They concluded that the adult height of a person who has trained intensively in artistic gymnastics is not affected even if training took place as a young child and during puberty. There was no evidence that training as a gymnast causes the reduction in the length of your upper body or legs or that the timing and rate of growth spurts is affected. I believe taking part in gymnastics intensively is more likely to have a positive effect on your physical conditioning. Search for:. There's a pretty big misconception about how gymnasts do it.
It's not simply a matter of shorter women gravitating towards the sport, but it's also not exclusively about the rigorous training of gymnastics "stunting your growth. I'll admit it: Last night's gymnastics round wasn't the first Olympic Games during which I've tried to convince myself: Oh sure, I could have done what these women are doing, if only I'd just been shorter.
And yes, at my 5'6" height, I'd tower over every single one of the current members of the USA team. Simone Biles, our star athlete, is just 4'8". Lucky for me, there's no research that directly challenges my prideful excuse. It could be that small people do tend to seek out careers in gymnastics.
From a physics standpoint, people with shorter arms and legs are better suited for the tricky rotations like Biles' now-infamous "helicopter legs," which involves balancing on one foot, knee bent, with her other leg fully extended, and spinning around it that gymnasts often use to wow the judges.
A small study published in the journal Sports Biomechanics suggested that smaller gymnasts were better equipped for moves involving forward and backward whole-body rotations and twisting. Girls in gymnastics tend to have parents who also are smaller than average, he said.
The girls tend to run late on getting their first periods, and their mothers tended to have done the same, Baxter-Jones said. The delay in sexual development lets an athlete retain the more lithe figure of childhood, with smaller breasts and narrower hips. The girls catch up later, with sexual maturity and growth that comes later than girls in other sports, or later than girls who are not involved in a sport, Baxter-Jones said. The Baxter-Jones article, with 18 citations of previous works, did not include some of the 94 studies cited in the Caine article, Caine said.
Both find the girls catch up later in their growth. Like many of us, I've always been entranced by the performances of female Olympic gymnasts — so much so that, after the summer Olympics, I made an executive decision: I was ready to take up competitive gymnastics and, obviously, become an instant superstar. My parents were less thrilled about my new life plan; and although I'm sure it was because of the expense of lessons, they told me I couldn't start training for my spot on Team U.
As someone who, at age 8, was frequently mistaken for a kindergartener, I didn't want to take the risk. But while I haven't spent much time since mourning my missed chance to rock an American flag-print warm-up suit, I have always wondered: does gymnastics actually stunt your growth? Or are gymnasts so short because small people just tend to be better suited to gymnastics?
It turns out that the scientific community itself isn't entirely sure — but the idea that gymnasts would have grown to be a foot taller, if only they hadn't spent all the time on the parallel bars, is absolutely a myth.
We can all agree that gymnasts appear to be shorter than the average woman their age. When you bring the height of top athletes in other fields into the picture, the stature of competitive female gymnasts becomes thoroughly shocking: Kevin Durant, leading Team U.
When you examine CDC statistics of average female heights, you can see that the average fully-grown woman is around 5'4" — giving her a solid eight inches on year-old Biles.
But while the urban myths state that training keeps gymnasts from developing, there's strong evidence that women with smaller frames end up pursuing gymnastics because it is one of the few sports where being tiny is a boon.
Kevin Thomson, a physiologist who wrote about the physical qualities of gymnasts for the BBC, noted that "being small helps with rotational skills for example, somersaults.
For the same reason, gymnasts also tend to have short arms and legs. Other research has also suggested that the extremely tiny seek out gymnastics careers; one study from the s suggested that most gymnasts were already shorter than their peers by age four.
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