Running drills for gymnasts?

Help us first by answering this question, why do gymnasts run with their hands straight and pointing down?

Rosanna Rosanna Danna wrote:

Help us first by answering this question, why do gymnasts run with their hands straight and pointing down?

Hmmmmmm, I don't think they do. How can hands be both straight and pointing down, anyway?

I ran a recreational artistic gymnastics program and a rhythmic team program during a hiatus from track coaching for about 10 years. I had my girls do a lot of the same things track HS track kids do. high knees,bounding, butt kick running mostly in short sprints (limited by the size of the gym) of about 50 meters. Anything to increase turnover. I also used pit mats and stack mats to have them do step up drils with a stop watch (that got them to do it more explosively). You might want to try aqua running sprint intervals if you have access to a pool. I always had pretty good vaulters and a few went on to gyms with team programs and excelled at vault (I couldn't coach bars to save my life, though).

as for the funny gymnast runs, I think it's because the kids are trying to sight their vault and thinking about their hand placement on the apparatus as they approach the board.

Rosanna Rosanna Danna wrote:

Help us first by answering this question, why do gymnasts run with their hands straight and pointing down?

You know, this is a good question. Why do they run like tinkerbell, instead of Paula or Ndereba? Is there a reason for hardly bending the elbows?

think of a long or triple jumper trying to get their steps. A gymnast has towork a take off with both the feet and the hands. The arms are not relaxed because they are going to have to serve as the means for propelling ones body upside down and backwards (often twisting) over the vault, so they keep a certain amount of tension in the arms.

Exactly, runamook. Gymnasts have to hit the right number of steps onto the spring board, or they'll wrongfoot it and...well, die or break their necks. Gymnasts have their run measured to the inch.

You can't really run full tilt into a Yurchenko vault (round-off onto the board, backhandspring onto the vault, twist and flip off) because you have to hurdle at the right distance from the board and hit the round-off with your feet on the exact right spot on the board to get the right push-off for the vault. So it's not so much raw speed we're looking at as maximizing the power and accuracy of their run into the hurdle. Meaning, we're not so much looking at running faster as running more powerfully, if that distinction makes any sense.

hmmmm, I've never heard this about gymnasts having particularly strange arms when they run. Runners have asked why gymnasts run up on their toes before. I'm sure they don't have great running technique, not being world class sprinters or anything - so are there drills that improve this?

Leaving aside whether gymnasts run like freaks or not and why, I would still like suggestions as to running workouts they can use for their overall strength, fitness, endurance, and conditioning. Running around the floor 5 or 6 days a week gets pretty monotonous for them, so I'd like to take them out more often to do more productive work at the track that will benefit their overall physical prep.

P.S.

To quote Dr. William Sands, "Mechanics of the vault indicate that a high speed run is advantageous to vaulting in that a gymnast needs sufficient momentum to direct into a high and long post flight...In spite of training emphasis on maximizing run-up speed, gymnasts probably do not require an absolute maximum running speed. More importantly, the gymnast should strive to attain the highest speed that the athlete can control. Maximum running speed is further constrained by the short run-up distance allowed in competition. Henry and Trafton (1) showed, as early as the 1950s that a sprinter could reach only approximately 95% of maximum speed within approximately 20 meters...."

P.P.S.

I just went and looked at video of vault runs, and what seems to happen is that for the first 3/4 of the run the gymnasts pump their arms, and then as they get ready for the hurdle phase, they do tend to straighten their arms as they run - but this is because they have to get their arms behind them in order to circle them up for the hurdle into the round-off or onto the board. In order to generate power and body position onto the vault the arms have to move upwards from behind the gymnass, so they have to drop their arms behind them while running. I never thought of that as running with straight arms before, as it's a necessary stage of entering into the hurdle and springboard phase of the vault.

The same would be true on floor where gymnasts have to hurdle into their tumbling runs.

um, gymnast, not gymnass.

No edit function?

I'm a track coach and my daughters are gymnasts and run track. They never compare the two except in the endurance needed for the floor exercise. But my sprinter daughter never compared vaulting and sprinting or suggested bringing her blocks to the gym. The vault takes another kind of "blocks."

Tom

Wow Tom! you with a sprinter daughter? That's what mine wants to be, she started as a gymnast. I think the overall conditioning in gymnastics translates well to explosive track events. One of my best vaulters is now great at triple jump and I have a few of my former tykes now training for pole vault. The only famous example I can think of of one who went into distance is Olympian Kerri Strug who got into marathons for a while, although I just found out that one of my former gymnasts is going out for junior high Cross country so I get her back next year!

HT

Well, first off, what level are your girls?

As a 12 year veteran of the sport and now being a pole vaulter for the last two years, I understand where you're coming from. It's not getting perfect running technique down (that's for later, if they go into track), it's about power and having enough endurance (not in terms of endurance such as these runners would think) to get a really powerful last tumbling pass on floor.

I think that what you're already doing for leg power (squats, jumps, lunges, sprints, etc.) is great. For something added, if you have any incline mats (we called them cheese mats, they're the 3' mats that fold out into a triangle & are fairly firm) you can position two of these around your floor and have your girls run up them & jump off as they are doing the standard jogged laps around the floor. This is kind of like adding mini-inclines to an indoor run...and you do feel it. Half-way through, have them switch directions so that they have to jump up and then run down.

I don't know if you can run outside around your gym, but we could (6 laps = 1 mile) and my coaches would sometimes have a tally sheet so that you would run 2 laps, go inside and do 15 pull ups, 2 rope climbs, 5 back tucks up onto a panel mat, etc. (just some conditioning exercise) before going out again, running another 3 laps and coming back in. The mileage added up to 3-4 miles and we had to complete it within a certain time or have extra conditioning or running.

Concerning floor, we would have it so that we would all be running around the floor (at a prety good pace) and then our coach would call out a pass, we would go to the corners and have to do it (sometimes once, and repeating it after more running, but done as a group so that everyone had to make three in a row...or sometimes individualized and three in a row at one time). We also did the sprinting passes in our dance throughs, so that we would have to sprint three diagonals (for each tumbling pass) in a certain time before our coach turned on the music again.

Some ideas...we never did any track training per se, so I can't help you there.

I like the incline mat idea - we used to do a warm-up where we'd drag a bunch of boxes and panel mats onto the floor and play obstacle tag, where they couldn't touch the floor, and this sounds like a more organized version of that.

The girls are from the equivalent of about level 8 - level 9. A lot of them are making a jump now to harder tumbling and vaulting, and so some of them are struggling with power issues. I'd like to get them to the point where they could do back to back routines, for example - there's no way they could do that now without crashing the second set of passes onto their heads. The gym has recetly switched owners - the coaches in the past didn't do a lot of conditioning with the girls, so we're trying to make a lot up now. That's why I'm thinking running...

A lot of former gymnasts pole vault - Amy Chow tried it out, for example. I know quite a few girls who went into field events after they quit, although most of the gymnasts I know absolutely despise running (: Too many years of fractured shins to make it possible, I think.