The Advanced Gymnastics Mindset

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Jordan Dahl and we're talking about advanced floor gymnastics and the next thing I wanted to talk about was your mindset. We've been talking about this a lot in previous clips, but I wanted to re-emphasize it especially for advanced tumbling. The biggest problem I see with people's mindsets, as they become more advanced, is the fear that comes along with it. Gymnasts have to learn to pretty much be fearless. You can't advance further if you're freaking yourself out and being scared. You need to clear that out with your mind. Another thing is learning to organize your mindset. We've covered this before in intermediate, but it's more important now in advanced than it was before. Knowing what you're going to do before you actually do it. I had an experience doing that before I was tumbling at a football game and something exciting had happened. I don't remember what, but I went to throw a pass; a tumbling pass and I just thought oh, I'll throw something really cool and everyone will be impressed, didn't really think about what I was going to throw; I went round-off double back hand spring and up in the air, I tried to decide on seven different tricks at the same time, my brain froze up and I just fell flat on my face on the cement, in front of the entire student body and it gave me a beautiful scar on my face and nice, couple of lovely scratches. So, you want to make sure to avoid injury that you know exactly what you're going to do before you throw the tumbling pass. Something else that may come up a lot as you progress is showing off. This is something that can be really dangerous if you're not in the correct environment. Anytime that people have found out that I'm a gymnast; that I can tumble, it doesn't matter what environment I'm in, they want me to show them. They want me to show them something that I've been practicing on and there are a lot of times, where I have to say, "Sorry, but I can't because the environment is not safe enough whether it's the ground is slippery or it's a confined space or it's on concrete, you need to really be careful to not let your ego get in the way of your safety. We've talked about it earlier, but I wanted to re-emphasize this idea on fear. I've noticed that gymnasts are kind of psychopaths when it comes to this. You need to learn to block; to block everything out. That doesn't mean to get rid of the emotion and the excitement that you feel, but when it comes time to perform your pass, you need to block it all off and kind of switch it off because if there's any twinge of fear during your pass, that can cause you to stop and freeze up and come down in a really harmful position whether it's on your neck or on your wrist and arm, it can be really dangerous. Now the Russian gymnasts have really perfected this idea of switching off. I've noticed this as I go to competition with my own boys, there is a team coached by Russians and their boys go up to perform their routine, they look excited to do it, but the second they start their routine, they're gone. You can tell they're zoned in. They're not thinking about anything but what they're performing. They're not letting fear come in. They finish their routine and they go off the emotions back on. So, they are a really good example of this idea of getting fear out of the way."