Because my This I Believe Essay is on the topic of fear, I figured my first blog post of the semester should follow the same theme.

Here one of my teammates was very close to hitting the bar during one of his skills.

So I decided I should write about common fears that a gymnast has. Every gymnast has a unique set of fears that are exclusive to them. For instance, someone could be afraid of doing a specific skill because of what happened to them in a previous attempt or their imagination has gone wild as to what could happen to them while they do something. But I’ll focus on some of the bigger and more common ones. These of course aren’t always everyday things, but they’re like a worst-case scenario that sometimes just inevitably happens that is always in the back of people’s minds. These are simply things one must get past in order to progress because sometimes they are out of are control and just part of the learning process.

One major fear that some people have is simply slipping off the bar or apparatus. A primary event for this is the parallel bars. It is the event that people spend the most time preparing for. That is why some people go to great lengths and time to chalk up the bar and their hands very and well before every turn. That is also where the concept of honey came into play. We will rub honey on our hands and then chalk up because it makes our hands feel more secure when going around the bar, while everybody knows that people did the parallel bars and the same skills without honey for years before just a little while ago. Though the fear is slipping off and getting hurt wile falling on ones head etc… One example I have had in slipping off of the bar was during a skill called a ‘giant.’ Basically one just goes around the bars in a full circle. Well as I went through the bottom of my swing and below the bars, my hands slipped off and I hit the two support posts that the bars are held up on at a pretty high speed. That one is of course not an everyday fear but the second someone’s hands get slick or the bars get slick, that possibility is always in a person’s mind and it can make a person either afraid to go for the skill or spend a whole lot of time making sure the bars are prepared well.

The next fear is simply the fear of hitting the apparatus. High bar is a big one for this because it is a solid metal bar. And especially when release moves come into play (an element everyone must have in their routine where they let go of the bar and grab back on) people can get very scared. They are afraid to hit the bar with their feet, face, or any part of their body really because they are afraid of getting hurt, or that hitting it will cause them to fall awkwardly and hurt themselves there. A smaller example of this is the pommel horse. Pommel horse is a safe event that is low to the ground and doesn’t involve much highflying activity. But there are wooden hands that seem to attract our legs and love to give out free bruises. So a common fear that hinders a person’s ability to progress is the fear of hitting their legs on the pommel. And while the pommel horse is low to the ground and less scary, that is where the most injuries occur sometimes because people are less careful.

A very common fear is losing the sight of the ground. To be able to trust the technique our coaches are telling us to do and to trust our actions can be quite hard sometimes because of the fear of landing on ones head. So poor technique derives from that. For instance the most common and very everyday error that gymnasts make is throwing their head back to look for the ground when doing a flip. It causes poor technique and hinder’s ones ability to progress and do better much cooler skills. But lastly, and probably a gymnasts’ worst nightmare, is grip lock. Primarily on highbar (highbar is probably the most feared event). On rings and on highbar, everybody where these leather “grips” that we have on our hands that have dowels on them allowing us to relax our grip and still remain on the bar or rings. Well this can also happen on rings but it is usually safer and not so much of a worry. But the basic concept of highbar is to go around in a circle, around the bar a bunch of times. Well grip lock is when a persons leather grips are stretched out too long from over use or just are too large of a size, and when going around the bar, the grip catches itself, and wraps around itself, locking in place making our hands unable to continue going around the bar. However, depending on the skill or speed of what we are doing at the time, our bodies will continue to circle or will continue with the skill and that can cause an arm to hurt quite a bit or even go so far as a compound fracture. Unfortunately a lot of instances result in some pretty clean breaks. Below is a video of my teammate getting grip lock. He did not break anything do not worry. His leather grip broke around his wrist allowing for much more flexible movement when swinging. He also didn’t have very much swing going into that skill so he ended up fine afterwards.

While these are the biggest and most common fears that prevent a person from doing well in gymnastics there are of course many smaller ones that we cant help but have and its many of those that we have to get past if we want to fly high and perform as well as we would like.