Gymnastics Coaching.com

Gymblog has a great overview (including videos) of the top candidates for the Chinese Women’s Gymnastics Team.

If you’re like me, you have trouble distinguishing one wonderfully precise girl from the next.

China’s legitimate shots to make the women’s Olympic team include:

– Pang Panpan
– Zhang Nan
– Zhou Zhuoru
– Cheng Fei
– Li Ya
– He Ning
– Xiao Tingting
– Xiao Sha
– Yang Yilin
– Li Shanshan
– Jiang Yuyuan

I’m sure there are others I’ve left out.

read the entire post – China’s 2008 contenders « WordPress Gymblog

Certainly Possibly Vault will be first priority as it is for the USA. Both teams want to improve difficulty from 2007 Worlds. (It’s surprising to me how far behind the Men they lag in difficulty though the horse is only 10cm lower.)

Cheng Fei has the only guaranteed spot at this point, I would think.

Now I read on difficulty plus execution that Cheng Fei will be “captain”. Not nearly a match for Alica Sacramone. That’s 1 point in favour of the USA.

Not to be outdone by Oksana Chusovitina, Jordan too is getting ready for Beijing. And he is training all-around.

Emailed by Tyler Hass of RingTraining.com:

My friend Jordan Jovtchev, who stars in the Ring Strength DVD, as well as a couple upcoming videos (more on that to come…), just qualified for his FIFTH Olympics. That is not a typo! He set the record in 2004 when he made it for a fourth time. But he was disappointed with the results in 2004 and so he decided to keep training and go for it again.

What is equally amazing is that to qualify, he had to compete in all six events. For the past several years, he has only competed on rings and floor, so he had to re-learn some of his old events. He ended up qualifying in the top 15 in the all-around competition. He also won bronze on the rings at that competition.

To see Jovtchev’s 2004 Olympics Final rings routine click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

This was filmed at the 2004 Olympics, where he won the silver medal, although most experts felt he deserved the …

related post – rings – strength “routines”

Difficulty Plus Execution pointed me to yet another Nastia Liukin article.

Interesting factoid in this one: Chusovitina has competed alongside both Nastia AND her father Valeri. Oksana is a marvel.

Oksana Chusovitina, who will be 33 by the time the Opening Ceremony (of her record-setting fifth Games) rolls around. Nobody’s denying she’s old, but Chusovitina is defying the odds by remaining at the top of her sport against competitors who are often half her age. Oksana’s first Worlds were in 1991 — where she competed on the same Soviet team as Valeri Liukin — Nastia’s father.

NBC Olympics | Liukin good at age 18

She won Vault at the last World Cup meet and was 6th on Vault at the 2007 World Championships.

Was Chusovitina the first to compete double layout, full out on Floor? I read that on the internet … so it must be true. UPDATE: Marcus left a comment (and video link) correcting me: “… actually, Tatiana Tuzhikova (another Soviet) performed it at the 1987 worlds.”

World Gym Art – 2005 World Championships (Chusovitina was 2nd)

Another great montage of “old gymnastics” by kevin123verstappen.

My montage about soviet gymnastics from the late 50’s untill the early 80’s.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Some great moments. I love the momentary horizontal planche by Shaposhnikova.

UPDATE: Gymblog linked to a video of Chinese gymnastics circa 1965, long before they entered international competition.

This movie is a minor variation of a PowerPoint movie I’ve posted in the past.

It’s my favourite presentation, so I’ll post it again. This time I shared it with coaches at the 2007 BC Fall Congress:

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (8 min.)

Related posts:

Mountain Shadows – FUN competition

Breaking story. This was on Google News Netherlands.

NieuwNieuws.nl – Topturnster (13) verlamd (Dutch)

It’s serious.

I post (potentially) catastrophic injuries like this as they remind us all to be as careful as possible in the gym.

UPDATE: more information is coming to light. Check the comments below.

I missed this. But certainly want to see it.

Leave a comment below if you’ve seen the clip on-line. National Geographic has not posted it as yet. UPDATE – the preview promo is posted here.

Joey Hagerty of Albuquerque, N.M., a U.S. senior national member who trains at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., and Brian Lee of the U.S. Army, who trained at the USOTC until June 2007, are among the U.S. Olympic athletes and U.S. Olympic Committee sports scientists featured in Incredible Human Machine, a two-hour special presentation on the National Geographic Channel that debuts on Oct. 21 at 9 p.m. ET.

In the segment on the skeleton, Bill Sands, the USOC’s head of biomechanics, engineering and recovery, demonstrates how USOC sports scientists measure the impact that elite athletes put on their bone and skeletal structure as Haggerty does a tumbling pass. Both Hagerty and Lee are shown on gymnastics apparatus. The Incredible Human Machine is a two-hour journey through an ordinary, and extraordinary, day-in-the-life of the human machine. With high-definition footage, radical scientific advances and firsthand accounts, Incredible Human Machine plunges deep into the routine marvels of the human body. An update of the 1975 National Geographic classic, Incredible Human Machine shows how our body works in unexpected ways.

Hagerty, who competes for Team Chevron, was a member of the USA’s bronze-medal team at the 2007 Pan American Games. Lee, a graduate of West Point, trained at the USOTC complex as part of the Army’s World Class Athlete Program. A part of the men’s community program until June 2007, he has since retired from gymnastics.

News: Male gymnasts among U.S. Olympic athletes featured in National Geographic Channel’s ‘Incredible Human Machine’

(via Plats on Gym Chat)

Our other favourite sport scientist, Dr. Jeni McNeal, was recently down at Karoli Ranch collecting data on elite gymnasts.

From Skeleton Crew Sport:

(via Gym Chat)

A coach at the 2007 BC Fall Congress asked me a tough question, one I’ve been unable to answer in the past.

“What do you do when it comes time for the obese child to do “pullover” on a bar. And there is NO WAY the coach can physically heave them over.”

Well … we talked about a couple of ways to minimize hurt feelings.

But the honest answer is, “We should not require the very overweight to do pullover. Coaches need to come up with alternatives to that skill.”

We want overweight kids in our programs. Gymnastics is very, very good for them.

And the percentage of heavy kids, sadly, at least in North America, is still increasing:

About one-quarter of Canadians aged two to 17 are overweight or obese, and they are expected to live shorter lives than their parents, the Commons health committee warned Tuesday.

An all-party committee report titled Healthy Weight for Healthy Kids calls on the federal government to stop the trend toward increasing obesity levels among Canadian children by the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver, and to decrease levels by at least 25 per cent by 2020. …

“It has been said that obesity outranks both smoking and drinking now in its effects on health and health costs,” said committee chair Rob Merrifield, a Conservative MP for the Alberta riding of Yellowhead.

“For the first time in recorded history, today’s younger generation will live shorter lives than their parents. Yet parents, and this is, I believe, the most alarming statistic that we found, do not recognize the problem.”

Obese children will die younger than their parents: report

cartoon – Mothers Have Inaccurate Perceptions Of Children’s Body Weight

Rick McCharles

Gymnastics Coaches are the world experts in warm-up games and activities. Games should be the very best time spent in our gyms.

They are fantastic for all athletes.

I did a presentation on this topic at the 2007 BC Fall Congress:

goals: FUN, Fitness, Fundamentals

kids use their own body first … delay adding balls, ribbons, etc. for as long as possible

near continuous activity

success for all participants (no “losers”)

challenge / discovery

use a wide variety of games

repeat favourite games of the group

Of course, SAFETY (physical and emotional) is the over-riding principle. The inexperienced coach is prone to start a game appropriate to the majority of the kids, but too complicated for the youngest and least experienced.

age appropriate

ability appropriate

ethical

I led a sampling of games in these categories:

Organizing games and activities

Mimic activities (e.g. “fly like a jet plane”)

Co-operative games and activities

Tag games

Combative games and activities

Races

Relays

The easiest way to increase FUN, challenge and complexity is by putting kids together as partners, trios or into small groups.

I advised coaches to do more combative games with girls, fewer (or none) with boys.

Christchurch School of Gymnastics

Many clubs overuse tag games which are often dangerous. We should do more co-operative activities and races.

Unfortunately there are no GREAT books or videos available yet on this topic. The best is the out-of-print Gymnastic games and activities: A compendium, by Ken Daley (1981).

We’ve posted Games Guru David Adlard’s PowerPoint presentation previously. Dave is an elite Artistic coach who no longer uses a stretching warm-up. His girls do games only for warm-up.

But what every coach needs is a video database of recommended games. Leave a comment if you are interested in working on a project like that.