The backward roll is a classic tumbling move that can be done both on the ground and on a trampoline.
This is the opposite of the backward roll. As with that roll, it's crucial to tuck your chin during the roll — perhaps even more so.
With practice, you can eventually do this trick without hands. Simply tuck your chin and begin to fall forward. Your body must be curved so that you land on your shoulders and roll down your back. Practicing with hands down first helps you learn to avoid landing headfirst.
This is a trickier one because you need to land flat — not in a roll or curved position. Once you mastered this, it can be a transition move for backflips, rolls, and more.
To achieve this skill, you'll need to maintain a straight body alignment. As with the other tricks here, it's helpful to use your hands to brace your landing and protect your head.
Similar to the back drop, you'll be falling backward with a seated position. But this time, the seat happens at the bottom of the drop. You can transition into back walkovers and back handspring from here.
If you'd like some support, you can use your hands to brace you in this trick as well. Simply hold your arms straight by your sides with your palms facing down. Never extend your arms behind you as this can cause injury.
I hope you found this article helpful as you explore the fun world of trampoline tricking! Want more tutorials and tips? Feel free to follow me on social media and YouTube, where you can see more trampoline sequences and demos. I visit gyms and tricking events around the world and would love to teach you skills in person as well. Follow me to see my next stops!
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Don't worry, though. With proper stretching, you will not only protect yourself but lay the foundation to get stronger. Here's what to do.
Your muscles are a rubber band. If you put a rubber band in the freezer, it gets crisp and inflexible...and if you stretch it, it will snap. Always warm up with a quick jog or other cardio.
Elevate your heart rate to at least 60-70% of your target heart rate before training. This is the best range in which to build strength. Just 5 minutes of aerobic exercise is usually sufficient. You can run a few laps, do jumping jacks, dance it out — whatever you want to do.
Your legs take a lot of beating during tumbling, because you're jumping and landing a lot. Always stretch your hamstrings and quadriceps first, because those are complex muscles that are prone to injury.
Some easy hamstring stretches include:
To stretch and activate your quads, do some lunges and squats. (Tip: maintain a 90-degree angle of your frontward leg and the floor in a lunge position.) Other helpful stretches include:
And don't forget your ankles. You don't have a lot of muscles down there, but you do have a lot of ligaments and tendons. If your Achilles tendon snaps, that's the end of your training for a long time. So do some ankle rolls, toe raises, and simple toe touches. Here are some of my favorite exercises:
Your wrists are also injury-prone areas. The looser they are, the better they can accept impact — which is a big part of tricking. It's important to maintain straight, engaged forearms and secure hand placement to avoid repetitive strain injuries (RSI). Ever heard of carpal tunnel syndrome? That can happen during tumbling practices because you're putting constant pressure on your hands and wrists.
To keep yourself safe and limber, do these exercises:
Back bends and general core support are crucial to tumbling. So, it's important to keep your back muscles limber. This also feels super good for recovering from the work day, whether you work a desk job or spend all day on your feet!
First, bring one arm across your chest and use the other arm to squeeze it close to your torso. Engage your latissimus to drive down your shoulder and allow the stretch to happen across your triceps. Repeat on the other side. This group of muscles and tendons is pretty tough, so it's important to stretch. If it does get injured, it's a long recovery. So, play it safe and stretch it out.
You can also stretch your abs and pecs with cobra pose.
Hanging is the best way to decompress your spine. You can achieve this with a simple pull up bar. Engage your trapezius and lats to pull your shoulders down; don't actually do a pull-up. Work on expanding your pectorals and contracting your scapulae, then vice versa, to strengthen your upper body while allowing gravity to lengthen your spinal column.
Remember: you need to be warmed up to stretch, and you don't want to stretch to the point of injury, A good rule of thumb is 5 minutes of cardio followed by 10 minutes of stretching. Then, do your training session. Conclude with 5 minutes of cool down stretching.
Limber, strong muscles and tissues help you train safely. There's no right or wrong metric for stretching, so don't compare yourself to others! A good rule of thumb is to stretch only until you feel a bit of discomfort. If you feel a burning, searing, or ripping pain, stop immediately! "No pain, no gain" is not true. You only want to push your body slightly beyond the comfort zone. In time, you'll be able to achieve greater flexibility and strength.
I hope you've found this article helpful! Remember, it's always better to train safer than to force yourself into your goals. Everyone's body is different, and I'm here to empower your unique training journey. Feel free to follow me on social media and YouTube for video demonstrations. I also travel around the world, so keep in touch to learn when and where I may be able to directly coach you on safe training!
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If you’re familiar with how to do the cartwheel and already have that down, great! The roundoff and cartwheel are very similar. Now, today, we’re not focusing on how to do the roundoff, so you should also know how to do a roundoff. That’s essential — you can’t roundoff into other skills unless you already know how to do the roundoff. The good thing is, if you’ve mastered the cartwheel, you should be able to easily do a roundoff, and vice versa. If you can do one, you should be able to do the other. Our main focus today is positioning to connect into higher-level skills coming out of the roundoff.
However, I will briefly touch on the cartwheel and roundoff below, and then we’ll move on to what makes them different and how we need to position for doing a roundoff into other skills.
As you should already know, with the cartwheel, you want to be nice and straight, facing forward, and as you’re reaching forward, use your arms to flip while standing. Keep it basic; no need to point your toes or any of that. Definitely focus on good technique and perfect body lines if you’re doing it for a certain sport, like gymnastics, But for the sake of this tutorial, we’ll keep it pretty basic; no need to get nit-picky. I should point out that the cartwheel is not a sideways skill. You should be straight, facing forward when you do it.
This will be similar to the cartwheel starting out. The major change is going to be your foot placement. When you land, you’ll be landing on both feet. Your hand placement will change just a tad when you’re putting your hands onto the ground.
There’s just a slight difference between the cartwheel and roundoff. With the cartwheel, I would proceed by putting both hands onto a line. Both hands are on the line. Start with your preferred leg out (it can be right or left). Start with the preferred foot in front. The hand on that side would go down first and then do your cartwheel.
Here is the change with the roundoff: What will change is where you put your second hand. Your first hand will go on the line, the second hand will come around a bit, and then you land on both feet. So, one hand goes down before the other. You can do the roundoff from a standing position or a running position.
The first thing you want to remember is that you always want to finish your roundoff with your arms up. This way, your arms are already up and ready to go where you need them. Now, you just need to make sure your feet are where they’re supposed to be in relation to your upper body.
For instance, if you want to do a roundoff into a back handspring or a whip, you would land with your feet slightly in front of you, so you have a backward falling motion to go backward. (Feet in front to go backward).
When you go from a roundoff into a high-level skill that requires you to go up, like the layout or double-back, your feet should end up a bit behind you to help you set up to go high. (Feet behind you to shoot you up high).
So that’s the secret sauce — you want to make sure you come out of roundoff with your feet in front to go backward, and you want your feet behind you to shoot up high.
Some of the basic things to know when connecting the roundoff into a higher-level skill is:
Prep Work
What should you be working on to strengthen your skill set and complete a flash kick?
The Mechanics of a Flash Kick
A backflip is absolutely necessary to do a flash kick and serves as the base to the trick. This means it needs to be a confident backflip at minimum. Once you feel comfortable in your backflip to the point that you can do a few in a row, the flash kick evolves by slowly splitting your legs before the landing. Over time, you’ll go from landing on two split feet to landing on one foot and then the other.
As you may know from my other videos, a cardinal rule for traditional backflips is to never throw your head back. This is still a rule for tricks where you’re looking to get maximum height in the air. However, for a flash kick, I break this rule in order to whip over as quickly as I can and see exactly where my foot will land. This is what allows me maximum control when I’m doing flash kicks on super narrow surfaces.
Check out the video for my flash kick details and bonus tricks from me and my teammates!
]]>One Quick Note: A gainer is essentially doing a backflip while moving forward, so you’ve got to have your backflip down before you can do a gainer. I repeat - please, don’t try a gainer if you can’t do a backflip! At best, you won’t be able to do it, and at worst, you end up in the ER.
Tight muscles stop you from using your full range of motion. So, really limber up and get the blood flowing before you start practicing your gainer. Stretch or use a massage gun.
Whether you use a mat, foam pit, or trampoline, the important thing is not to hurt yourself while you’re learning this new trick! But it’s easiest to start on a trampoline, and you can use the extra bounce to get yourself over.
Most people will go into the gainer with their left leg but figure out what feels most comfortable to you. If you are usually a left twister in gymnastics, you’ll step forward with your left leg but swing your right leg. If you typically twist to the right, then you’ll step forward with your right leg and swing your left leg.
Keep your chest at about a 130-degree angle to the ground. Place your arms behind you as if you’re about to take flight. This position is called the eagle, and it’s vital to landing your gainer. If your chest is too parallel to the ground, you can’t make a full kick with your leg.
Then take the leg you’ll swing with, pull it all the way back, and make a full swing. Note: Once you complete the gainer, you’ll land on your dominant leg.
Once you figure out which leg is your dominant one and perfect your eagle stance, you’ll be doing gainers in no time!
A one-handed back handspring is called a Valdez, and it's the next fun trick to learn after you've perfected your regular back handspring. This is a cool inversion skill that can provide a neat transition to your tumbling routine. The audience loves seeing the Valdez, which is an awesome way to add some variety to the classic skills. Yes, the Valdez is a more advanced move, but with the right training, you'll be mastering it in no time. Read on to learn how to perform the Valdez!
Once you've learned the back handspring, you can begin working on the one-handed variation, which we call Valdez. You'll need greater arm strength, though. While your weight is distributed evenly in the back handspring, a single-arm is taking the full force of your momentum.
You'll begin by engaging the same muscles as a back handspring: your quads contract as you squat, then you activate your latissimus dorsi and delts to flex your arms upward as you jump. Squeeze the glutes to extend your body as you press your hands toward the sky and rotate your scapulae upward.
Now comes the difference from a regular back handspring. You'll still be engaging that trapezius to adduct the shoulder blade and stabilize your shoulder. But you'll also need greater tricep and bicep strength to hold your arm straight when you land. Also, your supporting arm needs to be perpendicular to the floor. To achieve this, you must have good shoulder abduction. You'll engage the teres minor to prevent your shoulder from collapsing inward.
Then, pike hard to snap your feet down. You can land with both feet or only one, depending on the next trick in your routine.
Unlike in back handspring, you do not need to lock your arm straight unless you feel your biceps aren't strong enough to support your weight in a handstand. Otherwise, it's okay to slightly bend the arm in Valdez.
Be sure that your hand is pointing straight ahead in line with your body, or even slightly inward. Do not let your wrist rotate outward as this could cause injury.
This skill relies heavily on momentum, which can make it challenging to spot. That's why I recommend you feel very comfortable with your regular back handspring before attempting Valdez.
However, you can have your spotter place hands at your midback and behind the knees as you would with back handspring training. Once you extend backward, they can make sure you land in a proper one-armed handstand. They should NOT touch your arms, but they can guide your legs into a pike as you come out of the single-arm landing.
You can also practice this with a rolly and focus on planting that downward arm with good engagement.
I hope this guide was helpful as you tackle this awesome and challenging skill! Want more tutorials and tips. Feel free to follow me on social media and YouTube, where you can see the Valdez in action. It flows well into a lot of tricks where you need to gain some air. I also travel around the world doing workshops and competitions, so keep in touch to learn when and where I may be able to teach you the Valdez in person!
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A back handspring is a classic gymnastics trick that's always a crowd-pleaser. And believe it or not, it's relatively simple to do! The key is to maintain the proper body position and control your fall so that you can land safely. Read on to learn the basics of a back handspring and how to perform this fun trick.
A back handspring may look difficult, but it's all about controlling your fall as you launch yourself backward. You are essentially sitting, leaning back, then falling — but you land on your hands rather than your behind. This happens because your arms will meet the ground first as long as you keep them straight.
You will need to engage your quads and calves to launch yourself off the ground, your glutes to "sit" then arch backward, your latissimus dorsi and deltoids to bring your arms overhead, and your trapezius to adduct your scapulae and engage your shoulders. You should feel like you're doing a squat, then pressing the air upward as you extend your body backward.
This is a skill where you must commit. If you change your mind halfway through the trick, you could get injured. So, it’s important to overcome your fear of falling backward as you train your body position.
You can have someone assist and spot your handspring to train your body awareness and practice proper engagement. Your spotter should stand by your side with one hand at your mid-back and one behind your knees. As you sit, lean back, and spring backward, the spotter provides support at those two points. This way, you can get used to the sensation of falling backward.
Your spotter should NOT touch your arms. Work on keeping them straight with your shoulder blades together so you can have a nice strong handstand position in the middle of the trick. Once your hands are on the floor, bring your feet down to the floor. Continue practicing until you can execute the skill with less direct support and with the all-important "snap down" at the end.
Don't have a spotter? If your gym has an octagonal support device aka a "rolly," you can practice that backward movement with it. Stand in front of the rolly, sit, lean back, extend backward over the rolly, and snap your feet down.
I hope that helps! Feel free to follow me on social media and YouTube for video demonstrations. I also travel around the world, so keep in touch to learn when and where I may be able to train and spot you myself!
For the record, know that I’m not the first one to do the sitting back handspring, but I did popularize it with all the add-ons.
I’m happy to share with you here some of my secrets when doing the sitting back handspring.
The only thing I ask is that you already know how to do a good, solid, strong back handspring. If you haven’t done it standing, it will be even more difficult to do sitting. So number one, learn how to do it standing first. If you don’t know how I have a handy video right here that you can click on to teach you how. Once you have that down, you’ll be ready to go to the next step.
For this to go well for you, you will need very good core and back flexibility, as well as a lot of arm strength. You’ll be sitting so you’ll be low to the ground and will be bringing all of your body weight onto your arms. So strong arms and shoulders are a plus. You also want to ensure that you can bend really well, so having that core and back flexibility is a must in order to land on your hand from sitting.
Stretches are important to any exercise, and it also applies here. Here are simples stretches you can do to stretch out your core and your back:
These stretches will help stretch your front and your back muscles, which will be helpful for doing the sitting back handspring.
The sitting back handspring can be done on multiple surfaces. Some known surfaces for doing this are tumble tracks, air tracks, spring floors, and the grass. Wherever you choose to do it, make sure it’s comfortable for you. Hardwood and concrete surfaces are not recommended, as they could be harmful to your head.
There are a few different ways to start doing the sitting back handspring before actually doing it from a sitting position. One way is to hop first. The surface you’re doing this on will greatly influence how successful this is. You could also try standing and dropping. That allows you some additional flexibility for other movements, as well. Then there’s the stationary way where you are in a sitting position. Our focus will be on the sitting position.
Make sure you’re in a sitting position on the surface of choice. Apply these steps to pull off your sitting back handspring:
There’s no one specific way to do sitting back handsprings. These tips and tricks will help, but once you’ve mastered it, you’ve got it. All body styles are different, so yours may not look exactly like someone else’s.
As long as you’re working on your arm strength, flexibility in your core and back, making sure your shoulders are nice and strong, and applying to the proper surface for safety, you’ll be just fine.
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Here’s an issue I see often: stopping the arms midway. When you do this, that cuts off the height, and the head goes back, which causes the person to go straight backward. They may make it around because of outstanding foot rotation, but imagine what they could do if they had more height?
I have some tips for getting high in the air for a safer landing. Some of these things I’ve been doing since I was a youth, and they help me get pretty good height when I do back tucks. These tips will apply to anything that involves you going into the air because you want to make sure that you do have a lot of height.
The term setting is when you jump into the air and get your hands above your head. If you can still see your hands out in front of you when going up for your flip, then you’re not setting properly.
Your hands should be above your head. When you get your hands above your head, it helps you lift your chest up more. That’s what helps you get into the air.
Now, when you do throw your arms up, try not to let your head go back. When your head goes back, your body naturally tends to arch, and you’re bent over and cutting off your height, and you’re going backward and down instead of up and over.
Think of it as more of an up flip than a backflip. Your goal is to go up, flip, then come down. So, when you’re setting, you want to jump up and push.
When you’re going off of the floor, a lot of people just jump and keep their feet flat. But if you stand on your heels and jump, you won’t get very high, even if you’re flat-footed. So, push up and through your toes as you jump. This compresses your calves and presses them really hard, and it helps with your height.
As you jump up and you set, try to not bring your chest into your knees. Once in the air, you can lean back a bit and then bring your knees into your chest. Set high, lifting the chest, spotting something in the air to make sure you don’t throw your head back. Once in the air, pull your knees in and lean back a bit. That helps with fast rotation once you’re up top.
Again, you want to always ensure that you’re setting nice and high, getting your arms up and your chest up. Focus on not throwing your head back and making sure you get those knees in nice and tight as you lean back once you’re in the air.