Gymnastics

• Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
• by neil

I was taking a trip down memory lane this afternoon by perusing some of our blog posts from the past couple of years.  The pictures were probably more entertaining than the posts were!

One post by Jesse from May 2011 caught my attention as something really worth reposting - especially since for most of you, it will be the first time you see it.  So for your reading pleasure, I give you Jesse 2011.

Why do we, as adults, need to engage in “gymnastics”?  First off let’s take a look at what gymnastics is.  For most of us, the extent of our exposure to gymnastics is rooting on our fellow countrymen and women in the Olympics.  We watch in awe as these freaks of nature perform feats of strength and athleticism that resemble things we rarely see outside of the movies or in comic books.  At CrossFit Blacksburg our aim with implementing gymnastics skills and drills into our program is all about teaching proper body control and movement.  As with everything we do in CrossFit, scaling and progressions are the key to an inclusive gymnastics program.  Understanding that gymnastics is really nothing more than body movement, we can first drill fundamental movements until we have developed the physical competency to move on to more “advanced” movements.  While developing party trick type movements such as Free Handstands and Pistols is “cool”, improving body control and kinesthetic awareness is what we’re all about. Gymnasts who wreck their bicycle dust themselves off and continue their ride, whereas non-gymnasts unfortunately suffer much worse fates.  It’s this type of positive transference over to the real world that CrossFit training is all about. 

As we say during our intro sessions, our goal is to make life "out there" better.  

And if you want to read our old blog posts, look for the archive in the right navigation bar.

As long as we're going old school, here's Chris B. from May 2011