My Private Gymnastics Lesson

I recently had my first private gymnastics lesson. It’s something I should have done a very long time ago. I’ve been learning a lot of gymnastics on my own and have made quite a bit of progress. But a coach would have helped my progress happen faster. Learning stuff on your own is very rewarding, but you get very little feedback. While learning my front handspring, I knew that I was landing too hard, landing with my feet too far in front of me, bending my arms, etc. It probably took me six months of tweaking one-thing-at-a-time to land a decent front handspring, and over the next six months I refined everything further. What little feedback I got was stuff like “I landed way too hard,” which doesn’t tell me what thing I did wrong. Did I not keep my arms straight? Did I try to “sit up” and spot my landing? Is there some mysterious detail that’s entirely missing from all the tutorials I’ve seen? I also took video of myself on my phone. This was of limited value. I could tell what I was doing wrong, but not necessarily how to fix it. For example, I knew for a very long time that I was bending my arms when I touched the ground, but didn’t know how to make them stay straight (hint: you have to push hard off your front leg, otherwise your arms will pretty much have to bend). I’m guessing three or four hour-long coaching sessions would have vastly shortened those long, frustrating months.

It turns out my front handspring is pretty much okay. That was a relief. The coach tweaked one detail and I was landing a lot more cleanly. It was my first experience doing anything on real gymnastics equipment. The gym had a trampoline-floor, two floors of intermediate degrees of “bouncy”, and a solid floor. I over-rotated and face-planted on some soft mats on my first few front-handsprings off the trampoline floor. I didn’t know how to prepare myself for the extra boost. With the tweaks he suggested, I was landing cleanly, straight up-and-down with no face-planting.

It turns out I’m also pretty close to my aerial, the no-handed cartwheel. I could do them off the trampoline floor, which allows me to jump a little higher. I still am not quite able to do them on a solid floor. I think my initial back-kick needs to be stronger, and my push off the front foot needs to be stronger so I get a little more height. I’ve tried a few at home and I always have to put my hands down at the end. The coach said I was, “Doing the skill, then putting my hands down.” At any rate, I feel like I’m making progress on this skill just in the past few days, as opposed to making no progress whatsoever for the past year. Score 2 for “get a coach.”

I’m trying to learn the back handspring, too. It’s actually a much simpler move than the front handspring with far fewer details to screw up. But I was lost without a coach. The idea of jumping backwards and landing on my hands is terrifying. You can hurt yourself if you do it wrong. Anticipating that you will hurt yourself, your brain does not allow your body to do the technique properly. The coach had some excellent exercises to get me started. He had me use an object called a “boulder”, which is basically a big curved padded shape that tips you back onto your hands if you commit to the technique. It doesn’t move if you don’t properly commit. If I ever nail this skill, I’ll have to do a “physics of the back handspring post” similar to the one I did for the front handspring. There are similar physics principles involved in both skills. Anyway, I now understand the body mechanics of this skill in a way that I would never have understood by simply watching online tutorial videos. 

I figured out that my shoulder flexibility is really holding me back. I can’t do a kippup (that cool martial arts trick where you kick from your back up to your feet), probably because I can’t reach my hands back behind my shoulders and touch the floor. So I can’t get a good push off the floor with my hands. Likewise, I probably won’t have a good back handspring until I fix this. It should improve my jujitsu, too.

There’s a broader lesson here. “Get a coach” applies to everything. Oh, you’re self taught and can do everything well already? Shut up and get a coach. You can self-teach to an impressive degree, but you don’t know where your deficiencies are. Something else that I’m mostly self-taught in is data science. I really upped my game after my company hired a data scientist who I could actually talk with. Learning is feedback, and you don’t get enough feedback or the right kind of feedback when you self-teach. It would have been well worth a few $60-$100 sessions with such a person, who could have provided me useful feedback and suggest relevant readings and practice exercises. Get some kind of coaching. Get the kind of feedback you're not currently getting.