How to Do a Backflip

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Virginia and I am here with Amanda at Encore Gymnastics and we are going to teach you how to do a backflip. It is important whenever you start any sort of gymnastics activity that you make sure your muscles are ready by stretching out your muscles. You are going to want to make sure that for a backflip you want to especially focus on wrists. Ankles are real important. We are asking a lot for our ankles to do backflips, stretching them around, rolling them and let's go on our hands. Another good way to stretch those ankles, hands up, stretch those heels, good. Stretch forward so we get the Achilles, we get the hamstring, good curl the toes up. Very nice. We also want to make sure we stretch our neck out, shoulder to shoulder, there you go. And the next step we are going to work on our backflip is you want to start out with a couple of drills because you don't want to just throw a backflip because that could be very scary so we are going to start out with a set and with your set we are going to start out with arms up and we are going to go down and do a nice jump. What you kind of want to think about is you have little eyeballs right here on your chest and when you do your set up you want that eyeball focused directly on the ceiling so this is the angle that you want to be in. A nice hollow body and you want your toes up so let's just start out with a nice set, go ahead, arms down, stretch up, hollow good. Let's do it without a tuck. So we are going to do it with a nice stretch, arms go down, up set, hollow and good. When you do that first one you want to make sure that the toes are up and once that we are getting enough height off of that you want to start pulling the tuck up so you want to make sure that once you get to the very top of that set you are going to pull your toes up and we are just going to bring your hips up around the top, ready, arms down, set tuck, good. Once we get there you can start feeling the rotation. Our next step once you get that nice tuck going over is we are going to do the set and I am going to go to the side this time to get out of her way. She is going to set, pull her knees up, and she is going to rotate right around her shoulders. You want to make sure that as the set your knees come up and over the top instead of keeping it nice and low. So we are going to go arms up, and here we go, down swing, set, tuck, arms up and finish, very nice. It is important as you come around pulling your toes down and flexing your feet so you land right on your feet, knees bent and then pull to the finish. Let's do that all the way from the beginning. Start with a nice stretch, arms down, swing and set, tuck, very nice, thank you Amanda. That is how you do a back tuck."