Author: Rick Mc

Career gymnastics coach who loves the outdoors, and the internet.

double front with 1/1

… Bobby Baker shows off his new skill (Full Twisting Double Front) for the 2012-13 season.

Click PLAY or watch it on Gymnastike.

http://www.gymnastike.org/embed/MzIxNjU1NjY1?related=1

Watch more video of Gymnastike All Access: Aerial Gymnastics (IL) on gymnastike.org

Yang Wei – Blazon Forth Our Country Prestige

New book by the 2008 Olympic Champion, to be issued (surprisingly) after the London Games.

Blossom:

Picture of the book cover via Yang Wei’s Weibo

I wonder if it will mention his wife’s birthday. 🙂

Revolution Gymnastics

Here’s an excellent new video featuring the Women’s team at Revolution Gymnastics in Canada. Stephanie Merkle‘s club. Aaron Brokenshire – Director.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Olympians at the White House

How do you get to the White House?

… PRACTICE.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Athletes don’t spend much time thinking about politics.

related – davidboudia2012 on Instagram

new elements: Moors, Wong, Ferarri

The WAG Technical Committee released their newsletter today which has a lot of statistical and factual information from the London 2012 Olympics. Amongst the information is the announcement of new elements which have been added to the 2013 – 2016 Women’s Artistic Code of Points (CoP). …

Full Twist

Click PLAY or watch Angel Wong’s awesome Beam mount (E) on YouTube.

That’s an excellent FIG report. Well worth analyzing.

Youngest Team – USA
BRA 22.6 Oldest Team – BRA
CAN 18 Average age of all teams – 19.583 (OG’08 – 18.65) …

Assessment of the Judging

CI: Shortly after competition, the WTC carried-out a video evaluation of selected exercises:
VT- 59, UB – 45, BB – 47 and FX- 50.

… verbal warnings were issued to some judges.

Few judges showed bias for a gymnast from their own country and/or against a gymnast in contention for a similar placement.

It was also obvious that some judges were “Bias” towards gymnasts from “friendly” countries.

This fact will be taken into consideration in the evaluation of the judges’ work.

Generally speaking the ranking of the gymnasts was correct.

WTC Newsletter – N° 33 September 2012 (PDF)

Nellie KIM, FIG/WTC President

With the statistical and graphical assistance of Donatella Sacchi, 1st Vice President,
Naomi Valenzo, WTC Secretary

opposable thumb on Bars

You don’t see many female gymnasts keeping thumb around the rail on 360 degree swings.

Here’s one. A College gymnast.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

It’s more common on forward giants than backward.

Bars guru Tom Forster is now advocating that small girls should try to learn swinging skills with their thumbs around the Bar.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Thumb tape highly recommended.

Interesting idea. But start with a “pencil rail” (perfectly round rather than oval) if you can possibly get one.

I’m not convinced we’ll see this catching on much soon. But the more female gymnasts use their thumbs on casts and turns in handstand, the better.

That all comes via Gymnast Crossing which has much more detailed discussion.

If you have comments, leave them there.

Cirque Éloize – ID

Cirque Éloize is a Quebec-based nouveau cirque (contemporary circus) troupe.

Their 7th tour since being founded in 1993 is called ID. (2009 – present)

Click PLAY or watch the trailer on YouTube.

cirque-eloize.com

Acrobatic blogger kinesthesist performs in that show.

Let Me Tell You About CrossFit

Byers owner/coach Debbie Broderick Rodriguez is pretty crazy about CrossFit. She linked to the best promo video I’ve seen yet introducing the sport to newbies.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

People walk in the door and ask:

… “Hey, where are the machines?”

… We’re the machines.

CrossFit is great and getting better. Getting safer.

Still, I’d rate regular gymnastics bodyweight training as superior. And much safer.

Where CrossFit succeeds best is in the psychological domain. The team approach, very well explained in that video. We should emulate that.