Wikipedia
Gymnastics
Gymnastics is a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, balance and grace. Artistic gymnastics is the best known of the gymnastics sports governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG). Artistic Gymnastics, typically involves the womens events of uneven parallel bars, balance beam, floor exercise, and vault. Mens events include floor exercise, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar. Gymnastics evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks, that included skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and from circus performance skills.
Other forms of gymnastics are rhythmic gymnastics, various trampolining sports, and aerobic and acrobatic gymnastics.
The sport can include children as young as three years old and sometimes younger doing kindergym and childrens gymnastics, recreational gymnasts of all ages, competitive gymnasts at varying levels of skill, as well as world class athletes.
Etymology
The word derives from the Greek γυμναστική (gymnastike), fem. of γυμναστικός (gymnastikos), "fond of athletic exercises", from γυμνάσια (gymnasia), "exercise" and that from γυμνός (gymnos), "naked", because athletes exercised and competed in the nude.
History
To the Ancient Greeks, physical fitness was paramount, and all Greek cities had a gymnasium, a courtyard for jumping, running, and wrestling. As the Roman Empire ascended, Greek gymnastics gave way to military training. The Romans, for example, introduced the wooden horse. In 393 AD the Emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympic Games, which by then had become corrupt, and gymnastics, along with other sports, declined. Later, Christianity, with its medieval belief in the base nature of the human body, had a deleterious effect on gymnastics. For centuries, gymnastics was all but forgotten.Goodbody>
In the sixteenth century, Girolamo Mercuriale from Forlì (Italy) wrot read more at » http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnastics