Subject: how to do round-off twist

Sex: male
Age: 16
Gymnastics Level: national

please help me. my twisting movement is very slow. I do 720 twist, but I should do more twists. my twisting movement is moving, sometimes good, sometimes my twisting is bad. how can i make improvement to my twisting movement. please help me.
thank you.

Let’s talk about your specific tumbling twisting questions. You mention that your twisting is slow, so let’s talk about what can speed up twisting. There is a specific law of physics that applies to our twisting – decrease the radius and increase the speed of rotation. This is much more obvious with skaters, when they do their skater’s turns. They start out spinning and then pull in their arms and legs (decreasing the radius), which visibly increases the speed of their rotation. That same principle applies to twisting in gymnastics.

First thing to check is to make sure you are doing a good layout. If your layout or twisting overrotates, it is not the layout you want to be doing. Your layout (and twisting) should go up and drop right down to a stick – no overrotation.

You will want to do your arm lift in the layout a little wider than normal, so when you wrap your arms for the twist, you are able to decrease the radius. For a while, some male gymnasts lifted their arms straight out from their shoulders in their layouts when doing triple twists, so they could maximize the decrease of radius. That certainly works, but is not necessary, is neither visually appealing and limits the height of the layout.

I advocate a symmetrical arm wrap, but whatever arm wrap technique you use, you want to “snap” into the twist with the head and arms snapping simultaneously into the twist. Make sure your head is going in the same direction as your arms and the twist. If your arms goes one way and your head goes the other way, the twist cannot be fast and efficient.

Put all that together and your twisting should improve and let you do 2&1/2 and triple twists.

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