Source: How to Coach Your Gymnast at Home
The holidays are coming up, which means more time at home, maybe purchasing that floor beam or mat that your gymnast has been begging you for, and being asked to watch whatever skill they may or may not be learning on your new home equipment. Or maybe you’ve just watched practice a few times and you know their legs are supposed to be straight on that layout on trampoline (which you conveniently have in your backyard). Your daughter always struggles to point her toes on [insert any number of skills here], and it’s an easy fix, right?
Your gymnast does gymnastics at home. All the time. In every room. And you’ve watched enough gymnastics to know that certain things she’s doing are incorrect. So how do you make these corrections at home? You don’t. Let me repeat that. Do. Not. Coach. Your. Child. At. Home. Nothing will make your child’s coach cringe internally more than hearing that you worked on x, y, or z at home. You are not her coach. Don’t do it. Don’t even tell her to point her toes.
The bottom line is that gymnastics is your daughter’s (or son’s) sport. She puts in the work at practice, she feels the pressure at every competition, and all those little mistakes you see that you’re sure you could fix if they’re so obvious even you see them? Yeah, her coach is trying to fix them. I promise. Being a gym mom or dad does not qualify you as a coach at home.
I would know because my own parents were, in fact, elite gymnastics coaches at the same time I was making my way through the optionals program at our gym. In fact, if you followed gymnastics in the 90s, you’ve probably heard of my parents, Tom and Lori Forster. They had gymnasts on World teams, Pan American teams, winning the American Cup, the first alternate to the ’96 Olympic team; they were interviewed on 60 Minutes, had an article about them and one of their gymnasts in Vanity Fair, and those are only the things I remember. What I’m telling you is that my parents were possibly the most qualified parents in the world to coach me at home. We had a trampoline in our backyard. It would have been so easy to have me do a few drills to help with my tumbling.
My dad is currently one of the top uneven bar coaches in the country. Gymnastics clubs and competitive regions fly him all over to give lectures to their coaches about how to coach bars. Do you know whose worst event was bars? Me. Because despite having one of the most excellent coaches on the planet at my disposal (in my home, no less), I could not swing bars. It took me three years to learn a blind change (don’t worry if you have no idea what that is, just know that it should not take three years to learn. It shouldn’t take one, honestly).
Do you know how many times my parents offered to work with me at home? Zero. I didn’t do conditioning at home, I didn’t stretch at home unless I was feeling weirdly motivated all on my own while I watched TV, the trampoline in our yard was used for sleepovers and games of add-on with my friends. My mom and dad never put on their uber-qualified coaches’ hats at home. And I loved them dearly for it.
Gymnastics, despite being my own family’s very livelihood, was always my own. Every pointed toe, straightened leg, stuck beam routine, hard-fought bar workout was thanks to my own drive and the dedication of some very wonderful coaches (I would nominate Jason for sainthood if I could). Did my parents coach me at the gym? Yes, whenever they were coaching my entire team. I was never given preferential treatment (unless you count being the guinea pig for teaching coaches how to spot, which I don’t because it’s terrifying). As a result, I was able to take full ownership of my gymnastics. And my parents were able to sit back and enjoy my sport as spectators in a way they never could otherwise. They had no claim on my performance because they recognized that it was mine.
It’s hard to do. As parents we want our children to excel and when we feel we can help them, it’s in our nature to offer that help. I’m sure my own parents struggled with it. How could they not have? But I also know that if they had taken me aside and worked on their own agenda with my sport, they would have undermined my coaches and my own drive to be the best I could. I would wonder when my coach gave me a correction if my parents would have given the same correction. I would have worried that I disappointed them if I made a mistake that they had specifically fixed at home. It would have very slowly chipped away at the joy I found in my sport.
My parents loved watching me do gymnastics because I loved it, not because I was the best. Not because I was great at it, but because they loved me enough to let me have it for myself. So, parents, every time you find yourself wanting to make a correction or work on a drill you’ve seen that you could easily do at home, stop yourself and remember that even if you’re the most qualified parent in the world, you cannot love your child’s sport for them.
-Asha Forster Grebenik
