Gymnastics Floor Routine - Evaluating a Gymnast's Abilities

Michelle Carhart: I am Michelle Carhart and today I am teaching how to choreograph a gymnastic floor routine. Now, I am going to teach you how to evaluate the gymnast abilities. There are different types of gymnasts and there are two elements in gymnastics that makes a successful gymnast, one is being a dancer and one is being a tumbler. Most gymnast are very good at one or the other. It's very difficult to find a gymnast who can do both, that is where you see the Olympics gymnast because they are capable of doing both. However, when you are choreographing your routine you need to figure out which is the gymnast strength, so you can really start to form the routine around their strength. So as you have seen you have a gymnast like Anna, who is an amazing dancer and then you have a gymnast like Killah who is an amazing tumbler. What you need to do when choreographing your gymnastics floor routine is you really focus on what they are good at doing. So for Anna for instance, we would do a lot of dance elements to focus on the fact that she is a great dancer and with Killah we would really focus on her tumbling and minimize her dancing, although she would still be required to do the specific skills. But we will really focus on her tumbling skills. So that is how you evaluate the gymnast abilities. Now I am going to show you to select the required elements for a gymnastics floor routine.