Gymnastics, while flying under noses, is one of the most demanding sports.
Story by Hung Gwan Lau
Staff Writer
Illustration by Shyla Drake & Yumin Kim
Staff Illustrators
Sports will always be an injury-prone hobby that millions of children have. While common sports include football, the staple for injury-prone sports, and basketball requiring many quick maneuvers that wear down the athletes’ joints, gymnastics has secretly contributed to numerous injuries. With the required six events for males, and four events for females, there is little room for error in such a high demanding sport. From daily practices spanning on average four hours, to the sheer inventory of different skills needed, like flexibility, strength, and coordination, gymnasts cannot have any margin of error.
Physically, gymnasts are expected to generate enough power to launch themselves in the air, support their body weight , and control their landings. The whole body is taken into account with events, like still rings and high bar, focusing more on the upper extremities of the body, while other events like the floor exercise and the vault focus on the lower extremities. Gymnasts also need a considerable amount of movement through their joints and limbs with flexibility being one of the most crucial skills to have.
“As [my former coach] said, the three pillars of gymnastics are strength, flexibility, and balance,” Killian Holt, a gymnast of 12 years, said.
What makes gymnastics so flashy and impressive, is also what makes it so dangerous. Athletes will repeatedly perform acrobatics from flipping to landings that place considerable stress to the body. Even with the proper precautions, the minor details in the movements, like how one would flex or relax their body, can cause some of the most drastic changes in the outcome of their skill.
“It definitely takes a huge toll on the body especially if you land off in any certain way and especially if you injure yourself on a skill.” Holt said. “[It’s] is one of the sports where repetition of failure is the only way to succeed, with the extreme measures to perform these skills.”
With the main focus of gymnastics being the perfection of a set routine, gymnastics is, by nature, a very repetitive sport. With this, the overuse of muscles and joints is a common side effect of training in the sport. Sudden injuries can also occur when a gymnast loses control of their body, misjudges a landing, or tries for a skill they haven’t gotten familiar with. Often, gymnasts trying new skills will injure themselves due to how their body will react to something new.
“In other sports, a lot of the skills you learn are already akin to the natural human biomechanical system like running, or jumping. Gymnastics however makes you learn completely new skills alien to us,” Holt said.
Naturally, the human body is pushed beyond its limit. Skills like running and jumping are developed as one grows older, but things like flipping and airborne rotation is not a skillset people are born with, forcing one to learn something completely new. The ability of air awareness, or knowing where you are in the air is crucial. When flipping, it is almost impossible to see with the constant rotations the body performs, it renders the athlete almost blind, forcing them to use intuition to know where they are at all times.
Throughout Holt’s 12 years of gymnastics, he has seen countless teammates come and go, with the bulk of them leaving due to an injury that derails their progress. What makes injury in gymnastics so different from other sports, is the added mental block. When a gymnast fails to execute skill and gets injured, not only do they have to rehabilitate and stay off the sport, they must also revisit the skills that they once fell and injured themselves on.
Gymnastics is a sport refined by the relationship of its physical and mental attributes, and with the polishing that it does to one’s body, it can also take away. This sport reveals not only the capabilities of the human body, but also the limitations that remind athletes the fact that progress will always come with risk, especially in a sport where injury is just a small miscalculation away.
Gymnastics is not just about performing the most difficult skill possible, or pushing the body to its maximum, but learning to control the edge of our capacity.