Artistic Gymnastics and Athletics: A Comprehensive Guide
Corporal Expression in Science and Art
Psychology
Psychology utilizes corporal expression to assist individuals facing difficulties. This is achieved through psychodrama, a technique aimed at fostering a coherent personality and providing effective therapy for patients with emotional problems.
Pedagogy
Pedagogy addresses corporal expression within Physical Education, recognizing the body not only as a series of interconnected systems requiring balance but also as a means of communication with others.
Performing Arts
Corporal expression plays a significant role in various performing arts:
- Mime or drama: Develops precision of movement and facilitates nonverbal communication.
- Theatre: Enhances the verbal messages conveyed through dramatic action.
- Dance: Conveys messages through rhythmic movement.
Function of the Performing Arts in Physical Education
- Promote creative development: Helps individuals manifest their expressive originality and strengthen their personality.
- Foment cultural development: Recognizes the human body as a source of inspiration and a medium for communicating ideas and feelings in art.
- Contribute to the development of body language: Makes the body an essential tool for nonverbal communication.
Developing Rhythmic Ability
- Stimulus: Triggers immediate and spontaneous movement responses.
- Auditory sensitivity: Enables the capture and distinction of rhythmic structures from external stimuli.
- Ability to concentrate: Moving to a rhythm necessitates focused listening.
- Movement: Rhythmic, harmonious motion relies on a diverse range of motor skills, influencing the interpretation of stimuli.
Our Dance Rhythm
- Security and comfort of movement: Utilizes joints and muscles fluidly and harmoniously.
- Personal freedom: Encourages the creation of unique rhythms without interference, fostering imagination.
- Imaginative capacity: Transforms dance into a creative process expressed through its own language. Imitation, automatic movements, or excessive reliance on rules can hinder creativity.
Types of Dance
Classic Dance
Characterized by its high aesthetic value and adherence to elaborate rules and techniques. Each step and movement is meticulously analyzed, measured, and experimented with. However, this rigidity can restrict artistic expressivity.
Modern Dance
Distinguished by its expressive value and emerged as a reaction against the rigidity of classical dance. It emphasizes free bodily expression. Isadora Duncan is a prominent figure in modern dance.
Popular Traditional or Folk Dances
These dances hold cultural significance, reflecting the character and customs of a specific community or people, while still adhering to certain rules.
Popular Modern Dances
These dances serve recreational or leisure purposes. Some, like the chotis and the Charleston, are fading in popularity, while others, like the waltz and the paso doble, endure. Contemporary popular dances include rock and salsa, which have their own rules but are less strict than classical dance.
Requirements of Expressive Dance
Perceive
Involves a willingness to fully absorb stimuli from the physical and human environment, engaging cognitive, motor, and emotional skills. Music plays a crucial role in evoking, imagining, and executing creative actions in dance.
Feel
Perception should elicit emotional responses to stimuli, prioritizing feelings over thoughts.
Do
Internal feelings stemming from stimuli must be externalized through action, encompassing two key stages:
- Exploration: Involves experimenting with different elements to identify those that resonate with personal interests.
- Updating: Entails selecting, organizing, and implementing chosen elements, culminating in an original, personal, and unique dance creation.
Factors Intervening in Energy Modulation
- Time: Refers to the manner in which energy is released in a single movement, ranging from quick bursts to sustained release.
- Weight: Movements can be executed with varying degrees of energy, categorized as “strong” or “light.”
- Energy output: Energy can be retained within the body for controlled movements or released freely for unrestrained movements.
- Space: Direct movements follow a straight line to a predetermined destination, while indirect movements are winding.
Components of Expressive Action
- Different areas of the body: Each area possesses expressive value but must fulfill its specific function to convey meaning effectively.
- Basic positions: Forward, profile, back, standing, etc., combined with expressive postural actions like open/closed, forward/backward, tense/relaxed, straight/round.
- Movements: Executed with specific intentions (doubt, firmness, optimism, timidity, boldness, etc.).
- Rhythm: Provides the movement with the necessary time and energy.
Choreography
Exploratory Phase
Focuses on discovering new and diverse movement possibilities to enrich the repertoire of motor experiences.
Composition Phase
Builds upon the exploratory phase by organizing selected movements, combining them into phrases that imbue the motor action with meaning.
How Choreography is Performed
- Select the topic to be explored.
- Listen to and internalize the chosen music.
- Determine the rhythmic movements selected during the composition phase.
- Organize the workspace.
- Explore different ways of utilizing space: directions and paths.
- Perform the dance, infusing it with the meaning of the chosen topic.
Artistic Gymnastics
What Does It Entail?
When Did It Begin?
Vaulting can be traced back to ancient Crete around 1500 BC, where youngsters leaped over bulls. However, gymnastics as an educational discipline promoting physical and intellectual balance emerged in 5th century BC Greece. Modern gymnastics originated in Gym Schools that proliferated across 19th century Europe. In 1819, Francisco Amorós established a gym in Paris equipped with horizontal bars, window bars, ropes, climbing frames, and trapezes. Artistic gymnastics debuted in the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. Women’s competitions comprise four events: floor exercises, vault, balance beam, and asymmetric bars. Men’s events include vault, pommel horse, parallel bars, still rings, horizontal bar, and floor exercises.
Women’s Competition Events
Artistic gymnastics involves performing individual exercises and transitions or combinations thereof on a mat or specific apparatus. It emphasizes aesthetics alongside a high level of execution.
Balance Beam
A rectangular bar 120 cm above the ground, used for performing simple movements (walkovers, turns, jumps) and complex exercises (handstands, flic flacs). Requires balance and coordination. Gymnasts must remain on the beam for 70-90 seconds.
Asymmetric Bars
Round, hardwood bars requiring gymnasts to perform ten routines with various grips, supports, handstands, swings, release moves, and flyaways, switching bars at least twice.
Vault
A non-slip, padded apparatus placed perpendicular to the runway. Gymnasts take off from a springboard before jumping.
Floor Exercises
Performed on a square mat with a designated safety area. Gymnasts execute a choreographed routine with music (70-90 seconds), incorporating acrobatic moves like leaps, rolls, roundoffs, and flic flacs.
Men’s Competition Events
Still Rings
Wooden rings suspended from cables. Gymnasts require immense strength for swings, supports, turns, static positions (2 seconds), and dismounts. Deductions are given for excessive cable swinging or touching the apparatus.
Pommel Horse
Gymnasts place their hands on the pommels, swing their legs, and perform turns (spindles). Deductions are given for touching the horse with legs or failing to keep them straight. The horse is placed lengthwise to the approach run.
Vault
Preceded by a 25-meter run-up, gymnasts take off from a springboard, supporting themselves with one or both hands on the horse.
Parallel Bars
Adjustable, elastic wooden bars fixed to the floor. Gymnasts perform swings, kips, supports, hand releases, and dismounts from handstands or twists.
Horizontal Bar
Steel bar requiring gymnasts to release it at least once for straight arm hangs, swings, and turns. Proper grips, holds, full range of motion, body straightening, and dismounts are crucial.
Floor Exercises
Performed on a mat identical to the women’s competition. Gymnasts combine vaults and acrobatic moves without music in a 50-70 second routine.
Floor Exercises
Headstand
Requires maintaining a static upright position with hands and head forming an equilateral triangle. Upper body and arm muscles remain tense. Bodyweight is distributed between hands and head for balance. Back and legs are kept straight, the head is supported with a straight neck, and the body remains steady.
Handstand
More challenging than the headstand due to a smaller base of support and a higher center of gravity. Requires ease of getting into position, straight arms, upper body, knees, and ankles, minimal swaying, steady descent on the starting side, and maintaining balance for at least 2 seconds.
Cartwheel
A full rotation around the body’s anteroposterior axis, passing through an upside-down position with outstretched hands and feet forming a straight diagonal line. Requires stretched limbs, straight arms and legs throughout, wide stance, and maintaining balance.
Rolls
Forward Somersault
A 360-degree roll around the body’s transversal axis, initiated from a crouched position. Requires a curved back, flexed neck (head off the mat), straight rolling path, proper hand placement, and finishing in a crouch or standing position without hand support.
Backflip
A 360-degree rotation around a transversal axis, starting from a crouched position with the back to the mat. Requires a curved back, finishing in a crouch without losing balance, parallel hands with fingers at ear level, and pushing up with arms midway through.
Direct Vault
Comprises a run-up, take-off, flight, and landing. Proper execution depends on each stage. Involves a fast run-up, pushing off with both legs from the springboard, planting hands on the horse, spreading and bringing legs together, and landing on the mat. Key aspects include taking off with both feet at the same height, hips higher than shoulders during flight, keeping legs apart after hand placement, parallel palms, and bending knees for a cushioned landing.
Athletics
Swing
Ball in close contact with the neck, fingers slightly spread. Body leans forward, balancing on the right leg.
Glide
Right leg flexes and extends quickly, foot shifting to the circle’s center.
Final Action
Athlete whirls on one leg, the other leg extended. Elbow extends to push the ball at a 45-degree release angle.
Athletics originated from games honoring Zeus in Olympia, Greece, in 776 BC.
Track and Field Events
Races
- Based on distance: Sprint, middle-distance, long-distance, ultra-distance.
- Relays: 4x100m, 4x400m.
- Obstacle races: 100m hurdles (women), 110m hurdles (men), 400m hurdles, 3000m steeplechase.
Jumping Events
- Long jump
- Triple jump
- High jump
- Pole vault
Throwing Events
- Shot put
- Discus
- Hammer
- Javelin
Manners of Run
- Thrust: Take-off leg extends, free leg’s knee rises.
- Suspension: Moment of maximum stride length.
- Cushioning: Foot placement without abruptness.
- Support: Entire leg bears bodyweight.
A good start is crucial in sprints, involving a position where the body’s center of gravity is outside the support base for a smooth transition to motion. Low starts (using starting blocks) are used in short races, while high starts are used in middle and long-distance running.
Relay Races
Speed races where four athletes pass a baton, each completing a section. In 4x100m, each runner covers 100m; in 4x400m, each covers 400m.
4x100m Relay
The baton carrier determines the handover moment. Downsweep and upsweep methods are used. The receiver faces the race direction, and the incoming runner places the baton in their hand with a swift arm movement.
4x400m Relay
Handovers require less precision due to slower speeds.
Obstacle Races: Hurdles
Speed event where athletes clear ten hurdles in the shortest time. The lead leg’s knee rises to hip height during take-off to avoid tripping. The take-off leg’s knee moves outward, the ankle flexes, and the chest leans forward while clearing the hurdle. Landing is on the forefoot.
Long Jump
Aiming for maximum distance after a fast run-up and one-footed take-off.
Take-off
Legs fully extended, free leg’s knee lifts. The ball of the foot smoothly contacts the board.
Flight
Leg separation is prolonged, the body remains upright and balanced, and curling up is delayed.
Landing
Partially bent knees, legs as far forward as possible.
High Jump
Run-up and Take-off
Arms swing up and forward. Take-off leg extends quickly and rotates 90 degrees for a backward approach to the bar.
Flight
Lead leg lifts with a bent knee, back arches, and knees extend after clearing the bar.
Landing
Straight knees, feet high, landing on the entire back.
Shot Put
Preparation
: tip of tje right foot at the back of the circle, in the opposite direction to the throwing area.