Stretching Exercises for Gymnastics

Series Summary

Gymnastics is a sport which involves a sequence of movements and exercises that require strength and flexibility. Typical gymnastic moves include handsprings, handstands, forward rolls, tucks, somersaults, vaults, and other acrobatic maneuvers. Competitive gymnastics, like those in the Olympics, take a lot of dedication and practice. There are many types of gymnastics including artistic, rhythmic, sports aerobics, sports acrobatics, trampoline, and power tumbling. These are all regulated by the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique. The two most popular types of gymnastics are artistic and rhythmic gymnastics; these are the types seen in the Summer Olympic Games.

In this series of videos, you will learn some of the essential moves of a tumbling run, such as the cartwheel, the back handspring and the back flip. Professional gymnastics instructor Jarred Cummis will demonstrate these moves by breaking them down into safe and easy steps. You will also find out about stretching exercises to warm up for your tumbling run.

Video Transcript

"Alright, so to begin we always want to start out by stretching, otherwise we can pull a muscle with some of the moves we are doing in here. It can be strenuous on the body so we want to warm up. You can actually start with just a light running, just jogging. Get your blood pumping, your muscles warmed up, and then you can go in, sit down, and get into a stretch. We're just going to start out doing some basic stretch. We're going to start out in a straddle, so what you do is just reach up and reach all the way down as far as you can. If you can only reach to your ankle, excellent, if you can reach down to your foot, even better. Reach as far as you can to where you will start to feel a strain, that's a good feel that we all want for the stretches. We can reach to the other side. We can reach down to the middle, just as far down as you can go. We can reach to our back, we want to stretch out the shoulders. The shoulders are really, really important because we are going to be using a lot of shoulder flexibility so you want to stretch out as far as you can in the shoulders. You're going to want to touch your pinkies together or get your hands as close as you can together, going down as far as you can at the same time. You don't have to go down super far; I'm just showing you a nice and easy stretch right now. And, like I said, our next stretch, is our shoulder stretches are really important because the we are going to need a lot of flexibility in our upper body and our shoulders to get some of these tricks down. So our next stretch is going to be done with a chair. We're just going to grab on here, tuck our head down between our arms and stretch out those shoulders. You want to hold your stretches for a good twenty to thirty seconds and your muscles are going to stretch. If you start to stretch and just bounce down and come back up it's really not stretching anything, it can actually do more damage than good. So you want to hold those stretches and make sure you warm up your muscles pretty good before you start any stretches."