Coaches Intentional arm bend in handsprings

[Geoffrey Taucer]

Thoughts on training a deliberate arm bend in handsprings (front, back, or both)?

I've long been a fan of a deliberate arm bend in back handsprings, though I don't generally teach kids this until they are working back tucks. The arm bend allows the CoM pass farther over the hands before pushing off, allowing for greater acceleration. It also keeps the CoM lower, allowing for a better takeoff angle for subsequent salto.

On front handsprings, I never really tried this until fairly recently; I had an athlete try it on her FHS-FLO, and it worked beautifully, making her FLO both higher and longer.

Generally, I don't introduce bent arm technique in BHS until the athlete is getting ready for back tucks, and while I haven't experimented much with the bent arm FHS, my inclination is not to teach it until the athlete is learning a front layout.

Thoughts? Do you use or teach this technique? If so, what level do you introduce it?

 

[Geoffrey Taucer]

So I posted this on a coaching drills and skills facebook group and the idea of bending the arms in a backhandspring turned out to be much more controversial than I thought it was, so I'll go into more detail about my reasoning for this technique:

In a back handspring on floor, the goal is almost always to maximize horizontal velocity. This is true whether it will be followed by a high salto (ie double back, back 3/1, etc), a longer salto (ie back 3/2), a whip, or a handspring; no matter what skill follows the backhandspring, it will pretty much always benefit from having more horizontal momentum coming out of the backhandspring. Now, in order to achieve the maximum acceleration each time the gymnast pushes off the floor, we want the center of mass as far past the base of support as possible for the push-off. This leads to a more efficient handspring, because the bulk of the force exerted by the athlete goes into horizontal acceleration, rather than any vertical displacement of the CoM. This is true whether the push-off uses the foot or the hands; either way, we want the CoM as far past the base of support as possible.
By delaying each push-off slightly, we can allow the CoM to pass farther over the hands before the push, allowing for a more efficient handspring with greater acceleration. Straight arms generally lead to a more-or-less instantaneous block, but bent arms allow this slight delay (I also coach a knee bend in the transition between backhandsprings, for exactly the same reason).

Now, with a front handspring, the body doesn't have the same ability to fold from the hips and torso to scoop the feet under, which means that the gymnast has to compensate by blocking slightly higher off the hands to allow the body to turn over and get the feet under. But otherwise, everything I said above about back handsprings should apply equally to front handsprings.... at least, in theory. I haven't experimented with this on front handsprings nearly as much as I have with back handsprings

 

[eucoach]

I'm not knowledgable enough in biomechanics in order to have a good discussion on this. What you are saying sounds reasonable though.

However, I would never teach an arm-bend to a beginner athlete and someone learning a bhs-back tuck is a beginner. I would wait until the gymnast is proficient with at least 2/1 twists and double backs.

Also, I'm not sure if the arm-bend is not something that happens anyways with increased speed and higher level skills. Similar to how we see gymnasts who do multiple twists start the twisting action on the ground (I don't know what the English word for this is....sorry) and not in the air. This is something we would never teach and actually correct when we see it happening up until 2/1 twists (bwd.). Almost every gymnast has a slight pre-twist in the body once they start to do multiple twists. But we do not have to teach that.

Something else to consider.....bent arms in bhs and fhs are a deduction.

 

[tucktwisttumble]

I can't contribute much to this - but as an athlete I was always taught that 'angles' within our body while tumbling decreases power. i.e. a shoulder angle, knee angle, hip angle etc. Same idea as teaching kids to reach forward into their roundoffs, which keeps the body lines (as opposed to bending at the hips and reaching for the ground... does this make sense)

I too agree with @eucoach - I think it is something that begins to happen naturally... and doesn't necessarily need 'teaching'