… Texas Dreams elite coach Chris Burdette explains a set up they use to work tumbling on their low impact days. They have an air track set up on an incline which allows them to get numerous tumbling repetitions with just a back handspring entry.
… as an example, our team doesn’t gather at the beginning end of the tramp directly opposite the resi pit landing. Instead they stand perpendicular to the resi so they can watch each other tumble, hear the coaching comments, and even help coach their fellow team mates.
Only 2 people line up at the beginning end as one is walking to line up behind them. This keeps the athletes totally concentrated on the task at hand. If everyone clumps up at the end, the line goes slower and it’s easier to be tempted to lose focus.
Looks very efficient, not easy when you have so many good kids.
… Coaches Chris Burdette and Kim Zmeskal-Burdette will have 6 gymnasts representing Texas Dreams next week in Hartford at the 2010 US Championships.
They have 5 junior elite qualifiers: Kennedy Baker, Dare Maxwell, Claire Boyce, Ashton Kim, and Peyton Ernst (Kiana Winston qualified but won’t compete due to injury). Their lone senior elite is former national team member Chelsea Davis who will be competing in her first major national competition since the 2008 Olympic Trials. Watch how former World Champion and Olympian Kim Zmeskal-Burdette prepares her athletes for US Nationals, a meet she herself has won numerous times. …
… My advice to Naama is to consider this an advanced technique. Beginners should perfect long, low backward handspring series first. (Think of a rock skipping across a lake.)
Manjak has gymnasts do many sets of 5 normal ffs every day, for example.
Much, much later you can shape the skill for specific reasons, as Watanable is doing here.
A skill as old as the back handspring will have a thousand different drills to help learn it. This video represents a few of my favorites, but it is by no means exhaustive.
Of thousands of good drills like these, for me only 3 are critical:
• trust fall (spotted)
• trust fall bend knees slightly, straighten knees, return to start position (spotted)
• … same as #2, but the gymnast is spotted on a tip over to handstand on some
The trust fall is the most difficult part of the flicflac for beginners.
Beginners, once they can do it on the trampoline, should train downhill to ensure good technique.
Beginners should do long and low backward handsprings until they can do series. At that point coaches can consider advanced techniques … shortening the distance of the second half, for example.
As you may know, a “Ri Jong Song” is a triple twisting double back on floor (named for the Korean who competed it in Athens in 2004). There have been a very small handful of other gymnasts who have competed or at least done this skill on the real floor…Justin Spring and Kohei Uchimura to name a couple.
Want to see it stuck perfectly in competition? Germany’s Marcel Nguyen did just that in the all-around competition of the Japan Cup this weekend. This video shows four of his routines, but his floor routine starts right at 3:00. …
