What I am about to explain is something that I am not totally in agreement with but I believe is a very interesting way of looking at the concept of twisting direction…A fellow colleague of mine, and I were on the topic of twisting and he brought up a very thought provoking way of looking at the direction of twist and its implications.
My colleague, decided after retiring from gymnastics to take up bull riding. In bull riding, the participants are strapped into the bull by one arm while the other arm is used freely to try and maintain balance for an allotted amount of time. On the first attempt, he was asked which hand was his dominate (right arm) and which was his non-dominate (left arm). Coincidentally, he was instructed to strap his left arm down to the bull, and use his right arm as the balancer. In other words, his non-dominate arm was used as a stabilizer, while his dominate arm was the active/working mechanism. Bull riding caused my colleague to question many things about sport and its implications. One of these questions became – How and Why to we come to choose a particular direction of twist for gymnastics.
I think the majority of us would conclude that the majority of the world’s population are right handed. In other words, right-armed people dominate the world, left handed people are a minority (I am one of them). It is quoted in Wikipedia that ‘In 1998, a study suggested that approximately 7 to 10 percent of the adult population was left-handed’ (Hardyck, C., & Petrinovich, L. F. (1977). "Left-handedness", Psychological Bulletin, 84, 385–404.)
Following this well documented concept, there are many examples of sport adapted to this majority. In almost all racing sports the track goes counter-clockwise around the track (in the USA). I do not believe that this is a coincidence, rather I think that racing has adapted to the fact that when you turn a steering wheel, you pump your right arm, or you push the bike handle, the majority of the population find it more comfortable to use their right arm to drive through the left turns. Therefore, it seems very interesting to think that the only sport in the USA that goes clockwise around a track is dog racing, a non-human driven sport!
In gymnastics there are some who have adapted the way they teach gymnasts to this concept. In some nations, for instance the former Soviet Union, the choice has been standard in which direction to twist – it is deemed left for all individuals, regardless of haptic/optic testing, left is standard. There are exceptions to this rule, Vitaly Sherbo being one of them, however, we have to ask why this would be the case?
If you run along the principle of the non-dominate arm to stabilize and the dominate arm to provide work as presented above in the bull riding paradigm, then it makes more sense. The coaches are considering that the majority of their gymnasts will be right handed so why not let their left arm be the stabilizer and allow the right arm to throw across their body to work a left twist. It seems that almost 90% of the time they will get the choice correct, considering documentation has been given that between 7 – 10% of the adult population is left handed.
But what about those 7-10% in those countries that choose only one direction? What happens when they learn to twist the wrong direction? I am a left handed person and learned to twist right…It seems that I fit the paradigm in twisting. I have tried twisting left but it seems that I twist early and can not seem to drive the twist fast no tight enough. Why do I twist early? My dominate arm seems to want to work faster instead of having a stabiliser to set the twist squarely first.
The conversation has been very interesting for me to examine my own gymnastics and this seems a great forum to think about the implications of the majority of the population being right handed and how it has affected gymnasts and coaching principles in twisting. Discuss….?