Gymnastics Floor Routine - Starting a Floor Routine

Michelle Carhart: Hi! I am Michelle Carhart and I am here to teach you how to choreograph a gymnastics floor routine. The next part I am going to teach you is how the beginning of the routine starts. So what you will do is you have to decide what your beginning pose is. Often gymnasts have a really strong opinion as to how they start their floor routines and other times they don't. But what you want to do is you either start -- there are three ways, either you start with a pose standing up so you might do something like this or you do something in the middle which might be on your knee and maybe something like this or you do something on the ground. So you might do something like this or maybe even something like this. So those type of poses are very important for beginning the routine and then from there you can start.

Depending on whether a gymnast is a strong tumbler or a strong dancer also can help you decide whether to have the gymnasts starting standing or on the floor. If the gymnast is a really good dancer you want to start generally on the floor because that really can help you show up dance moves that will really bring out their style.

If the gymnast is a tumbler, they may want to start standing in the corner as many of the Olympians do because they really need to get out in their first tumbling task that takes a lot of stamina. So that is how you start a gymnastic floor routine. Now I am going to show you how important the timing is and how is the time the space between the dancing and the tumbling during a gymnastics floor routine.