots Tucked Planche

6-6-2014

Tucked planches are good for developing casting strength in young gymnasts.  I remember years ago at one Congress, I attended a bars clinic and the clinician's gymnasts could not only hold tucked planches, but also press them to handstand.  They also had the cleanest tucked flyaways that rose first in a candlestick.

Structuring rec like team

Looks like part of a power points presentation:

Sunday Funnies

Source:  Marc Jacobs

Building the Kip

This drill here is the best thing I have learned from Coach David in improving glide extensions:

All the former 3s have kipped now.  Erica was the last one to finally start kipping.  We promised te girls a pizza party, which is this Friday at the end of gym.

Marissa currently has the best-looking glide kip cast on this team:

KIp Cast Handstand

Gymneo's Spotting Jaegers

I have bookmarked Gymneo's old Youtube channel; but only recently realized they have a more current YouTube channel. 

I don't remember if I posted this video before (seen from their Facebook page); but it's the first English translation and example of the quality of their dvd content and production.

Resistance band tap swing shape-conditioning drill

A slight follow-up to my earlier video:

Backhandspring Drills

Sunday Funnies

By Peter Marino

Saturday Funnies

Why did the cinnamon roll?

Answer:  ɹǝʌouɹnʇ ǝןddɐ ǝɥʇ ʍɐs ʇı ǝsnɐɔǝq