#twisting form

[gymfanconfessions]

[gymfanconfessions]

[say-duhnelle]

Brace yourself, I'm throwing science up in your gymnastics part 2: Electric Twisting Form Boogaloo

So you may remember my post from a few months back where I explained why some gymnasts maybe don't dance at the top of their abilities in competitions because of troubles with phasing and hearing the music in the arena. Now I'm going to talk about another thing that gets a lot of complaints: twisting form.

So a lot of female gymnasts go to do a laid-out twist and rather than looking like a log rolling through the air, well...

Pictured: A helicopter.

Why do some gymnasts do this? And why is it so much more common in WAG than MAG? A few months ago, someone (Vik?) made a post saying that it required more energy to hold the gymnast's body in the laid out position than to let it slop. While this is true, it's far from the biggest factor at work here.

Any object that is not perfectly spherical has what is known as a center of mass or center of gravity. Basically, if you throw the object or otherwise interact with it in a vacuum with no outside forces, the object will behave as if it is a sphere centered around the center of mass. Therefore, if you want to get something moving a certain way, the easiest way to do that is to get its center of mass moving that way.

Okay, that was the physics. Now for the anatomy. On a typical physically fit, full grown man, the center of gravity is generally located somewhere in the area of the breastbone (sternum) as a man's mass is concentrated mostly in his shoulders and chest. Therefore, to get his entire body twisting, all a man really has to do is roll his shoulders to the appropriate side, the tendency of his spine to remain attached to itself will do the rest.

With women, it's a bit more complicated. After puberty, a typical woman's mass is concentrated lower in her body, with her center of gravity near her navel. So to be able to twist quickly, she must start her hips rolling. The easiest way to do this is to just bring her leg over in the direction of her twist and use it to yank her hips around. Another method (try it laying on the floor or floating in the pool!) is to slightly pike the layout position and then open it up with a push to one side- and piked layouts are another common twisting form flaw in WAG. The faster the twist needs to be, the harder the gymnast must pull her weight around- and so these form errors are loads more common on skills with a large number of twists, such as the Amanar vault as compared to the DTY or 1.5TY, and the triple twisting laid out salto as compared to a 2.5 or smaller number of twists.

For a female-bodied gymnast to be able to twist easily with good form, she must be built in a way that spreads her weight out more over her frame, especially up towards her shoulders. Thus you notice many of the "power" gymnasts with ridiculous arm muscling tend to have better twisting form than often more femininely-built "balletic" gymnasts, and those with smaller, boyish body frames (especially those from back when 14- and 15-year-olds were allowed to be seniors and puberty was intentionally delayed with diet and training regimen) tend to have an easier time getting a good twisting form. Obviously because of other factors such as bone density and internal organ layout that affect a gymnast's weight distribution, this isn't universally true, but it does shed some light on why this flaw is so very common in WAG these days.