Being Able to See is Always Helpful.Keep your hair out of your face and tie back long hair. Hair can obstruct your vision, get caught on equipment or you can pull it on skills like back extension rolls.
Fashion Safety.Don't wear dangling earrings, necklaces or other jewelry. They can get caught on your leotard or gym clothes, on the equipment, mats or carpet. Earrings torn out of your ear - that's gotta hurt. Rings can scratch the bars and pinch your fingers.No Valuable Jewelry.
Don't wear any valuable jewelry in the gym, especially into a loose foam pit. You may never find it or find only by pulling out every single piece of foam in the pit. Take it from the girl who lost her mother's diamond stud earring and spent three full days sifting through the pit and dust and dirt at the bottom of the pit to find it. She never did find the back to it.Tight is Right.If you wear socks to class, make sure they fit tightly.
You don't want them to come off in the pit and get lost. And you don't want them to bunch up and possible create poor footing on skills or landings.What Not to Wear.Don't wear hair ties with hard objects, like plastic balls, on them. Skills, like back extension rolls, or falls can press them painfully into your head.
There is no place in the gym for dangerous hair ornaments however decorative or stylish.This is Not Ballet.Don't wear slippery nylon tights, like you commonly see in ballet classes.
They are not appropriate or safe in a gymnastics gym. They can cause you to slip on both beam and bars. Incidentally, if you wear tights to keep warm on floor or vault, gymnasts wear them outside their leotards, not inside like dancers.
This allows you to remove them quickly and easily for events on which they are inappropriate.Don't Be a Bag(gy) Lady.Don't wear baggy shirts or sweatshirts. Your vision can be obstructed if your shirt goes over your head when you are upside down. This can make it difficult and unsafe to tumble or perform on apparatus. Baggy clothing can also caught on spotters and equipment or wrap up your spotter's hands.
No Studs in the Gym.Don't wear any clothes in the gym to work out with belts, metal studs or buttons. The uneven bars are especially likely to get scratched with these. They can also scratch up your instructor or maybe even you.No Heavy Metal.
Wearing metal objects like belt buckles can damage gymnastics equipment, especially the uneven bars and which could result in splinters in your or other gymnasts hands. Rips are bad enough. Don't compound the hand problems.Contact Time?.If you wear glasses, you need to make sure they are safe and secure.
Wear a strap with glasses if they fit too loosely or tend to come off. Not only they can fall off and perhaps break, but also they could come partially off and poke you in the eye. You need to find some kind of solution for your glasses situation if you are unable to see well enough to vault or to see your coach clearly enough and contact lenses certainly fill the bill. If you want contacts anyway, here is a legitimate reason to ask for them.Nail It.
Keep your toenails and fingernails closely clipped and manicured. The rough and jagged edges of both toenails and fingernails can get caught on the floor exercise carpet and cause a painful tear. There is no place in gymnastics and the gym for extremely long nails. Hey could break or even scratch your coach.
.John Howard is the author of 15 books and e-Books about gymnastics, gym design, gymnastics humor and cheerleading. He has 25 years experience and has coached State, Regional and National champion gymnasts and international competitors and cheerleaders at the National level in NCAA Division I.GymnasticsZone.com is a web site for gymnasts, cheerleaders, coaches and parents with numerous FREE articles and information, fun pages and activities available for viewing at: http://GymnasticsZone.com.
More In-depth information products are available at: http://gymnasticszone.com/eBooks.htm.
By: J Howard
