I haven’t put something like this up in quite a while but my wife sent it to me and I had to share it. This acrobatic gymnastics routine is pretty amazing and the announcer fascinates me with his commentary. I don’t follow acrobatic gymnastics so I am not versed on what is the best work out there but if this was the weakest of their qualifying routines I can’t imagine the strongest.
The planche towards the end on the upside down split blows my mind—both for the strength of the girl supporting the move and the pain of her hyperextended knee that provides the stability.
This kind of work is extremely inspiring though I can’t say I would want to put my kids through such a rigorous childhood. The discipline involved would be rather daunting. I have found in adult clients with a background of competitive childhood sports two main lingering feelings—there is often little middle ground and the extremes are either, they loved the rigor and discipline and carried it with them into an adulthood of drive and achievement, or they hated the rigor and discipline and rejected exercise and rebelled against using their body.
I am pretty sure I could have been a decent athlete but my parents didn’t teach me anything or push me to do anything. And now as a parent I am not asking much of my kids in this regard. They go to school and after school it is the playground followed by homework, dinner and early to bed. We are not carting them around from activity to activity. What fascinates me about this is I have no clue whether our approach is best for my children or not, it is merely our approach and we will see how it shakes out in the years to come.
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