By: Quinn Nordick
Gymnastics is a decently well-known sport, but have you ever wondered about what’s behind an athlete’s mind who seems like they can do all those skills so effortlessly? Today we are here to dive into the mental and physical effects of gymnastics.
Gymnastics, specifically artistic gymnastics involves 4 events for women and 6 for men. For women, these events include floor, beam, bars, and vault. For men, these events include rings, floor, high bar, pommel, vault, and p-bars. Women’s gymnastics focuses on flexibility, grace, and acrobatics. While men’s gymnastics focuses on strength.
This sport can be extremely physically grueling on the body. When I was in gymnastics, my practice was right after school from 4:15 to 8:15pm, and this would be almost every weekday. So around 20 hours per week. But in the summer, it was 5 hours almost every day minus Sunday having no practice and Saturday being a short practice. Saturdays we mainly did a long run and little actual practice, that day was mainly conditioning.
During those 5- or 4-hour practice sessions, we only had a 15-minute break to eat. Then we go straight back to practice. Not only do the long hours take a huge toll on your body, but say you have homework for school, you won’t have any time to get that work done outside of school because you’re at practice all the time.
In my last few years of gymnastics leading up to me quitting, my mental health had taken a huge blow. My confidence was at an all-time low, I was extremely stressed, and all I could think about during school was the fact that I had gymnastics after. This led to me quitting later on.
Reasons many gymnasts get super stressed is because say you fall hard on a skill you had been working on; you wouldn’t want to do it again right? Yeah, I know I wouldn’t, but in gymnasts that doesn’t matter. You are expected to get back up even if you’re terrified to do it again. You cannot just stop doing a skill because you’re scared of it. This leads to stress among gymnasts, causing them to have something many people experience, a mental block.
Mental blocks for gymnasts are as scary as they are dangerous. They are described as not necessarily being scared, but your body just won’t move, and you freeze up. Having a mental block could possibly lead to injury.
Overall, gymnastics is often overlooked when it comes to the physical and mental aspects of the athlete.
