What to do When Your Gymnast is Stressed

Gymnastics teaches us life lessons. True,  but it also comes with a boatload of stress. Ways of dealing with stress, in my opinion,  are LEARNED techniques.  Not often will a coach sit a gymnast down and say, “This is how you relieve stress.” In fact,  a gymnast might not even understand what stress is in the first place. It’s our duty to explain to all young children what stress is and how to deal with it in a positive way. 

Resistance Training for Gymnastics

What is resistance band training?

Resistance band training is a technique used by gymnastics and cheerleading coaches to enhance their athletes’ performances.  Resistance band training activates the core muscles for stability and balance and builds up leg strength for tumbling and jumps. It is also a great tool to use for flexibility training.

I’ve been looking into the most effective, safe way to implement resistance band training into my team training plans. There are a few options:

Importance of Completing A Gymnasts Awareness

As promised, a bit more from the Sharing Session. This one is thanks to a couple of co-workers who attended a Trampoline Course with Jack Kelly an International Performance Coach. They passed down a document titled, Twenty Six Essential Principles for the Development of World Class Performance in Trampoline Gymnastics written by Jack Kelly. 

How to make a Lesson Plan from Skill Deconstruction

Now that you've done our skill deconstruction using the free downloadable template you have yourself at least 10 elements to make up drills that will fulfill the requirements for those drills. You might be asking yourself, "What is the best way to make a lesson plan out of the drills?"

12 Reasons Why Gymnastics Coaches Should Use Pinterest

Indeed, it is!

With no doubt the power and appeal of Pinterest has taken social-networking to the next level. As a user, you get to create virtual pinboards about favorite topics and ideas or products that you find on the Internet to reference later. As my mom says, "I found a cool site with recipes and crafty thingies." - she couldn't remember the name Pinterest but I instantly knew what she was talking about. 

This site has instantly become a hit with foodies, fashionistas and educators. I've found it to become such a great resource but for a gymnastics coach who has never seen Pinterest before you might wonder what you can get out of using this awesome platform.  

Nutrition on the go to your Door Step!

Every time I walk down the cereal isle I get suckered into buying a few packs of granola bars. Perhaps it's that I'm usually hungry when I go or it could be the totally irresistible food packaging that makes my mouth water and causes me to completely ignore the price tags until I'm at the check-out counter. A typical pack of 8 bars cost well over $10 and I go threw a pack like candy. I'm hoping my husband doesn't read this post because I'm sure he would think I'm crazy spending this much money a month on just granola and energy bars.

Life of the Hashtag #Gymnastics

I made this little infograph for fun and my favorite Italian #gymnast comes out on top!

Example Skill Deconstruction

Using the free downloadable template, I was able to deconstruct a Front Walkover in less than 10 minutes and found 38 different aspects of the skill!! I'm sure there might be some I'm missing, if you can think of some please let me know. 

Gymnast Nutrition Books

Recently, I've been asked by a parent of one of my gymnasts to talk about nutrition in hopes to get her to get on track to healthy eating habits. Knowing that a "Coach Casie says to eat," might not cut it, I've decided to try an activity to get all the girls involved. 

Simple Guide to Deconstruct Any Gymnastics Skill

If you are anything like me, I’m thinking about gym the minute I leave the chalk-filled air. My mind is always running with thoughts on how I can improve the ways I teach a certain skill or how to make my girls better, faster and stronger.

While it’s quite easy to just hit up youtube for the latest drill, remember, it comes down to the basics and the fundamentals of the skill if you want to make any improvements. Not only does skill deconstruction have some attractive reasons to implement into your lesson planning, it is also the best way to get down to each element of a gymnastics skill.

Supplies Needed:

• ·      Good ol’ pen or pencil
• ·      Downloadable Template or any paper will do

Estimated time:

10-15 mins

How to deconstruct the skill:

Think of all the possible ways to break down a skill and write them down into the 14 different categories:

1. Body Positions and Alignment: Some gymnastics skills may have many elements in one. For example, a cartwheel has  a lunge, lever, split straddle, split and opposite lever and another opposite lunge.

2. Balance: What is the balance requirement? Do they need a significant amount?

3. Weight Transference: How many are there in the skill? What kinds? i.e. hand to hand, foot to hand, foot to foot.

4. Hand placement: What direction do you need their hands to be? How far apart are they? For bars, is it in over-grip, under-grip, mixed grip, eagle grip?

5. Direction of movement: Not all movements are natural. For example, backwards movement takes time to learn.

6. Eye placement: Where do you want them to look in the beginning, during the skill and at completion?

7. Supports: Arm, Leg, Torso, etc.

8. Lead in skills: What are they going to do prior to the skill? Keep in mind where they are coming from, what body positions they will be in prior to the skill or movements they will be moving through.

9. What is the skill after?

10. Flexibility requirements: Don't forget shoulders, Legs, hip flexors, and back

11. Strength elements: arms, core, legs

12. Action of a movement: When do they need to do the certain movement? How can you build this awareness for when to initiate a certain movement?

13. Position of a movement

14. Motions and Movements: Forwards, sideways, backwards, bilateral movement, opposable movement 

I’ve gone a step further and made a FREE downloadable template for you to deconstruct any skill. Anything from rolls to the most advanced gymnastics skill can be deconstructed with this time saving template. Gymnastics, Men’s Artistic Gymnastics, trampoline, tumbling’s, rhythmic gymnastics, aerobic gymnastics or Acro Gym.

In my next post, I will take a skill show you how I would deconstruct using the template. I will also explore possible drills using the template. 

4 Fantastic Reasons You Should Use Skill Deconstruction

I know what you are thinking… Who has time to sit down and break each skill down into the minimum number of elements? I've got the perfect answer, You do!

You can and should carve out the time for some professional development, and work on that Natural Process I blogged about last week. Using Skill Deconstruction is well worth the return on your initial time investment.

Gymnastics Word Cloud: Awesome Find!

Thank you internet for providing me with hours of fun and making it impossible for me to get the stuff I really need to be done, accomplished. Those lesson plans can wait a few hours. 

Quick Tip to Improve your Gymnasts Speed

Lately, I’ve been taking into consideration the main points of Mr. Takashi Kobayashi from our sharing session when creating lesson plans. A co-worker always reminds me, first they need the speed and power…and he says it in his awesome Chinese accent that gets me fired up. After going over my resources, I’ve come up terribly short when it comes to training speed, agility and quickness. 

I believe if we really want to learn how to train powerful runners, we need to learn from other sports professionals instead of staying within our gymnastics comfort zone. Makes sense, right?

After scouring the internet, I found a great digital product for any youth athlete coach trying to Developing Youth Speed.  A PDF e-book, Easy To Follow Manual With A 9-week Program. 

Instantly, I had a golden ticket to improve my gymnasts performances and I’ve been implementing their ideas within my training. Here’s a little bit of what I’ve got my girls doing. 

As you can see, this would be much more effective if we had a bigger facility. ;)

Nonetheless, I can tell these drills help my kids put in more effort with a fun twist. They are starting to transform their abilities where my co-workers are starting to notice the differences.

I highly suggest taking a look at what they have to offer at Developing Youth Speed. From the author:

youth speed training agility quickness strength speed coach workouts 

• Lean how to incorporate balance, stretching, and movement that will have your athletes warmed up, breathing, sweating, and prepared to play at game speeds in less than 10 minutes.
• Learn why progression is king for athletic development and how performing advanced exercises too soon will result in your athletes peaking too soon.
• Do your athletes have a tryout coming up soon where being faster and quicker may mean the difference between making the team or not?
• Learn how to properly and safely develop explosive power based on the athlete’s age and maturity using only a medicine ball. 
• Learn how to use the agility ladder drills properly.  What 99% of coaches don’t know that could be hurting your development.

Sign up for their email list for FREE speed training tips and get your gymnasts FASTER! 

The Natural Process of a Gymnastics Coach

If you are searching for the best tools out there to become a gymnastics coach, you may find some useful resources online or in a book and through attending various courses and workshops. Sorry to say, that neither of them make one an extraordinary teacher. What separates the best from the rest is a coach that is also a teacher who is a brilliant facilitator that carries their learners to succeed.

When we look at the phases a coach goes through in our line of business, there are four distinctive phases, in each one a coach may have that key moment when arriving at the other advancement in their career. This natural process of a gymnastics coach will not be found in yours or mine resume or CV but rather it is in our intrinsic development.

Newcomers to the coaching world think in terms of the entirety of a skill; they teach gymnastics skills. They really only think in terms of teaching the skill at that point in time and that’s really all that they want to achieve. In spite of this, there are frequent setbacks when these newcomers teach the skill. (Ever try to teach a new kid a cartwheel with absolutely no preparation? Yes, me too…when I was starting my coaching career.)

At that time, coach becomes more conscious about the skills problems and aims to resolve the problem areas in the skill. Still, when making the effort to fix the skill there comes numerous problem areas in technique, lack of strength or flexibility or power. The majority of the time, these are not solitary problems but go hand in hand with one another.

Then, the gymnastics coach will think of the primary root of the skills and the components of each factor. They decipher each gymnastics skill, think of the essentials and set in motion their transition into the last stage of the natural process.

At last, they look at the entity. They look at each individual gymnast and realize they are teaching them how to do gymnastics. Each and every one of their gymnasts has special qualities accompanied by their personal flaws. In parallel, these coaches giving these gymnasts triumph from the very beginning in segments so that these gymnasts will be proven proficient each step of the way until they accomplish the skill.

This natural process, is something one would say, “You have to go through it yourself.” I can’t tell you to stat thinking in terms of the individual and their needs compared to another student in your class. Nor can I give you all the answers. In spite of everything, there are tools for you to speed up this process.

Next week I’ll post about skill decomposition and you can take a bite off that learning curve. Follow this journey, you never know what you’ll learn through the process.

SEA Games Myanmar drops Gymnastics

As concerns of Vietnam and other countries in the region, in a meeting of the Southeast Asian Sports Federation held in Nay Pyi Taw (Myanmar) yesterday, January 29, the host country of the 27th SEA Games officially decided to exclude gymnastics out from the competition program.

Vietnam Net

We have yet to hear anything official from Singapore Gymnastics, however, given this news, I see our gymnasts out of an opportunity to compete. This is one of the (many) reasons Singaporean and SE Asian gymnasts are left behind. 

If you ask a veteran gymnast here how many competitions they've competed in during their lifetime, their answer might be 30 and that's including major international competitions. If you ask a level 8, 10 year old gymnast in America how many she's competed in she will probably give you a number double that. 

Give these gymnasts MORE opportunities please! Not take them away. 

Sharing Session at Prime Gymnastics

Last week, we had a sharing session in our gym. Many of our coaches' had been lucky enough to participate in a various number of courses throughout SE Asia leaving the rest of us to hold down the fort and cover their classes. For the gymnasts, I think they enjoy a new coach once in a while as it means a new change to their routinely work-outs. Our coaching team works quite well together; Sure, I'll cover your class if you share what you've learned.



Two had done a F.I.G. Level 1 course in Singapore, another two had taken part of a Trampoline course in Singapore and another two had taken part of an Asian Gymnastics Union MAG Coaching Course held in Singapore that was presented by coaching expert Mr Takashi Kobayashi who happens to be acoach of World Champion and Olympic Champion Uhei Uchimura and was Coaching Director of the Japanese Olympic National Training Centre. In fact, one of the coaches also headed out to Sri Lanka and attended another course Mr Takashi Kobayashi lead! How fortunate is that?!

All together we had 5 staff in the past 3 months attend some sort of training.
I've learned some great insights from my co-workers sessions and I'll be sharing some of the great information that was passed down to me throughout the month of February. I plan to include theory, drills and other useful tips for all of my readers. Some of the topics include:

• psychology

• beginning trampoline

• spotting beginner trampoline

• developing speed 

• POWER!

Here's to a fantastic February!

Benefit from Injury: A Back Handspring Drill for Hand Placement on Balance Beam

Today's gymnastics coaching tip is the lemonade that came from lemons. Recently, two of my WAG Level 5 gymnasts suffered from foot injuries. My heart always goes out to injured gymnasts knowing that they feel left out; I try to find ways to give them special attention to remind them we are a team and they are important as well. With the limitations on training that include no running, jumping, bounding or hard landings, I found myself (not to mention my gymnasts) bored with basic kicks, swings and turn drills during our 1 hour balance beam training.

These training partners have the support of each other while during their recovery and coincidentally, these two gymnasts have been struggling with correct hand placement while learning how to do back handspring on beam. Taking reference from a YouTube video on hand placement, I found some equipment available at our gym.

Gymnastics equipment I used in this set up:

• 1 large barrel (an octagonal tumbler would work as well.)
• 20cm blocks
• Low balance beam

I really like this drill for a couple of key reasons besides the obvious:

• they can do this drill independently
• going crooked adds to the fun and the difficulty of the drill. After all, not every back handspring a gymnast a performs is perfectly straight.
• it's fun

How have you found ways to work on a gymnast's weakness during times of injuries? I would love to hear your stories.