Parents What keeps people in gymnastics?

[Dream]

Just wondering if people would be willing to share what is the driving force that keeps them or their child in gymnastics?

 

[Dahlialover]

Friends, habit, love of the sport, the satisfaction of learning new skills, the pride of being very good at something.

 

[raenndrops]

It's my peaceful, happy place.
Even when OG and YG had to take a break from gymnastics, I kept going.
Last season was LSS's senior year. I am still going to the gym as much as I can.

In December, OG's L'il Nugget started "Mommy and Me" class. I took her to the first one because OG had to work. Yesterday, I went to watch them both. It was a full-circle moment (YG started in Mommy and Me, and OG was in preschool class at the beginning).

I have been involved with gymnastics for almost 21 years now (April will be 21 years)!

And that doesn't even count my own gymnastics as a kid. I was flipping around a bar in 1977. I learned a handstand, a backbend, a cartwheel, and a roundoff in 1978. I could always do the splits. In 1985, I was doing roundoffs and handstands to bridge on a low beam on the stage in my middle school gym. I learned a one-handed cartwheel in 1986. The last time I did a cartwheel was 1996. The last time I did the splits was 2020 ... just before lockdown ... to show those team girls who had never seen me do it that I actually could.

 

[Geoffrey Taucer]

Just wondering if people would be willing to share what is the driving force that keeps them or their child in gymnastics?

This is not a mindset I would encourage in any of my students, but as a kid I was an adrenaline junky who was absolutely in love with the feeling of facing a mortal risk, and the feeling of invincibility that comes from taking such a risk and living to tell the tale. In retrospect, it's a wonder I survived to adulthood, but if it hadn't been gymnastics I suppose it probably would have been drugs or street racing or something else similarly stupid.

I think I've grown marginally more mature since then.

As a coach, I find a borderline-spiritual sense of joy and wonder in the laws of motion. Each and every practice is an endeavor to better understand the underlying mechanics of the skills, and to better understand the strengths and weaknesses and quirks of each athlete, and then to find a way to bring all those things together in harmony. I find this process sublimely beautiful.

I also love the puzzle-solving process. Each skill and each progression is a puzzle to be solved. And sometimes the pieces of one puzzle can be fit together to solve another puzzle! And sometimes a flash of inspiration will lead me to revisit huge swaths of puzzles and find better and more efficient solutions! It's all just puzzles and optimization challenges, and as a nerd who grew up playing Zelda and Final Fantasy, I LOVE puzzles and optimization challenges.

(though I'd enjoy it a hell of a lot more if I wasn't using it to pay my bills -- that does have a way of sucking the joy out of it sometimes)