How to Use the Parallel Bars in Kids Gymnastics

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Matt, and on behalf of expertvillage.com, I’m going to show you some parallel bar basics. First thing, when you grab the bars, you want to have both hands equally. You don’t want to have one way in front of the other. Okay. Next thing, would be a support. You’re just holding yourself up. Again, you don’t want to be shrunk, push out of your shoulders. Okay. So, hands even, jump up tall, and you’re going to put one leg up and then the other leg. This is called a straddle travel. Leave your hands to the front. Shift your weight onto your hands off your legs, you bend your knees, take your feet off the bar and go back to the front. Hands, take your feet off, to the front. Okay. Now, when you get to the middle of the bars, you can do some swings. So I’m just going to kick off and we’ll swing back and forth. Generally, you’ll look up to the front. Now, when you’re swinging, be careful that you don’t fall forward. So when you’re swinging, don’t fall backwards because you can hurt your shoulders. As you swing higher and higher, you can swing into a handstand. "