Preparing for Tomorrow's Gymnastics, Today

Wade's spoken to me a couple of times about anticipating and preparing athletes of today for the trends of tomorrow, so as to remain current and relevant to the times (at least for international, high-end gymnastics).  And he spoke specifically to me about bars.

It appears that for the next couple of Olympic cycles, the trend in women's gymnastics will be to connect bar releases.  So the Tkatchev technique of not focusing on a specific kind of tap and just swinging up and sitting up and dropping on the other side will now be obsolete (because you can't swing out of it into anything else, aside from kipping).   Coaches still teaching Tkatchevs that way will be following the buzzards.  They've actually been doing so, ever since the bar distance was changed 20 years ago; yet many still teach the Tkatchev technique that was compatible with the bars in close.





The men's style of tapping encourages strong counter-rotation; and this is what Wade had introduced to Sonya when he started her off on Tkatchevs. Eventually, hers ended up being a kind of hybrid.

Self-spotted pirouette setup

My last contribution...

A light bulb went off in my head last Sunday while doing a workshop with Cara. So she was my initial guinea pig:


The concept isn't new (I've heard of sticking a kid's legs through a basketball hoop); but the idea to take the physioballs and squeeze them between the pbars to box in the legs I think is original. I sorta did that previously for different drill purposes:





Monday I used Rowan to try out the pirouette setup idea:



I can see coaches making a game of this, as well. Two teams, tally up combined total of each team on number of pirouettes (emphasizing good body-line, of course).   Maybe 1 pt per each half completed? 5 pts if it's done with desired shape and form?  It'd be a fun conditioning game-challenge, I would think.


The boys don't train at the same time as the girls in the summer; so might be a nice side station during bars rotation, then.

Are you all thumbs?

I wrote up a post a while back regarding the use of the thumbs on bars. Rowan is the only girl on our team that I am aware of who is taking advantage of putting her thumbs around the bar in her cast handstands. What is interesting is that she is actually shifting them around during giants as well, everytime she wrist shifts to handstand. I've talked to her teammates before about experimenting with shifting the thumbs around for cast handstands (especially those girls who habitually overcast their handstands and fall over); but most are unwilling to really try it out. Because they're not used to it, rather than fully research their own experience, they'd rather live in lazy ignorance and not explore the possibility that it might help them have better control on handstand positions; to not fully vet first before dismissing it outright as an unworkable, unviable technique.

Certainly, it's not for every female bars worker; but you can't educationally reject without honestly researching it first.