The Benefits of Gymnastics

And Other Sports

If you have siblings, you’ve probably spent a lot of your childhood on the sidelines of some sporting event, maybe cheering on your brother or sister, more likely crawling under the bleachers or wandering around the practice field looking for something better to do.  Baseball is a boring enough sport when you’re playing it, so no one can blame you wanting to throw rocks instead of watching it.  But basketball or soccer aren’t much better when you’re a kid.  At least they’re all over pretty quick.

I had to sit through gymnastics meets.  An entire Saturday morning, hours spent huddled in the corner with nothing but a Gameboy, listening to the same floor music on repeat, surrounded by trampolines and unable to jump on any of them.  I’ll never forgive my sister.  (Just kidding, Hannah, I might one day).

And apart from my own childhood torture, I had also witnessed my two cousins (both eventual college gymnasts) spend untold hours at the gym, homeschooling to accommodate the practice schedule, travelling all over for meets and camps and generally having their whole lives consumed by the sport.

So you can imagine my hesitancy when my own daughter, after a few low-stakes kids classes at the local gym run by some of our friends, was invited to join the competitive team.  Oh no, I thought, not me.  Not again.  I won’t be the one sending my kid to gym for four hours every weeknight and hauling the family to interminable meets playing the same, repetitive music I can still hear in my head when I close my eyes at night.  Spoiler alert: I am.  I’m sorry, Jackson, I truly am.  I never wanted to start down this road.  I thought it would be a nightmare.  But I could not have been more wrong.

Gymnastics is maybe the best thing that could have happened to my daughter.  That doesn’t make the schedule any less insane.  After a few years, currently at level 6, she has practice four nights a week from 4pm to 8pm plus another four hours on Saturday mornings.  With how much time she spends there, I’m honestly surprised it’s not catered, since it makes family dinner a little hard, to say nothing of an early bedtime.  And it’s intense.  This isn’t farting around in the outfield or jogging across a soccer pitch.  An hour of conditioning.  Hours of training on each apparatus, repeating a move until each finger and toe is perfectly aligned, pushing toward new skills at the limits of her abilities.  She comes home tired and sore and hungry.

We don’t force her to do it, though.  Frankly, it would make our lives easier if she quit.  She does it because she loves it, because she’s good at it and loves climbing up that podium, because the other girls are her best friends, because she knows, deep down, that it’s good for her, not in spite of all the time and work and pain but because of it.  It’s good for her to commit to something that is hard, to struggle, to strain, to persevere, and to see the fruits of her effort.  That’s what makes you grow.  She’s cried at practice, plenty of times, but she’s never given up.  It’s made her strong.  Can your kid climb a rope to the top of the gym with no legs?  Can you?  She’s only 9, but I swear she has more upper body strength than my wife.  It’s made her tough.  It’s made her confident.  It’s given her a community to invest in and root for.  Those are hard lessons to learn on your own.  Parenting would be a lot tougher without it.

The principle is not unique to gymnastics.  Guys, get your kids involved in some kind of sport.  It’s good for their bodies, their minds, and their souls.  Exercise and activity, cooperation and competition, skills to learn and and scores to improve, a taste of victory and a safe place to fail.  These can happen in almost any sport.  It doesn’t matter which one.  I’m sure even baseball teaches…I don’t know, patience or something.  In fact, it’s probably better if they pick one you don’t like or didn’t play.  Because it’s not about you.  It’s not about success or future prospects or college scholarships.  Don’t force it on them.  That’s a great way to ruin a good thing.  But don’t let them quit too early, either.

A sport should be a piece of life they can call their own.  Almost everything in a kid’s life, apart from entertainment, is dictated to them.  Wake up, go to school, pick up your toys, eat your dinner, be nice to your sister, brush your teeth, go to bed.  It has to be that way, and it’s good that it is, because kids, like all of us, are lazy and dumb and selfish by default, so they need to learn to do what is healthy and good and necessary.  But our commands only take them so far.  Telling them hard work will pay off is a lot less effective than having them see their hard work actually pay off.  A sport is a microcosm of life, where they can control their own fate, set their own goals, see their own results within a limited time and scope in a self-motivated, fun, low-risk environment of their own choosing.  It’s the perfect place to learn the hard lessons of life without any of the serious hardship.  But they need to drive it.  Give them the space to do so.

I know it may sound like a hassle, not to mention expensive.  I don’t love all the drop offs or the late nights or the travel, and more kids just multiplies the commitments.  Or maybe you’re more into it than your kids.  It doesn’t have to be a competitive league with fancy uniforms and State Championship aspirations, though.  It’s just as good, maybe better, to gather up the neighborhood kids for a game of hoops in the driveway or soccer in the cul-de-sac.  Just don’t give up.  Let them try a million different things, if need to, and drive them to each on a different day with a glad heart.  Because I promise that it’s worth every mile and minute and penny.  Just give my apologies to their siblings.