I have noticed that when a gymnast no longer has excitement for learning a gymnast’s learning stops or slows down. When they are learning, they are full of energy and their effort on each turn is greater. As a result, they will be more productive and the workout becomes exciting.
This is why goal setting is so important. If they have a clear goal to accomplish for each workout it is easier for them to focus on the goal. Also, improvement toward their goal should be checked periodically so they know how much progress towards the goal they are making. During the summer program, it is easy for the gymnasts to lose focus and their interest may drift away from gymnastics training. They may have other activities planned for the week and their mind could be occupied on those.
The summer time is the best time to have some other activities other than gymnastics. They need to be refreshed physically as well as mentally by participating in other activities and it should be allowed to some degree.
When you notice the gymnasts are having some personal (none related gymnastics) conversation during the workout and not taking many turns, we need to remind the gymnasts to focus only on gymnastics during the workout.
We need to be particularly careful when they start losing focus and not paying attention to the details during the basic drills or not putting a great effort into the strength training.
The basic drills on any event are generally repetitions of simple skills. The summer time is a great time to improve and refine the technique so that the harder skills become easier to execute with greater amplitude later on.
However, motivating the gymnasts to put some effort into basics is not easy job for us. Perhaps, we may need to be more creative when we work on basics. We could possibly attempt to use more variety of technique or progressions or do the simple skills in different combinations. Avoid doing the same type of repetition
as much as you can and make it more interesting or fun to do.
We also need to be very sensitive to their effort or to the small improvement. Sometimes, we need to appraise them for their effort even though they are not quite making actual progress yet. The positive re-enforcement needs to be done before you criticize them with their mistake and try to recognize the positive aspect even if it is a very small change.
The strength exercise is a tough one to deal with. The biggest problem is that they are going through the motions of the exercise, but they may not be making any progress. They can put their half effort doing the exercises and not gain any strength for a long time.
When we do core exercises or plyometric exercises we do it as a whole group. It is easier to manage large numbers of gymnasts at a time. However, when we do more skill oriented exercises or gymnastics specific exercises, we pair them up and the partner spots or counts the numbers for each other. This way, we can somewhat make them responsible for each other and they need to rely on the partner as well.
Some days, we pick the exercises that can be stationed close so that we can make a contest or a coach to oversee them closely.
No matter what we do, the real key is how much effort they are putting in each exercise. If they are not motivated to do them, it is very difficult to make them get stronger. So the best we can do is to talk to them often and make them realize that the strength is one of the key factors to better gymnastics.
I hope that your gymnasts are listening to you and they are getting stronger.
Have fun coaching!
Edited by Dan Connelly
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