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Hi All,

Today I wanted to give you a quick drill/exercise for developing straight knees. These are toe taps. This is an exercise that I think should be done at least a few days a week if not every day. If you have oversplits in your warm-up it’s a quick minute or two that can be done before or after them that you’ll be grateful you did. One of the reasons we get sloppy form from gymnasts is that their muscles actually aren’t strong enough to squeeze them as long as we ask them to. So we need to develop their strength with drills like this.

Make sure that you’re gymnasts are sitting up straight and that their knees are completely locked out. Drill this home with your gymnasts and you’ll find that their muscles aren’t as fatigued from “squeezing” during practice, and you’ll get a better quality gymnastics from them. You can also do them standing up and turned around so that the gymnast is lifting her leg behind her to get another direction of motion.