Coaches want DD to change twisting direction...

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Kiwi

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I need specific knowledge about twisting, preferably from knowledgeable trampoline coaches!

My older DD (who did rec gymnastics for a couple of years but wasn't very good) has been doing rec trampolining for about 5 years and joined a competitive squad this year. She loves it, since joining the squad she has improved heaps and had her first competition recently.

The trouble is, one of the other coaches came and watched the squad training last week and told some of them they had to change their twisting direction. When DD seemed upset after training yesterday, I spoke to her coach briefly and he said it is so they don't get confused or lost when doing harder skills.

DD says they tested her on swivel hips and half turn to front and decided this direction was opposite to the way she twists in her barani. I am confused because to me it seems the same way. If I imagine what direction her hips are turning from her POV, she always turns to her right. She would be a righty in her handstand and cartwheel if she still did gymnastics. In her half turns and swivel hips she turns to her right. In her barani she turns to her right upside down, from what I've read here on CB I believe this is known as left twisting.

DD is very upset at the prospect of having to relearn her barani after 3 years of doing it the same way (and then relearn her rudi and full twist back). I am wondering whether she is more likely to get confused and lost rather than less likely. Can someone here enlighten me as to why the coaches are insisting on this change and why they think she should twist the other way?
 
Turning to the right by bringing your left shoulder across your front is right twisting. Turning to your left by bringing your right shoulder across the front is left twisting.

Actually which way is your left and which way is your right is unaffected by what way up you are. So if she turns past a person stood on her right side as she starts the move she'd right twisting, for half-turn, swivel hips or barani. (Try going into a shoulder stand and rolling over to your front if you can't see how that works.) So basically if she starts facing the same way on a swivel hips and on a barani she should face the same side of the trampoline in the middle. If she doesn't she has to change some of the moves so they all match.

The thing is lots of former artistic gymnasts see a barani as a "round-off" with no hands (which is not right, it is a front somersault with half twist out so you take off square, unlike a round-off.) If you do a round-off leading with your right hand you will twist left BUT it will set you up for a right twist on the next move. For this reason a right handed gymnast will typically either learn to do a round-off left handed (so they twist right on round-off to set up the left twist on everything else) or else they will respond to the left-twist in the right-handed round-off by right twisting all their other skills. [Or if they are aware of the issue they might avoid linking round-off with twisting.] It sounds like this may be the issue with your DD.

Do check if you are not sure she actually is twisting the opposite direction on different skills but if she is she does have to correct that. You have to twist consistently in the same direction throughout a routine. It is really unfortunate that it has been picked up on so late. It is much simpler when consistency in twisting is taught from the beginning and it really should be established which direction the gymnast twists before teaching barani. I'm sorry not to be more encouraging, as I know that is not what you were hoping to hear but she really does need to pick a direction and stick with it and if she isn't consistent in her direction of twist now that is unfortunately going to mean re-learning moves.
 
The problem is a lot of coaches don't pick up on this early enough and a lot of kids are taught to do a barani like a roundoff with no hands rather than a front (tuck,pike or straight) kickout half turn. And like the above posted stated most peoples roundoff's are a different twisting direction than they will learn for full, rudi's etc.

For most people this never even becomes an issue as most kids don't get to level 10 or Elite where it comes into play. The problem is when you start doing skills like half in half outs etc. where you are twisting both front and back in the same skill. It confuses you and is incorrect.

I went to some classes at National's a couple years back and they addressed this. Unfortunately the kids do need to re learn the barani to match the full, rudi and back full. I can tell you from my person experience it isn't that hard, frustrating yes, annoying cause you have to think every time you do it yes. It took me a couple of months and still if I get nervous or rush I will sometimes twist barani's the other direction.

There are drill to teach this, you don't just tell a kid to switch it. Hopefully he coach is up on this.
 
okay folks, all that really matters in all this is that the athlete is twisting the same direction going forwards and backwards. that's all that matters.

the issue of "confusion" with the vestibular system is when you twist 2 different directions. when your perfectly upside down, the VS does not know which way it is somersaulting whether forward or backward. this is why twisting must be consistent. that's all that matters.
 
Turning to the right by bringing your left shoulder across your front is right twisting. Turning to your left by bringing your right shoulder across the front is left twisting.

Actually which way is your left and which way is your right is unaffected by what way up you are. So if she turns past a person stood on her right side as she starts the move she'd right twisting, for half-turn, swivel hips or barani. (Try going into a shoulder stand and rolling over to your front if you can't see how that works.) So basically if she starts facing the same way on a swivel hips and on a barani she should face the same side of the trampoline in the middle. If she doesn't she has to change some of the moves so they all match.

The thing is lots of former artistic gymnasts see a barani as a "round-off" with no hands (which is not right, it is a front somersault with half twist out so you take off square, unlike a round-off.) If you do a round-off leading with your right hand you will twist left BUT it will set you up for a right twist on the next move. For this reason a right handed gymnast will typically either learn to do a round-off left handed (so they twist right on round-off to set up the left twist on everything else) or else they will respond to the left-twist in the right-handed round-off by right twisting all their other skills. [Or if they are aware of the issue they might avoid linking round-off with twisting.] It sounds like this may be the issue with your DD.

Do check if you are not sure she actually is twisting the opposite direction on different skills but if she is she does have to correct that. You have to twist consistently in the same direction throughout a routine. It is really unfortunate that it has been picked up on so late. It is much simpler when consistency in twisting is taught from the beginning and it really should be established which direction the gymnast twists before teaching barani. I'm sorry not to be more encouraging, as I know that is not what you were hoping to hear but she really does need to pick a direction and stick with it and if she isn't consistent in her direction of twist now that is unfortunately going to mean re-learning moves.

do you mean "not right" as in right twist? or not right meaning incorrect. if it is the 2nd , then that is not correct. the rest of what you stated is spot on.
 
Tumbellina, thank you so much for your detailed reply! I found it hard to understand at first and have spent about half an hour working through it, doing shoulder-stands with a half-twist on my bed! I hadn't been thinking in terms of shoulder coming across in front. I don't think I've totally got my head around it yet but it is starting to make some sense.

The cartwheel/round-off situation does seem a little bit different and makes it confusing because you end up facing the opposite way. I had read CB threads in the past where coaches talked about using the round-off to tell which direction a gymnast naturally twisted. I think it might help me to take it out of the equation because she is not a gymnast and isn't doing round-offs anyway. She is not really a former artistic gymnast, she did a bit of beginner rec when a lot younger, didn't get past a cartwheel.

She told me she learned barani by doing a front somersault followed by a half turn. I'm pretty sure her back twisting is the same as her front twisting, so I don't think that is the problem. I think they want her somersaults twisting the same as the other moves in her set such as swivel hips and half turn to stomach - this is what they were testing her on at the time.

Dunno, thanks, I was hoping you would reply. Please can you clarify what was not correct?
 
I thought of another way of explaining it. Suppose DD faces North on the trampoline, her right is East and her left is West. If she does a half-turn jump say and twists right she will face to the East part way through the jump. Now suppose she does a barani. As she is upside down she is now facing South, rather than North, but her right is still East and her left is still West, so if she turns to her right she will still face East half way through the turn.

The thing is, if she does half turn to front drop twisting to her right then she very likely does other moves that build on that also to the right. That would mean full twist to back-drop, half-twisting crash (if she does that) and building on from those, full. So if she goes the other direction in her barani, which seems to be what the coach thinks is happening then she's probably twisting right in back somersaults but left in front somersaults. So, quite apart from that twisting consistently in the same direction through routines is required, what happens when she gets to something like a half-in-half-out? She'd be taking off for a back somersault so twisting right but then having performed one half twist would be going into the second somersault with forwards rotation and feeling she should be twisting left. That can't work.

So if she does in fact, twist consistently to her right then it is all fine and dandy. If the front and back somersaults with twist all twist the same way, but that is opposite to the non or quarter somersaulting skills then it is probably easier to change the direction on those so her routine doesn't have reversals. Ultimately there will be less and less of those skills in her routines as she advances anyway until they completely disappear. If she goes the opposite way in front and back somersaults though, which seems to be the suspicion, then she needs to fix it before she gets to the point where it does create real problems.

do you mean "not right" as in right twist? or not right meaning incorrect. if it is the 2nd , then that is not correct. the rest of what you stated is spot on.

I mean not correct. I would say that a correctly performed barani is distinct from a round-off, not just because you use no hands (and because it shouldn't travel and you are not supposed to lean into it) but because the take off should be forwards facing, as for a front somersault, with the twist performed as an aerial twist in the later part of the flight. For a tucked or piked barani I would expect the twist to be generated in the kick-out. In a straight barani I would expect the gymnast to still face directly forwards in the take-off phase and to twist when they see the cross (keeping their head neutral and looking forwards in relation to their body, not looking downwards.) In a round-off your hands go down side-ways so you've made a quarter turn already when you are half-way through. Is that not what you would expect of a good barani? Or are you telling me that my round-offs are lousy? Barani on floor might be somewhat different of course.

Actually in the case of Kiwi's DD it might help her to do some late twisting cradles and make sure they are twisting to the right because late twisting cradle has forwards somersault rotation and an aerial twist, very much like barani.
 
I've figured out a few more pieces of the puzzle now. You are right, I think she actually was back twisting right and front twisting left. According to DD, when she first learned barani in her old rec class, the coaches taught it by having everyone turn toward a certain direction, so it seems she learned it in her non-natural twisting direction. Now that I understand what is going on, I've explained it to DD and she is feeling a bit better about having to relearn barani and rudi. I think in everything else she twists right, so hopefully it is just those two. And hopefully since she'll now be going in her natural direction they will be reasonably easy for her to learn. Thank you, Tumbellina, you've been a huge help!
 
A good barani, if you're asking me, is a half twist going into the salto, and it's pretty much a stand alone skill until you wanna work half in-half out double back. Oh yeah, I almost forgot Cuervo on vault, and Comaneci bar dismount.... and then there's that bothersome twisting on tsuk fulls that seems barani ish during the second half twist. Probably more but since I can't count past five I'll quit while I'm ahead.

Sure there's some who barani in full out on a front layout, but I seem more who work the 1.5 twist as a set, salto, twist movement.
 
A good barani, if you're asking me, is a half twist going into the salto, and it's pretty much a stand alone skill until you wanna work half in-half out double back.
That's not what is taught in trampolining coaching education in the UK. Also not what I have seen a very high level trampolinist do showing off to a bunch of novices while explaining how skills build in difficulty by doing barani, rudi, randi adolph. If you want to see a twist into the somersault in barani what would you see as the difference between a barani ball out and a baby fliff?
 
Thought of more stuff, but couldn't edit.

A good barani, if you're asking me, is a half twist going into the salto, and it's pretty much a stand alone skill until you wanna work half in-half out double back.
That's not what is taught in trampolining coaching education in the UK. Also not what I have seen a very high level trampolinist do showing off to a bunch of novices while explaining how skills build in difficulty by doing barani, rudi, randi adolph. If you want to see a twist into the somersault in barani what would you see as the difference between a barani ball out and a baby fliff? And isn't your idea of a good barani a jonah?

Also if doing it that way is stand-alone until you get to half-in-half-out, (except for baby fliff if I understand you aright) why would that be a good way to do it? Even with fliffs, since you don't seem to see it as useful for half-in-back-out (aka barani back-out) does that imply you would expect the twist in the second half of the first somersault in that skill? And if it is useful for half-in-half-out why teach it like that from the start rather than teaching a jonah as a progression nearer the time?

I don't really know what you are referring to with the non-trampolining moves because I'm a trampoline coach and have only ever done artistic for fun at a pretty basic level. As I say, it could be that if you are approaching it from an artistic gymnastics perspective it is different because of course you don't have the same height and time, it is much harder to generate aerial twist and there are other skills it could be associated with. I really thought, in trampoline at least, barani was pretty universally seen as a front somersault with half twist out, but they are not something you'd see competed at an international level so that might be wrong.

I'm sorry that's loads of questions and going off at quite a tangent from the original topic about twisting directions but teaching barani as an early twist seems quite weird to me and I'd like to understand the thinking behind it.
 
That's why I said "if you ask me" rather than a some one skilled in trampoline basics. I wish I knew more about trampoline as a tool for spatial orientation and the carry over value of basic trampoline skills, but I don't. That's why my comparisons were all found in the artistic events.

Geez, I just realized I'm posting on a trampoline thread and while the human body and it's abilities don't change from one discipline to the other, the experience base does. The point is that the opinion I offered is grounded in how some skills require an earlier half turn to get into the next sequence of movements.

Maybe there's something I can learn from this forum.
 
That's not what is taught in trampolining coaching education in the UK. Also not what I have seen a very high level trampolinist do showing off to a bunch of novices while explaining how skills build in difficulty by doing barani, rudi, randi adolph. If you want to see a twist into the somersault in barani what would you see as the difference between a barani ball out and a baby fliff?

you forgot one...reydolph before adolph.

anyway, your explanation was very good. and you understand the 1/2> 1/2 out paradox.

to reiterate, the most important thing in all this is that the athlete twists the same direction going both forwards and backwards. this is absolute for trampolining.

edited for IWC: trampoline is now used for everything artistic. as for myself, i have been using the trampoline my entire coaching career. i was brought up that way. so were the Russians.

edited for Tumbellina82: of course it matters if you twist early on a barani. you know that and that is correct. can you imagine a fliffis rudi with an early barani? CRAAAAAAASH!

in artistic you will find opposite twists. they too should be taught same twist forward and backward. it's vestibular. :)
 
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I have no idea what a 'baby fliff' is! ... but ... I have talked with younger DD's WAG coach (who is also my coach at adult class) about twisting. He competed at gymnastics at international level, then trained in trampolining and competed that at international level as well. He told me that gymnasts and trampolinists do twist differently and demonstrated for me. It seems that gymnasts start twisting earlier, while rotating. In trampoline they like you to rotate first and then twist, this is also what older DD has been told by her coaches. Also, gymnasts usually twist with bent arms, whereas in trampoline they have straight arms as much as possible. The demonstration showed the difference quite clearly. So it is very likely a gymnastics barani and trampoline barani are quite different.
 
Kiwi: Yeah, sorry for going off at a tangent. A baby fliff is a ballout from a back landing (usually performed from a crash dive i.e. 3/4 front somersault straight, or from a 1 and 3/4 front somersault) with an early half-twist. So rather than somersaulting then twisting out, like a barani ballout, you twist in and so end up rotating backwards. I don't think it is something you see competed. People do it sometimes before learning fliffus (double with minimum of half-twist) skills or just for fun.

So Dunno, what was the bit that was not correct in my initial post? Or was it not that it wasn't correct but just wasn't clear so that it seemed like it wasn't? I'm interested because I've been lurking these forums for a while before joining so I know that you are a very knowledgeable and well respected coach and I like learning stuff. I think that's why I enjoy gymnastics, there's always something new to learn.
 
a barani is a barani. techniques range for different body types. no 2 barani's done trampoline style will be the same. but it is possible for a perfect trampoline barani to be done when done on an artistic floor. we've all seen them. and it is not accurate that artistic twist with usually bent arms. there is no usual in artistic. one simply needs to look at the Japanese boy doing quads.

what you described above is called a Jonah... when you go 1 3/4 (suicide dive we used to call it) to "crash dive" then 1/2 twist and then back flip. in artistic the closest skill would be called a Cuervo which is performed at vault. and a ball out can be 1/2 in back out or front 1/2 out. what distinguishes the two is Jonah. in the old days, we would call it ball out or Jonah.

yes, trampolinist's flip then twist, and artistic tends to twist early and then flip. what trampolinist's are able to do are obviated by the fact that the bed can launch you and give you time. artistic floors can't do that. nonetheless, the artistic athletes strives for somi first then twist. surface twisting in artistic has always been problematic because there is no 'assist' from the apparatus. and it is more prevalent on the hand apparatus. a trampolinist must only initiate from the feet. the artistic must learn both hands and feet. and sometimes they full one way off the table for vault, but twist the opposite way when they dismount apparatus like bars, high bar and rings.

and twisting early is problematic for the trampolinist also. if a barani in is to be done, you certainly can't twist early lest you find yourself cockeyed and then off you go. it must be done more "front 1/2" before the back flip. same with barani out (fliffis). you want to be near upside down in the 2nd somi before you barani out. when you go crooked on tramp you leave the tramp crooked from 20 feet in the air. the artistic athletes just crashes a couple of feet from whence they came and screwed up. lol. :)

and then the other stuff you posted was correct. but a lot of people here won't know what your talking about. like 1/2 one way and 1/2 back the same. what we used to call "1/2 in fake out". in the old days, the judges didn't even catch it. so for sure, as you described, your "barani" and your "1/2 in" must twist the same direction. and certainly this is established a bit differently and earlier in trampolining than it is in artistic.

the trampolinist first learns fulls and barani's. a left barani is a right twist. therefore, you better twist backwards right. and of course, just as it is for artistic, a 1/2 in then rudi is a double full. it is the same in artistic. there is nothing wrong with this for artistic.

but in artistic, let's say, a left round off (which again is a right twist) on to a vault board for yurchenko with a twist is much easier if that twist also goes left making the vault a "Kasamatsu" versus a "pure" Tsuk full. but then you have Simone Biles. hers is pure trampoline technique...round off twist (barani) and back 2 1/2 (Amanar) twist continuous one direction.

in artistic, coaches tend to use whatever will work cause the apparatus is not a help such that the trampoline is. even lightweights can get air time. not so on a floor or vault board.

but as i originally pointed out, it is best for the vestibular system of the athlete if they twist the same direction when going backwards as well as forward. and i pointed out, many gymnasts will twist one way forward and the opposite going backwards. and it is more likely than not that this was established early on based on which way they twisted backward. this is because for most kids, it takes a bit longer to learn front handspring front and the skills that follow that like barani, full, rudi, etc; but by time they get to that, they have already learned their back full the opposite way of their barani...or what you referred to as a "no handed round off". understand?

so then, artistic uses whatever will work for the athlete. trampolinists can't. unless of course they learn how to learn all of their skills both directions. it just wouldn't be possible. i was able to do fulls and double fulls and rudi's and baranis both directions. but NO WAY would i ever have done a 1/2 in fliffis rudi out both ways. just NO WAY. same with double doubles and other stuff, etc; the hard stuff went all the same direction. screwing around playing add on was different. :)
 
OK. Thanks Dunno. That's very informative, though I think I'll need to read it through a couple of times to get my head round it! So what you are saying (I hope, if I understood OK) is that seeing a barani as a "no handed round-off" is not "not right" meaning incorrect, because for artistic it can be appropriate (even if for trampoline it might end on the floor.) And sometimes in trampolining there's a half twist into a front somersault that then ends up being completed backwards. It is just that in trampolining we wouldn't then think of it as being a barani anymore but a Jonah. (At least in the UK we (caveat: I mean the people I've hung out with, I haven't actually carried out an extensive national survey) call any front somersault with half-twist in so the somersault goes backwards a Jonah and we call them specifically baby-fliff when it is a ball out.) But in artistic they'd both be seen as different versions of a barani. Also the issue of twisting is a lot more complicated in artistic than on trampoline where you just pick a direction of twist and stick with it. Also, unlike Zoolander (or me), you are an ambi-turner!
 
yes, you understand. and to clarify, we were only ambi when we played games like add on. i did triple doubles and triple triples tucked. no way i would have done that going the opposite way. we would talk about "what if" but nobody had the guts to attempt something like that their opposite way. :)

also, the 'terms' of what everything is called has changed over the years. we used to call a back 3/4 to the stomach and then back flip a Cody. i can't recall what they call it now in trampoline. but i was at a competition here a couple years ago and went and watched. i heard them call it something else but i didn't know what they were talking about so i asked what the term was. when they answered "whatever it was" i said..."oh, a Cody". they laughed and said endearingly "we used to call it that a hundred years ago". :)
 

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