Hi All,

I wanted to share a couple more things you can be doing today for round offs and back handsprings. These are probably the skills that I get the most questions on, and I think part of it is that we often get bored with using the same drills year after year after year. Every time I see a new back handspring drill I’m a little giddy, because while I have my normal set of progressions, I’m always interested in trying something new to see if it works better, or if kids understand it better.

I like this lever drill against a wall. If you’ve got a wall by you in any of your circuits I would definitely think about adding it. One thing I might do is is put a line on the wall of where they should put their hands (maybe two if you have shorties and tallies). If this is too advanced for your kids, I’ve also done a similar drill where they are just holding the bent knee lever – but they have a couple panel mats stacked behind their back foot so they know how high it’s supposed to be.

This second drill is a really nice variation of a fairly typical back handspring drill. There are a couple things I really like about it. 1) The jump forward at the beginning gets the gymnasts feet in front of her 2) The barrel is up on an 8″ so she has to jump a little more 3) the drop at the end gives her a little more time to get her feet to the ground so she doesn’t feel like she has to pike.

If you’d like even more basic tumbling drills – you should check out “Beginning Tumbling – Where to start with preschool and rec (from handstands to back tucks)” it’s 94 minutes of easily taught drills and progressions that will lead to bigger and better tumbling.

Train hard!