Last month we covered our warm-up exercises. Now it’s time to begin covering the individual sports that’ll be part of our physical education program here at Brio. We’ll be covering basketball, baseball, tennis, gymnastics, soccer, tag football—and the most strenuous of all: chess.
The first sport that we’ll participate in is gymnastics.
First, let’s look at the word gymnastics. The root word is gym, meaning gym. This is where one usually does gymnastics. If you did gymnastics during math class, it would be called mathnastics, which is just weird.
The middle of the word is nas. There’s no meaning of the word nas. It was simply put there as a buffer between the first and last syllable. The end of the word is tics which is, of course, what you could be left with if you land an Arabian double-front incorrectly.
Balance plays a large role in gymnastics. You must maintain your balance at all times. If you don’t have good balance, “walking the high beam” would become “clinging to the side of the high beam for your life.” That’d be a little long to say at the Olympic games.
Agility is another important part of gymnastics. To successfully execute the splits, you need to be limber. Otherwise, only your thigh muscles will be doing the splitting.
Most of you have probably already done a cartwheel or two in your life; either on purpose, or when you tripped over someone tying her shoe in the locker room.
Cartwheels are a good form of exercise, not only because they burn calories, but also if you’ll do four or five on your way to class, they’ll give your hair that full-of-volume look.
When you’re attempting a gymnastic trick for the first time, it’s a good idea to have your coach or a friend “spot” you. This is not the “I spy with my little eye” kind of spotting. This means to be standing close enough to help the person should she run into trouble. Preferably with a safety net. If you get the choice of who you would like to spot you, I recommend a third-year medical student or higher.
Gymnastics is a great way to get and stay in shape. That’s our goal here at Brio. We’re all committed to finding our inner couch potatoes and getting them moving again.
Are you game? Of course you are! And as soon as all of us here at Brio get untangled from the backward handsprings we just tried, we’ll join you.
