Why Gymnastics?
Gymnastics benefit every child regardless of talent and ability. It incorporates strength, flexibility, speed, balance and coordination. Many of the benefits of gymnastics are not related to learning gymnastics skills, but more important developmental areas that will help your child become a better student and young adult. Gymnastics doesn’t only create gymnasts; it creates better athletes for all sports. Most importantly, it creates more mature and well prepared young adults.
It builds self-esteem, and improves skills such as self-discipline and concentration. Whether they are involved in recreational gymnastics or with a team, skills learned in gymnastics can benefit a child’s overall development. Plus, being a gymnast is a lot of fun!
Fitness
The habits learned as a child are often carried through to adulthood. Children benefit from an active lifestyle and participating in any sport. Gymnastics classes are full of activities that will make your child more fit and help keep them healthy. From muscle strength and balance to healthy bones and flexibility, every part of the body is used when doing gymnastics.
Coordination: Participation in gymnastics develops body awareness, control, motor skills and coordination, which can be beneficial to other physical activities, sports, and in everyday life.
Flexibility: Gymnastics builds flexibility better than any other sport. Flexibility helps limit injuries. Athletes in all sports can benefit from an increase in flexibility.
Strength:Gymnasts are renowned for their excellent strength-to-weight ratio. Taking part in gymnastics at a young age can help build the foundations of good all-around muscle strength, endurance, and power. With regular training a gymnast gains muscle strength through tumbling, jumping, static flexing, and holding one’s own body weight in various positions help children develop strong and powerful bodies. This strength aids in the development of lean, toned muscles, improved balance, and even improvements in posture. This helps the gymnast as well as the students who are also in other sports.
Social Skills
Attending a regular gymnastics class provides children with the opportunity to communicate with people their own age, work within a team, and engage with adults. They learn important social skills like listening, following directions, taking turns, being quiet, and respecting others. Children also have fun, meet new friends, and learn independence.
Responsibility
The best thing about gymnastics is that the kids have to earn their skills; no one can give it to them. Each gymnast is ultimately responsible for his or her own results. Rather than relying on the ability of all of your team members to be successful, you achieve the results you desire. This makes it a very satisfying sport for many people who enjoy being able to control their own growth and results. Some children do not have the skills or coordination to excel in other sports. But in gymnastics they can control their progress and challenges.
Gymnastics is highly customizable for each individual person, which makes it very easy to measure the individual success as well as the success of the individual compared against the group results. Children who are a little weaker, a little overweight and/or a little less flexible can all find success with caring gymnastics teachers.
Commitment, Determination & Work Ethic
The structure of gymnastics lessons teaches children how hard work and dedication pays off. The challenging nature of gymnastics requires commitment, concentration and hard work.
Discipline & Respect
Rules and codes of conduct in gymnastics help children learn the importance of rules for safety, and teach respect toward others.
Self Confidence
To face a challenge, maybe with a little fear, and then to accomplish the challenge is a wonderful part of gymnastics. The key is to challenge them with “attainable challenges” so that they are successful the majority of the time. Through this challenge, the students gain confidence with each step that they take. Positive experiences in gymnastics can build confidence through achievement, and illustrates to children that commitment to sport benefits them.
Goal Setting
Because gymnastics is so flexible in the opportunities that are provided it is a wonderful sport to use to learn how to make modifications to the goals as skills improve.
Self Esteem
In addition to enhancing physical fitness, participation in gymnastics gives kids body confidence and promotes self esteem. As children’s skills progress, they become increasingly confident in their physical abilities. Because gymnastics is a sport that can adjust to the skill level of each gymnast, it is amazingly easy to feel almost immediate senses of pride. This confidence and pride spills over into other areas of life, improving their performance in many areas.
