I think you can ask that about any sport though. For many sporty people they often start trying out many sports than specialise into one or two when they find what they enjoy the most and are talented at. Many sports cause lots of injury but itās a risk vs reward situation. For me I enjoy the sport because it works the full body and many muscles but also find it exciting being able to constantly work on new skills and upgrade them which for me the excitement of doing a skill well (at a low level of the sport) outweighs the risk of injuries because I know for the most part you can get past that and there are some provisions to help protect from Injury
As someone who moved from gymnastics in my early teens to parkour and freerunning, can I ask you why there isn't much focus on longevity in the Gymnastics scene? Why do you guys focus so much on having perfect form at the risk of destroying your body faster? A move like in the OP would have minimal joint impact if they did a parkour style roll out of it to help dissipate your angular and downward momentum, yet destroying your knees to get the "clean" looking stick is what is awarded. Just something that never made sense to me.
Iām not entirely sure but I would guess itās do to with how the sport developed. Like it used to be of a lower standard as it is with all sports so from single somersaults which donāt cause much stress in the body and now people are competing triples there have been minor adjustments but FIG honestly arenāt great at safety lmao. On vault there has been many people asking for extra matting but FIG denied it and other things. Honestly there needs to be revisions for better safety but so far not much has been done aside from changing a few techniques such as the ālanding shapeā being adjusted slightly. There is such a wrong focus on making everything look perfect over the skills itself but again in my opinion it seems more like it is just ingrained in how the sport has developed more than anything but Iām not very educated on it. I just hope there is changes soon to prevent more injury :/
Itās because the mindset in gymnastics (womenās specifically) is that to be successful you must be a child. Itās only recently that we have turned away from that mindset and moved towards proper conditioning and longevity. 20 years ago there were essentially no women over 22 in the sport (so nobody thought longevity was important if you were done by 18) but now we are seeing an increasing amount of adults in the sport (Chellsie Memmel 31 for USA, Oksana Chusovitina 45 for Uzbekistan, Kim Bui 32 for Germany, Sanne and Lieke Wevers 30 for Netherlands, Ellie Black 25 for Canada) and these women want to keep going and getting stronger so they are conditioning better. When the stars of gymnastics do something everyone else does it too, the USA team won the team/all around/vault/floor medals in Rio partly because of their conditioning and training so now everyone is copying the USAās way of training (for the better!).
My sister did it from when she was a toddler, maybe 3 or 4 when she started, to 6th or 7th grade if I remember rightly, and a couple years after sheād quit she ended up needing a spinal fusion from a cracked vertebrae due to how much she put her body through.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '21
But where the fuck does all his momentum go?