Blog Reflection

What I've Done
I have posted blogs about my thoughts and my personal experiences.  I have posted video's and pictures to show people what I am talking about so they won't be confused.  I have also taught some people about gymnastics that they might have not known before.

My Best Post and Why it's Good
I think my best post I have posted is Trudi Kollar because it brought back old memories of my favorite coach and it was fun to write about her.  It was fun to go back into my childhood memoeries and relish in them. 

What I'd Like to Improve on
I would like to improve on my writing.  I want it to catch people's eye's so they read my blogs.  I don't want to make people fall asleep at their computers.  I would also like to improve on writing more blogs than necessary.

What I've Learned About Myself as a Learner
I procrastinate sometimes and only make my blogs when I have to.  I make little time for my blogs and always decide to put it off till later.

Where I'd Like to Go
I would like to have more time for my blogs so they can become better.  I would like my blog to become more about me now that my competition season is starting up soon.  I would also like to share my personal experiences about what is going to happen this season.

PR Wraps

I have something wrong with my left wrist which makes it hurt really bad doing mostly anything.  My coach is stumped because she has no idea what is causing my pain because it isn't hurting in a wrists usual spot. It hurts on my bone on the outside of my wrist, instead of the inner side of my wrist.  I never did anything to it for it to start hurting.  So I ordered a pair of PR Wraps and they are amazing! They are even better than Tiger Paws. For those who don't know what I am talking about, a Tiger Paw is something you put on your wrist for support if you have pains in your wrists.  And a PR Wrap is just a better version of a Tiger Paw.  Gymnasts use them for vault, beam, and floor.   I didn't think that a PR Wrap would even work because it is literally a piece of cloth that is about 2 feet long and you just wrap it around your wrist.  I can't explain how it works, but it does. A lot! PR Wraps are actually meant for athletes that do cross fit.  But gymnasts are starting to use them.  They aren't bulky like Tiger Paws and you still have full range of your wrist.  Sadly I used them on vault on Friday and they don't work as good as Tiger Paws.  But they do help me on beam and floor.

My Favorite and Least Favorite Events

I have this one teammate who just LOVES beam and if she could she would just do beam and not work on any other events.  I always respond to her by saying, "You are crazy.  I hate beam.  I have never liked beam and I never will."  My favorite event always switches between vault, bars, and floor.  It just depends on what I am doing better on.  Right now my favorite event is floor.  I like floor right now because I am doing great on all my new tumbling passes.  My first pass is a double back.  My second pass is a 11/2 layout punch layout, and my third pass is a front rudi.

                                                            Double back on floor

                                             1 1/2 layout punch layout on floor

                                                    Front hanspring rudi on floor


Vault is probably my second favorite event because I can do it, I just don't really like doing it.  Vault scares me.  Especially now that I have to do a urchenko layout full.

                                                     
                                                           video of urchenko layout full on vault

Bars is my third favorite event because I still have to put my routine together.  I need to catch my jaegar and start putting it in my routine.

                                                                 
                                                                       Jaeger on bars

 

Las Vegas

Last weekend I went to Las Vegas for a gymnastics showcase.  I went with three others from my gym.  For those who do not know what a gymnastics showcase is, it's sort of like a meet.  But not exactly.  You get a leo thats a color that represents the year you will graduate so that the scouts from colleges know what year you graduate.  All four of us that went had different leos because Hannabeth's a freshman, Natalie's a sophmore, I'm a junior, and the Hannah's is a senior.  HB had a pink leo, Nat had a lime green, I had blue, and Hannah had purple.  We all had to wear numbers on the back of ouor leos so that the colleges knew who they were watching.

Instead of competing and saluting judges, we just show off all the skills that we can do.  The college scouts are not allowed to talk to us yet because then it would be breaking NCAA rules, so they just were walking around watching who they wanted to watch.  But sunday was a little different. Instead of it being a showcase it was a clinic.  That is when the scouts are allowed to teach us and help us learn new skills. But they still are not allowed to talk to us about coming to their college because that would be breaking NCAA rules.

The showcase was really fun.  I saw a lot a good gymnasts that have been levels 10's for a couple of years now.  So I'm kind of nervous about competing because I have to compete against girls that have been level 10's for like 3 years and I'm a first year level 10.  It was a good experience seeing them though because I got to see girls that I will be competing against soon.

Trudi Kollar

From fives years old until I was fourteen, I went to a gym called Pozsar's Gymnastics owned by Geza Pozsar.  I was coached by Trudi Kollar (Getrude Emilia Eberle) the entire time I was there.  Trudi was an Olympic gymnast in 1980.  I love Trudi so much.  She was my favorite coach.  Then Pozsars closed and I had to moved to another gym.  I chose to move to Byers Gymnastics in Elk Grove. 

While I was at Pozsar's though, I remember in 2008 that KCRA came to Pozsar's to get an interview from Trudi. While Trudi was in Romania training for the Olympics she was coached by the Karolyi's.  One of her teammates was Nadia Comaneci.  She was abused by the Karolyi's while training for gymnastics. 

                                               Emelia Eberle on vault at the WC EF in 1978

                                             Emelia Eberle on bars in the 1980 Olympics

                                             Emelia Eberle on beam in the 1980 Olympics

                                             Emelia Eberle on floor in the 1980 Olympics

 

The Evolution of The Floor Exercise

Both men and women compete on floor. Men have a routine based on tumbling and strength while women have theirs based on tumbling and dance.  Men's routines last up to 70 seconds and womens have to be 90 seconds.  The men don't do their routines to music but the women do.  The floor is 39ft by 39ft.  It is a sprung floor to provide gymnasts with bounce for their hard tumbling passes and has a layer of cushion so the impact isn't as hard.

In the 1970's, floor was all about dancing with not that hard of tumbling passes.  Nowadays it's about being graceful, but most powerful.  Gymnasts now do much harder tumbling passes such as a triple twist instead of a double twist.
 

                                                  Nadia Comaneci at the 1976 Olympics

                                                Shawn Johnson at the 2008 Olympics
   

The Evolution of Balance Beam

The length of the beam is 16 feet and its only 3.9 inches wide.  In the early days of gymnastics, beam was based more on dance than on tumbling.  Routines at the elite level were just leaps, dance poses, handstands, rolls, front walkovers, and back walkovers.  In the 1960's the most dificult skill performed by the average Oympic gymnast was just a back handspring. 

Originally, the beam surface was plain polished wood.  In earlier years, some gymnasts competed on a beam made of basketball-like material.  However, this type of beam was eventually banned due to its extreme slipperiness.  Since the 1980s, beams have been covered in leather or suede.  In addition, they are now also sprung to accommodate the stress of high-difficulty tumbling and dance skills.

In the 70's the difficulty of beam began to increase. Gymnasts started advancing their routines by adding aerial skills and advanced tumbling combinations.  Today, balance beam routines still consist of a mixture of acrobatic skills, dance elements, leaps and poses, but with much greater difficulty.

The Evolution of Bars

 Uneven bars has changed a lot over the years.  It originally consisted of men's parallel bars set to different heights.  The bars were very lose together and gymnasts could go from the high bar to the low bar with little difficulty. 

In the 1950's routines usually consisted of simple circles, kips, balance elements, and holds like you might see on beam.  Release moves even began to come into play but they were almost entirely limited to transitions between the low and high bars.

In the late 1960's to the early 70's, companies began manufacturing uneven bars as a separate specific apparatus.  The design was changed slightly to allow the bars to be adjustable, with tension cables that held the bars to the floor.  As a result of this change, caches could set the bars further apart.  Additionally, the circumference of the bars themselves decreased, allowing gymnasts to grasp and swing from them with greater ease.

                                                       Emilia Eberle on bars in 1979
By the mid 80's, routines had become so based on swing and release moves that the bars were moved even farther apart.  The distance between the bars increased even more as gymnasts developed difficult transition elements that required space. 

                                          
                                                   Me at level 9 Regionals April, 2013

The Evolution of Vault

The vaulting horse was set up with its long dimension perpendicular to the vault runway for women, and parallel for men.  The vaulting horse was used in the Olympics for over a century, beginning with the Mens vault in the first modern Olympics and ending with the 2000 Summer Olympics.  The horse had been blamed for several serious accidents over the years. In 1988, American Julissa Gomez was paralyzed in a vaulting accident; she died from complications from her injuries three years later.  During warmups at the 1998 Goodwill Games, Chinese gymnast Sang Lan fell and suffered paralysis from a cervical-spine injury. 
  In a series of crashes when the horse's height was set too low or too high, gymnasts either rammed into the horse's front end, or had bad landings after having problems with their hand placements during push-off.  

Brian Meeker at the 2008 Olympics misses his foot on the spring board and runs into the horse.

 

Following the 1988, 1998 and 2000 problems, International Gymnastics Gymnastics Federation (FIG) re-evaluated and changed the apparatus, citing both safety reasons and the desire to facilitate more impressive acrobatics.  The 2001 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships were the first international competition to make use of the "vaulting table", an apparatus made by Dutch gymnastics equipment company Janssen-Fritsen since the mid-1990s. It features a flat, larger, and more cushioned surface almost parallel to the floor, which slopes downward at the end closest to the springboard; it appears to be somewhat safer than the old apparatus.

The History of Gymnastics

Some of you might be wondering just how long gymnastics has been around.  It has been around for over 2,000 years.  But as a competitive sport it is a little more than a 100 years old.  The word gymnastics comes from the Ancient Greek word 'gymnos' which is translated to mean 'to train naked'.
The Ancient Greeks used gymnastics as a training for war.  The Romans followed the Greeks and they made gymnastics a compulsory for their soldiers as part of their training.  They had the ambition to conquer and they thought gymnastics could make their fighting forces supremely fit. 

Gymnastics is one of the oldest Olympic sports.  Artistic gymnastics was introduced at the very first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, and has been present at every Olympic Games since then.

At the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, the basis of modern Olympic gymnastics competition was firmly established.  The athletes (men) began to compete for individual Olympic titles on each event, as well as the combined team score.   In 1928, women were included in the Amsterdam Games and the U.S women first competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany.

My Project Plan

Hi my name is Carly and I am doing a blog on gymnastics.  This is going to be my first year as a level 10 gymnast and I want to teach people about gymnastics and to share some of my experiences.  Anyone who wants to read my blogs can, it's not just for gymnasts.  My purpose is to help people understand more about gymnastics.  You can expect to find lots of interesting topics, anything from the history of gymnastics and even to my gymnastics meets.