Women Any lefties struggling with the new routines?

[cbone]

My daughter and two other gymnasts in her level at our gym are lefties in their routines (all are righties as far as their dominant hand is concerned). We've been doing some group privates to work on the new routines. This has helped the girls a lot since the coach is spending time on doing it "their way". Have any of you seen this type of thing where lefties (who are a minority as I understand it) need some specific coaching to do things their way?

 

[Jabba]

I'm teaching it, and it is confusing. I have only one Level 4 in my group and several learning the Level 5 routine. Of course the Level 4 has to also be a lefty. I'm a very analytical person, so I found that making a chart helped. One column writes out exactly what the righty is doing (arms, legs, focus, direction, etc.) and then my second column has everything reversed for the lefty. It seemed too hard for me to just reverse things on the spot. I tried doing this at first and felt really bad when I couldnt help my left without looking at the book and taking 5min to reverse the simplest thing. Now if my lefty asks me to clarify something, I can just look at my chart and tell her where she should be looking, which arm is doing what, etc.

 

[cbone]

It's interesting, because my daughter knew the routines for two levels above her last year, just by osmosis. This year, she hasn't been able to watch other girls, so the learning curve has been a little tougher. I'm glad to hear the coaches struggle a bit, too.

 

[mommyof1]

Our coaches group the lefties and righties together and demonstrate everything separately to each group using the correct leg.

 

[fuzi]

I'm a lefty coach, and I work with a righty coach. We both learned the routines on our respective sides to help teach the kids, though I can now reverse it pretty easily. It's interesting, we have more lefties than righties at our gym.

 

[dmytv]

I so need advice on this. My littlest dd is a hopeless lefty. I have a whole group of them in my beg. team session. lv 1,2,and some3s. I am a hopeless righty. Learning the floor routines from a lefty pov is so hard .I feel for the lefties of the this world. All of the video demos we got were of righties. I do have all my righties and lefties grouped together. And I have employed a lefty helper!

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[Mustanggal99]

I have the same issue of being a hopeless righty coach! Luckily, I have a phenom lefty who I spent all the extra minutes looking at the book with her and reversing all the moves when she came in for a private and she now knows it by heart and loves teaching the other lefties and being my leader for that side. I remember going through the same problem last time the routines changed. I guess anytime you take a dominant righty and have them teach lefty it just turns out crazy sometimes.

 

[GymGirl's Mom]

DD's team is about 60/40 slightly more righties. Coaches split them and train them separately on floor. One group righties, one lefties. They have always done this. Helps if the training group has 2 coaches.

 

[cbone]

I know this sounds crazy, but it's really comforting to know that we haven't been the only ones with lefty/righty struggles. Thanks for all of the responses!