by site editor Rick McCharles
Mas Watanabe posted some basic drills on The Gymnastics Minute for improving the “alignment” of round-off. (see the video here)
Without question of the tumbling “basics”, round-off is the most problematic.
In reality, mistakes in round-off are taught at a very early stage. These drills (and others) must be introduced and improved by a very sophisticated coach, one with a good eye for detail. This is one reason that the Head Coaches must be closely involved with precomp classes.
My own system is to delay the round-off as long as possible, instead challenging beginners with accelerating cartwheel series. When gymnasts can do cartwheel series both directions fairly well, they won’t have major problems learning round-off.
That said, I’ve seen World Champions at World Championships doing basic round-off drills on the podium. This is one basic you should never stop training.
When it comes to difficult skills like round-off, go slow to go fast.
6 comments ↓
I’m thinking about switching my roundoff direction, because when I started gym I was doing ice skating and twisting in one direction there (left), then at the gym I was twisting to the right on roundoffs but of course in the air twisting to the left felt natural because of the skating.
Now I try to do a front layout with a half and wind up doing a barani…it is almost impossible for me to twist it to the left, even when I try my hardest, my body just goes to the right naturally because of the roundoff!
My roundoffs to the left are OK…I think with some work they could be decent, but it’s definitely more comfortable to the right!
Got any advice Rick?
Rick, are Head Program Coach for the girl’s actually has something along the likes that he would prefer rec kids to never work round-off at all, especially since they are our pool to going to team one day.
He would prefer they would work cartwheel step-in and turning over the cartwheel vs anything else.
I don’t have this problem since I coach all the boys but there is definitely something to be said about this. Unfortunately for the L4 routine, the boys are required to a do a round-off and bare in mind, many L4 boys are very new to gymnastics. However, L4 boy’s floor is more like L3 girl’s floor.
L4 girls generally have at least 2 years in gymnastics unless they just join the gym and could breeze through everything else because of their talent and being physically prepared.
Great points, Rick! The round-off should be delayed as long as possible, and the cartwheel and cartwheel step-in and “blocking” cartwheel step-in should be perfected. The drills you showed are excellent and should be done over and over and over.
My advice is not to change, Amy.
After a “certain age” it’s more problem than benefit. You can work around problems twisting in multiple direction. We even had a male gymnast compete World’s who twisted forwards in different directions, depending on the skill.
… On the other hand, it’s a FUN challenge to change your round-off direction. Ask anyone else to try that. They’ll call you “crazy”.
Our pre-team-ers are banned from doing round offs for this reason. They spend the first 5 months doing perfect cartwheels, and forgetting whatever they had in rec. This is only possible becuase of the UK comp. system, which starts later that in the US. I can see that in a different set up it would be impossible.
GREAT idea. It will pay off, long term.
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