Gymnastics Events for Women
Women compete in four gymnastics events. The Olympic order for women’s gymnastics competitions is vault, uneven parallel bars, balance beam and floor exercise. Each of the gymnastics events requires conditioning for stamina and endurance, strength, power, flexibility, intense focus, spatial awareness, rhythm and timing. The art of women’s gymnastics is elegance, beauty, poise, confidence, dedication and focus.
Vault is a quick and explosive gymnastics event that requires the gymnast to explode off the springboard and off the vaulting table. The basic vault is a handspring. Gymnasts spend many years perfecting the handspring because it evolves into lots of different and complicated vaults for the more advanced gymnasts. Adding a change in body position such as tucked, piked or stretched and adding twisting and flipping to the handspring makes it much more difficult and exciting to watch this gymnastics event.
Uneven parallel bars is a favorite gymnastics event to watch because it demands unbelievable upper-body strength and split-second timing. A good routine flows from one movement to the next without pauses or stops, extra swings or additional supports. Like the men, women perform high-flying release moves and dismounts, but this gymnastics event moves from one bar to the other as daring release moves and re-grasps cause the spectator to hold their breath. Like the men on their bars, the women try to perform handstands with perfect body position and pirouetting into release moves to increase the difficulty value of the routine. This gymnastics event takes a lot of courage. Movements have to be performed with precision, exciting transitions, multiple twisting and flipping between the bars, perfect form and awesome technique to get through this gymnastics event without missing the bar. Then, add the dismount with multiple twisting and flipping and a stuck landing to make this gymnastics event spectacular to watch. A good gymnast makes the routine look easy to fling the body around from bar to bar, but it is not an easy gymnastics event.
The balance beam presents a challenge to gymnasts as this gymnastics event is performed on a four-inch wide beam, 16 feet long and about 4’ off the floor. Many of the skills performed on floor are also performed on the balance beam including flipping and twisting and stuck dismounts. It takes courage and concentration to do this gymnastics event as the gymnast has to focus intensely on each movement in order to keep the body aligned with the beam and not wobble or fall off. Wobbles are deductions and falls will generally put the gymnast out of the running for a high place. The routine cannot exceed 90 seconds and must cover the entire beam performing acrobatic and dance movements backward, forward and sideward. Gymnasts show confidence, poise, flexibility and power while executing movements high off the beam.
Floor exercise is a combination of tumbling and dance, flexibility, strength, power, endurance, timing, rhythm, grace, confidence and poise. The gymnasts can express themselves through their music and movement on this gymnastics event in less than 90 seconds. Gymnasts show lots of energy in a good dynamic routine. The choreography blends dance and tumbling while making use of all the 40’ X 40’ floor area and changing direction and level of the elements.
All around is not a separate gymnastics event in either men’s or women’s gymnastics, but a total of all the event scores. The all around winner of a meet actually depicts the gymnast who excels in all areas of gymnastics and not a specialist on one event. It is an honor to achieve this coveted title at any meet.
