Implications of child development for learning and performing in gymnastics

In this section, consistent but evolving findings have been outlined across the careers of expert performers. The pioneering work of Bloom (1985) over 25 years ago traced the pathways and provided profound implications for the progression of high level performers.

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But another dimension that is often forgotten is in regard to the practice of gymnastics during free and deliberate play (Côté et al., 2003) during the sampling years. During these early years of a gymnast’s career, it is essential that one or both of the parents devote some of their daily routine to becoming a taxi driver, sometimes for two-a-day workouts. Durand-Bush and Salmela (2002) reported that parents of multiple Olympic or World champions rarely had the energy to devote the same amount of time to other siblings and had to find other performance niches in their lives, such as in the arts or music.

Once the gymnasts pass through the specializing or investment years, they still love or respect you, and hopefully both, but now the rules have changed! You as a coach, teacher or parent, do not have the same total control. They now can call some of the shots, or at least participate in the planning of training and competitions, with their coach as a colleague. The extreme stages of deliberate practice may, when viewed from the outside, but appear repetitive and boring, but this is not always the case.

I invited a world-renowned Serbian concert violinist, Dragan Rodosavljevic, to a graduate seminar in Brazil. He remarked that when others watched him repeatedly practise the same piece over many hours, it appeared to them to be boring. He explained that he was curious about minute variations in his techniques and these small changes were not apparent to non-violinists. After 25 years, he was always experimenting with slightly different approaches.

It is interesting that the term curiosity is not found in the sport psychology literature regarding adherence to deliberate practice.

Durand-Bush and Salmela (2002) outlined how multiple Olympic and World champions maintained their training with meticulous planning and commitment, but did not require the same quantity for achieving their first gold medal, but improved the quality of training for the second one. They now had more free time and were able to plan for their future employment possibilities when their sport careers ended, since the 10 athletes then were either currently attending high school or university. They reported that imagery, relaxation and self-talk were important skills that they used during this maintaining period and also outlined the impor-tance of their physical and mental recovery to prolonging their careers. There are a number of factors that may have caused the underestimation of how individuals become champions in

FIGURE 12.4 Stages of learning and changes in performance across a gymnast’s career Years of practice

Novice Expert

Sampling years

Specializing years

Investment years

Maintaining years

Stages of expertise development

Performance

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gymnastics, and the athletes do not always attribute it to the number of hours of deliberate practice but sometimes to the genetically driven notion of natural talent.

One of my childhood gymnastic heroes was Abie Grossfield, an American gymnast who competed in the 1956, 1960 and 1964 Olympic Games and was also a long-time coach for the USA men’s team. In 1995, I had the opportunity of talking to him at the 1995 Sabae Worlds and I asked why he was such a great gymnast at such a young age, since he made his first Olympic team at 18. He said that he learned all of his gymnastics from 15 to 18 years of age!

Thinking of Ericsson’s 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, I asked what he did prior to these three years. He said, ‘Nothing – just five years of rope climbing and trampoline twisting and somersaulting’. Now, this is what the Russians are currently doing: massive conditioning at a young age and learning spatial orientation skills on the trampoline. Figure 12.2 reveals the high levels of the contributions of the organic skills (muscular strength and flexibility) and perceptual skills (balance and spatial orientation) during the final stages of gymnastic devel-opment. It seems that Abie was wrong in his self-assessment and that the developmental theory of learning was more appropriate!

Duran-Bush and Salmela (2002) reported the remarkable feats of athletes who became multiple Olympic or World champions in separate Games. However, a number of Russian gymnasts like Boris Shaklin and Yuri Titov participated in multiple Olympics and World championships in the 1950s and 1960s for the Soviet Union. What was more impressive was Tanaka’s (1987) report which outlined over a 28-year period what he termed the ‘Japanese Golden Era of Gymnastics’, when 32 Japanese gymnasts competed in multiple Olympics or World contests! Ono and Kenmotsu competed in seven consecutive games, from 1952 to 1964 and 1968 to 1979, respectively, an amazing record of longevity in such a demanding sport.

Two other examples from athletics and one from gymnastics spring to mind regarding pass-ing from the samplpass-ing to the investment years and, in the case of gymnastics, remainpass-ing in the investment years. The first regards Wilma Rudolph, the three-times Olympic champion in the sprints in athletics (100m, 200m, and 4 x 100m relay) at the 1960 Rome Games; the second was with Lee Evans, world record holder in the 400m and in the 4 x 400m relay at the 1968 Mexico Games. I was fortunate enough to meet them both at a conference in Perugia, Italy, in 1991. While thinking of Bloom’s (1985) stages of development I asked them both:

‘When did you first think that you were good in athletics’? and ‘When did you think that you were great’?

Wilma was the first to respond and said that she never thought that she would be good at anything in sport, since as a child she experienced no sampling years since she had polio, scarlet fever and pneumonia and for some years lost the use of one leg. But she did say that, as a high school student, she trained at the Tennessee State University with the famed

‘Tiger Bells’, and was beating their times in practice. These successes in the intervening years transformed her from being good to great in her progress towards the Rome Olympics, where she was great!

Lee Evans was another story, since he was always in good shape, and when he began training as a freshman at San Jose State University, in repeated 400m runs he noted that his more experienced team-mates were lying on the track gasping for air while he was ready for the next series. He said to himself: ‘Maybe I do have a future in this sport, and maybe I can become great’. His world record of 43.86 second lasted for almost 20 years.

But perhaps the most amazing gymnastics-related event which occurred during the invest-ment and maintaining years was Dmitri Bilozerchev from the USSR, who won the European championships at the unheard-of age of 16, in 1985. Shortly afterwards, he was involved in a

Task demands and career transitions in gymnastics 119

car accident in which he broke one leg in 40 places. But the Russian medical staff were able to reconstruct his leg with pins and straps and two years later after an incredible rehabilitation programme during which he worked on his upper body, in 1987, he won the World gymnastics all-around title! This went beyond the maintaining into the reconstructive years! In that year at the Rotterdam World’s, his tough mental attitude developed during his recovery, and his performance levels led to his being labelled as the foreman, since he always looked in charge of everything.

12.4 Conclusion

Gymnastics for men includes six events and four for women. Each event has various and sometimes, extremely different task demands. Some apparatus require balance, others strength and power, and others highly complex and difficult elements. Thus, sport sci-ence must be multidisciplinary and specific for each apparatus.

Knowing what are the task-demands for each apparatus: each apparatus has different task demands. The balance beam requires women gymnasts to perform on a beam that is 10 cm wide, and the movements are often equivalent to those performed in floor exercises on a 12 x 12-metre surface. The vault, for both men and women, requires a rapid sprint towards the horse, contact with the horse with their hands at an appropriate angle, somersaulting and /or twisting in the air, ‘spotting’ the landing point, then ‘stick-ing’ the landing with no further movement. The other events require gymnasts to per-form movements which are not natural for human beings, including being upside-down, twisting in the air, being supported by only one arm (uneven and horizontal bars), per-forming movements requiring extreme flexibility (floor and balance beam), dynamic balance (pommel horse) or strength (rings). These elements can be assessed with some sport science methods, but more frequently through the eyes of experienced coaches.

Understand the evolution of the various points of view and methodologies of researchers in gymnastics since 1985. In 1985, Bloom interviewed the best scientists, musicians and athletes in the United States. He found that they followed very similar career paths. During their initial stages of involvement in their activity, they received very caring interventions both by their parents and teachers, and became ‘hooked’ on the activity. This led them into the middle stage, which required stricter training by the coaches and more parental support. In the final stage, after many years of practice, they worked with the coach in a more collegial way, during which decisions regarding train-ing and performance were decided upon together.

In 1993, Ericsson and his collaborators used a quantitative approach to understand how musicians evolved from novices to experts. Using diaries and questionnaires, they found that expert performers completed at least 10,000 hours of what was termed ‘delib-erate practice’, or practice that was goal-related, but was not necessarily enjoyable, and thus they were able to put a metric on Bloom’s work.

Côté, Hay and Abernethy (2003) replicated Bloom’s study and labelled the early stage the ‘sampling years’, when the athletes tried a variety of sport activities; this was followed by the stage in which they would specialize in a given activity for 8 to 10 years, and this was termed the ‘specializing years’. This was followed by another period, called the ‘investment years’, during which the athletes devoted all of their time practising and competing in their selected domain.

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Durand-Bush and Salmela (2002) added another dimension to Bloom’s model, by interviewing multiple World or Olympic champions, with special attention given to the period between their first and second gold medals, which was termed the ‘maintaining years’. Their practice was less intense and more focused, and rest, mental practice, and recuperation were emphasized.

In summary, the models and guidelines first suggested by Bloom provided a qualita-tive framework for expertise development, which intertwined the career phases of ath-letes, coaches and parents (Bloom, 1985). Côté and Hay (2002) later labelled the sub-components of the various activities that young, successful athletes were engaged in prior to moving into the deliberate practice regimes during the specializing years. Finally, Durand-Bush and Salmela (2001) considered the development of expertise from the other end of the continuum, when athletes had already achieved Olympic or World Championship gold medals and continued to achieve others over the next cycle, during the maintaining years.

13.1 Coaching

The notion of an autonomous, self-directed athlete’s propulsion to world class standards has been put into perspective by the research of Salmela (1996). Expert coaches reported on how they helped shape the learning environments of young athletes by judiciously creating and monitoring achievement goals, and facilitated the acquisition and maintenance of excep-tional performance in training and competition by minimizing the constraints which limited their practice, competition and skill development.

Some dimensions that have been so far omitted are the central roles that coaches play, not only in gymnastics, but in other sports as well. Success in gymnastic achievements cannot occur in isolation, nor does it in any other academic pursuits. I spent many hours with great former Soviet Union coaches abroad, such as Leonid Archiaev and Edouard Iarov, and many foreign and native gymnastics coaches living in Canada. Of course, when I compared the best in the world to myself, my shortcomings in understanding the rapidly evolving gymnastics coaching techniques, and the fact that I was now part of the very old school of coaching, quickly became embarrassingly obvious.

Rabelo et al. (2001) discovered that young Brazilian soccer players, usually from lower socio-economic classes, received only minimal coaching until they reached the professional ranks as juniors. But they played and practised for an enormous amount of time – at each break in their classes, before and after school, and in nearly all of their leisure time. In contrast, all Brazilian gymnasts received specialized coaching from the beginning of their careers, but during their leisure time did other activities apart from gymnastics (Moraes et al., 2004; Rabelo et al., 2001). This is in agreement with Durand-Bush and Salmela (2000), who reported that Canadian Olympic and World multiple champions spent their youth discovering a variety of other domains and in only a few cases were totally devoted to their selected activities.

Côté and Hay (2002) discussed the importance of two different types of activities in which coaches could facilitate the progression from the deliberate play, sampling years, through the investment and deliberate practice years. Deliberate play involves the child’s active participa-tion, is voluntary and pleasurable, provides immediate gratificaparticipa-tion, and is driven by intrinsic motivation. On the contrary, deliberate practice is not as enjoyable, requires effort, and involves the delayed gratification of rewards (Ericsson, et al. 1993).

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COACHING AND PARENTING IN