“Gymnastics has made me strong. I feel like it broke me down to my lowest point, but at the same time, it has given me the greatest strength anyone could ask for.” – Shawn Johnson. This quote is amazing because gymnastics has changed my life so much, and I have never regretted joining gymnastics even though it’s so hard. It is really mental, and sometimes it breaks you down, but you have to keep going. So today I will be telling you what a normal practice looks like and how hard we work.
The gold and platinum practice starts at 6 pm, and that’s the practice I’m in. The silver practice ends at 6:15 pm so we have a little bit of overlap. Before practice starts, we jump on the trampolines and talk to our friends, then once it is time, we head down to the floor and start stretching. It depends on the day,but we either do dynamic stretches, open stretch, or running then stretch. Most days we do dynamic stretches, and we go up and down the floor. So stretches are lunges, arm circles front and back, and kicks. After we finish stretching we go and do 10 back tucks either off the double mini, the tumble track, or on the floor. After that, we talk to our coach and figure out the plan for practice and all the events we will do.
We always find a way to fit in tumbling to our practice whether that’s at the beginning or end, and most days it’s right after stretching. After 15 minutes of tumbling, we split up and go to the events our coach told us. We normally get split up by the skills we’re working on and our level. I go with the other golds, and the other group is the platinum. We start on beam, and they start on bars, and after 15-20 minutes we switch. After that we will work on our floor routines if we are in season and if we are not we do vault. We don’t do vault that often because once you have it you don’t have to work on it as much as your other events. Then at 7:55 we go and pick up all the mats and equipment.
By 8 we are done cleaning up and our coach tells us if we’re gonna do conditioning,play a game, open gym, or over splits. Most practices we do over splits or conditioning for the last 15 minutes. When we condition we do push-ups and v-ups. If we do over splits, we do a minute on each side and for middle splits we do 30 seconds then switch legs. Finally we are done and we give our coach a high five and tell her bye then we grab our stuff and leave.
In conclusion, gymnastics practices are really hard, and our coach is really chill, and we don’t have as many practices and as long of practices as some gyms. Yet we still work hard and get stuff done. During the summer we have 3 practices a week because we don’t have school, so it’s easier to schedule practices than during competition season during school. Here you can see Simone Biles crazy schedule everyday. If you want to learn more about gymnastics, go read my other stories.
