34 Gymnastics
East London Gymnastics Centre, Beckton
Enjoyment - 40%
Success - 20%
Will try again - No
First timer’s recommendation – You have to search pretty hard to find an adults gymnastics class, but the East London Centre is excellent, so a good place to start. Work on your flexibility before you go, and take a friend, preferably one who is worse at cartwheels than you are.
As the Olympics reached their conclusion, I jumped on the gymnastics bandwagon, or pommel horse, and headed for one of the few adult classes I could find in the South-East at the excellent East London Gymnastics Centre. It was pay on the door taught session for beginners to intermediates, so I got there early, as inevitably they had to turn people away on the back of the success of Max Whitlock and co. If you’re in any way self-conscious, gymnastics in a group of 30 people is probably not for you, or it could completely cure you if you can actually do the cartwheels, handstands and flips that we were taught. The gym had the full range of equipment, from vaults and trampolines, through to high bars and the rings, and there were people of varying abilities trying to improve or impress, including two dancers doing a pretty decent routine, which was being professionally filmed.
At school I stuck to team sports, running and swimming, and found gymnastics pretty daunting, especially trying to do a backwards roll which I quite reasonably assumed would result in a broken neck. The class started with a decent warm-up; probably the best one this year aside from fencing, but then the session accelerated quickly, for the benefit of the regulars who had already mastered the basic moves. Forward rolls I was fine with, backward rolls I sort of managed, but then came cartwheels, which I felt I was doing OK with, until I caught my reflection in the mirror and realised my perennially inflexible back and shoulders didn’t lend themselves too well to even the most basic routine. What made it worse was that we were split into five groups, and ours was the slowest, and I was the last to go, meaning that I was always on the floor on my own, with my struggles in plain sight. We then moved to handstands which I was a bit better at, and are something I would like to practice, even if just for a new party trick, after exhausting my traditional move of jumping up on to a bar or table from crouched position. We had some free time at the end so I tried out the high and parallel bars, and then headed home. This has got to be one of the toughest sports there is in terms of getting to the top level – definitely one which needs your full dedication, and my respect for the already impressive performances of the gymnasts in Rio only went up after this week.
