Why Gymnastics?

Gymnastics is a terrific sport for young people. Many people have grown up in and by gymnastics to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, business people, professors, police officers, nurses, scientists, and many others. Gymnastics provides an outstanding way for young people to test their mettle against themselves and others. Gymnastics can provide opportunities for physical development, character development, and education that are hard to find anywhere else.

Psycho-Social

Gymnasts tend to do very well in school. Educational experiences in gymnastics reach from physics to the appreciation of cultural diversity. One of the most important benefits of gymnastics activity is that the gymnast can experience a variety of things rather than just read about them. For example, physicists discuss the principle of conservation of angular momentum while the gymnast experiences it. The physics teacher may discuss the moment of inertia and its relation to angular momentum, but the gymnast can see and feel it while performing skills. The richness of such experiences goes far beyond reading about them in a book. Recently, a National Science Foundation grant has used gymnastics as a means of teaching fundamental physics to students.

Gymnastics shares with other sports the opportunity to learn about teamwork, sportsmanship, fair play, dedication, and so forth. Sometimes these character traits may be considered old-fashioned, but gymnastics does provide a terrific opportunity for teaching these characteristics. Because gymnastics is difficult to perform, the learning time is long when compared to most sports. The long time required to attain mastery of the fundamental skills requires patience, dedication, perseverance, and planning.

Gymnastics helps people learn to work hard for objectives that can take years to achieve. In the modern world of quick-fixes, instant communication, instant hamburgers, and instant entertainment, there still needs to be a place for young people to develop their character. Although it may sound corny, gymnastics is a perfect activity for such development.

Gymnasts of even modest ability can compete in local, international level competitions. These competitions afford the opportunity for travel, meeting people of varied and diverse backgrounds, and seeing places that would normally be bypassed. The recent dramatic increase in participation by gymnasts in Gymnastics For All (GfA) serves to emphasize a newly developed outlet for training and competition that does not emphasize Olympic-level pursuits.

Group exhibition-type displays involving tumbling, acro sports, balance, and music can be an exciting and rewarding activity for young gymnasts. The GfA area of Singapore Gymnastics has developed the Gymnastics Carnival which includes low-level competitions -TeamGym, GymChallenge, GymFest.