Gymnastics Floor Routine - Putting It All Together

Michelle Carhart: Hi! I am Michelle Carhart and I am here to teach you how to choreograph a gymnastics floor routine. One thing that's very important about floor routines is how you spread yourself out throughout the floor. So don't concentrate on one area when performing. You want to start in one area and then all the tumbling passes have to be done from different corners to show that you really utilize the entire floor space. So when I am choreographing a floor routine I start off and depending as we talked about it before whether the gymnast is a dancer or a tumbler, that decides how long the gymnast takes before they get into the corner. Then they give their first tumbling pass.

The next question is how do they get from end of that pass to the beginning of the next pass, if they are dancer you are going to want to show a lot of beautiful dance using up the floor to get to the other corner. As a tumbler you want to get there as quickly as possible, so they are not going to waste all of their strength getting from one corner to the next.

Then what you are going to do a lot of gymnast, the powerful tumblers will wait until the very end of their routine to show a little bit of dance because as I said before the routine has to be at least 30 seconds. Usually, it will take at least 30 seconds just to get their tumbling in. So that's not usually a problem. When I am helping a gymnast put together a floor routine and we have completely finished the floor routine, we've put together all of the dance and all of the tumbling elements, I review the routine to make sure that there are no serious errors. That means if I have put in some sort of dance that the gymnast absolutely cannot do and she is going to get so many deductions on it that it's now even worth while which means any bent knees that can't be helped flexed feet because all of those -- anything that looks ugly is going to get a deduction and you are trying to minimize deductions.

So I will make sure that everything that I put into the gymnastics floor routine, the gymnast can do incredibly well, otherwise we take it out and we put in something different. Well, thank you for watching and I hope you've enjoyed it.