Safekipedia

Gymnastics

Explorer · ages 7 and underAdapted from Wikipedia
Nadia Comăneci performing on the balance beam at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.

What Is Gymnastics?

Gymnastics is a group of sports. It uses physical exercises that need balance, strength, flexibility, and endurance. Gymnastics helps build strong arms, legs, shoulders, backs, and chests.

Where It Began

Gymnastics grew out of exercises used by the ancient Greeks. They practiced skills for getting on and off a horse. In Germany, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn started a gymnastics movement in 1811 in Berlin. Later, people invented the parallel bars, the horizontal bar, and the pommel horse.

Many Kinds of Gymnastics

The most common kind of competition is artistic gymnastics. Women perform on the floor, the vault, the uneven bars, and the balance beam. Men perform on the floor, the vault, rings, the pommel horse, the parallel bars, and the horizontal bar.

The group that organizes gymnastics competitions around the world is World Gymnastics. Its sports include rhythmic gymnastics, which mixes ballet, dance, and holding special equipment. Trampolining has been part of the Olympic Games since 2000. Parkour is a newer sport.

Gymnastics is for everyone. Young children, fun-loving athletes, and competitive athletes at all levels all take part. A traditional Indian sport called mallakhamba is done with a tall wooden pole or rope. Its name can be translated as "pole gymnastics."

Quiz time!

3 questions about Gymnastics

Question 1 of 3

What does gymnastics help build?

Pictures

A gymnastics room at a YMCA, set up with equipment for children and adults to practice tumbling, balance, and other gymnastics skills.
Portrait of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German teacher who helped start the gymnastics movement in the early 1800s.
Women taking part in a gymnastics class at the Gymnastiska Centralinstitutet, a gymnastics school in Stockholm, Sweden, photographed long ago.
A gymnast performs on the uneven bars at a Virginia high school state competition.
Gymnast Dorina Böczögő performing a one-arm press hold on the balance beam at a competition in Florence, Italy, in 2013.
A high school gymnast performs a double ring leap on the floor during a state competition in Virginia in 2006.
American artistic gymnast Christopher Cameron performing flairs on the pommel horse in 2010.
French gymnast Julien Gobaux performing on the still rings at the Internationaux de France artistic gymnastics competition in September 2018.
Andrei Muntean performs on the parallel bars at the 2015 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships in France.
Rhythmic gymnast Irina Chaschina performing an oversplit, a split that goes past 180 degrees, as a demonstration of extreme flexibility.
Evgenia Kanaeva performing with a hoop at the 2012 Rhythmic Gymnastics Grand Prix in Austria.
Galima Shugurova, a rhythmic gymnast, performing with a ball in a photo from 1973.
An aesthetic group gymnastics team performing a routine
A TeamGym performance on floor
A gymnast dismounts the wheel in vault
Rope mallakhamba

Keep exploring

Ancient Greece
Sparta
Athens
Endurance
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
Parallel bars

This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Gymnastics, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Images from Wikimedia Commons. Tap any image to view credits and license.