Our Carson City Gymnastics Club Team is in the middle of a candy bar fundraiser. The last two weekends we have set up a table at Wal-Mart to raise funds for equipment, guest coaches, meet entrances, and uniforms.
Please buy a delicious candy bar or two from our team!
When a Carson City Gymnastics athlete has a minor training injury – twisted ankle, jammed wrist, etc. – the best treatment advice is contained in the acronym RICE.
RICE stands for:
(For more information on treatment with RICE, read this post: Carson City Gymnastics: RICE For Small Injuries)
But when should parents and coaches use RICE?
The answer is contained in another easy to remember acronym: SHARP
SHARP stands for
All of the above are symptoms of inflammation. The 5 signs of SHARP are representative of the inflammatory reaction/protection phase right after an injury.
If any swelling, heat, altered function, redness, or pain is present, continue treating with rest, ice, compression, and elevation.
When moving, there will be pain before tissue resistance. The last thing you want your gymnastics athlete to experience is more pain when moving, as this will indicate further damage and lengthen the healing and recovery process.
When the SHARP inflammatory phase is over, true healing and recovery will begin. Continue with good nutrition, low-impact training, and plenty of rest.
A Carson City Gymnastics recipe…
Larabars are a great snack for gymnasts, they provide energy without added sugars or grains.
Here is a simple recipe that you can use to make your own fruit and nut bars for your gymnast to take as a pre-training snack.
Ingredients:
½ cup raw almonds
1 cup raw pecans
¼ teaspoon sea salt
12 Medjool dates
1 cup dried apricots (unsweetened)
Instructions:
1) In a food processor, pulse the nuts and the sea salt until finely chopped.
2) Pour the processed nuts into a mixing bowl.
3) Put the dates and apricots to the food processor and process until it makes a paste (it will turn into a giant sticky ball when it’s done).
4) Add the date mixture to the nuts and use your hands to kneed the nuts and the dates together until well mixed.
5) Grease a baking sheet with coconut oil.
6) Make a big ball out of the mixture and pushflatten it down onto your greased baking sheet. Cover the ball with some plastic wrap and using a rolling pin, roll out the mixture to about 1/2 an inch thick or a little less.
7) Cut the rolled out mixture into any size that you like
This recipe makes about 15 bars and they cost approximately .50 cents per bar, a third of the price of store bought fruit and nut bars.
A Carson City Gymnastics Club Blog Post…
In their phenomenal book Easy Strength, Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline have a short list on how to live longer:
These simple rules will survive any statistics test you want to put them to.
Even better, they list an actual tumbling progression.
Whether you or your child, mastering the simple skills on this tumbling list will make you a better athlete (plus you’ll be ready the next time you trip over something in the dark)
Forward Roll:
Shoulder Roll:
Dive Rolls:
Side Rolls:
Leapfrogs
Wheelbarrows
Squat Hand Balance:
Head And Hand Balance
Hand Balance:
These basic gymnastic tumbling exercises will give you confidence and great freedom of movement – much more so than pushing and pulling the padded handles of machines at the gym.
Level 7 gymnast, Maya Fullmer Silvera, age 13, from South Jordan, Utah, competed with her teammates at the annual Crystal Cup Gymnastics Invitational Meet on Friday, Feb. 3, 2012, at Salt Lake Community College, just six months after she received a heart transplant necessitated because of sudden heart failure. She postponed her third ablation operation procedure for heart arrhythmia until the next week, so she could compete in the meet. She competed vault, beam and floor and hit all her routines.
You can read the entire inspiring story here: Utah teen defies the odds, competes at gymnastics meet with a new heart
Silver State Gymnastics does a phenomenal job of keeping our young gymnasts healthy. Coach Dave focuses on the skills and conditioning levels necessary for being a top performer without pushing too far, too fast.
That said, gymnastics IS a sport, and injuries can happen. For small tweaks and strains, use the Rest/Ice/Compress/Elevate formula (Gymnastics R.I.C.E).
For anything bigger, go and see a qualified doctor. Leaving injuries untreated not only makes the injury worse, it can lead to more injuries.
A survey study was done on level 4 to level 10 gymnasts in the Seattle area.
It covered 96 athletes competing at the club level.
Acute injury rates were 1.3 injuries per 1000 hours training if looked at across the board. For gymnasts aged 10-17, the injury rate was 3-fold greater than athletes aged 7-9 years.
This increase in injury rate may be due to more complex skills, to small injuries stacking up, or to many other factors.
The majority of injuries occurred in practice, but the injury rate was higher during meets.
Most injuries occurred in:
The most commonly injured body parts were:
Overuse injury rates were 1.8 per 1000 hours.
During their gymnastic careers, concussions occurred in 30.2% of gymnasts, and stress fractures (mostly low back and foot) occurred in 16.7% of gymnasts.
To prevent injuries, first you need to find a great coach (if you’re at Silver State Gymnastics you have this covered :)). Next, focus on proper mechanics of landing after a skill. Then conditioning.
As a parent, making sure your young athlete has plenty of rest and eats properly will go a long way towards preventing injuries and healing them faster if they happen.
The study referenced is:
Clin J Sport Med. 2011 Nov;21(6):486-92.
Survey of injuries in Seattle area levels 4 to 10 female club gymnasts.
O’Kane JW, Levy MR, Pietila KE, Caine DJ, Schiff MA.
Department of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, University of Washington Sports Medicine Clinic, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
Handstands are a really cool Carson City Gymnastics exercise that require great skill and strength.
Here are five cool exercises for training the handstand:
Exercise 1: Handstand Wall Run
Exercise 2: Wall “Cast” Walks
Exercise 3: Hopping Handstands
Exercise 4: Kipping Handstand
Exercise 5: Handstand Obstacle Course
The annual Gymnastics Nevada Challenge will be held in Sparks on February 18th and 19th.
Silver State Gymnastics will be competing on the 19th. Here’s the email from Miss Kathi:
“Meet times for the 19th, level 3′s be there at 8. Level 4′s and 6 at 11, level 5′s at 3″
Gymnastics Nevada is located at 225 Lillard Dr. Sparks, Nevada 89434
According to the event website, custom photo montages of your gymnast can be ordered. Click link for more info: Meet Info
a carson city gymnastics blog post…
The Hollow Body Rock is a serious core exercise that has a great carryover to correctly performing gymnastics skills.
To perform, first you need to learn the gymnastic Hollow Body position:
How to do it:
Your next step is to add in a rocking motion, here’s how:
Add gymnastic hollow body training into your workouts in place of normal core work, during your warmup, during your cooldown, or in-between sets of other exercises.
This exercise is not only a drill, it is a gymnastics skill that will carry over to handstands, ring work, flags, etc.
It’s almost the New Year and a lot of Carson City Gymnastics Parents are making resolutions to get in shape for 2012 :)
Instead of using complicated, dangerous machines at the gym, make this the year that you master your own bodyweight and be able to exercise anywhere.
Here are ten gymnastics pushups variations that will help you get in kick-butt shape so you can keep up with your gymnast:
1. Hindu Pushup
2. Atomic Pushup
3. T- Pushup
4. Hover Push Up (Core Challenge!!)
5. Side To Side Pushup
6. Close Grip Push Up
7. Chest Touch Pushup
8. Grasshopper Pushup
9. Plank Walkup
10. Pike Pushup
Are these variations too advanced? I’ll bet your gymnast could do them…
Here’s a video on how to do the pushup for beginners:
