Gymnastics can be a tough sport, but practice doesn’t need to be a negative experience. Creating a positive culture in your gym means that coaches and athletes feel respected, heard, supported, loved.

Why is this important?

• Performance: Improved motivation and focus, more consistency and more productive workouts.
• Team cohesion: building a common team identity, mutual trust between athletes and coaches. This can mean less athlete turnover and more “team spirit.”
• Compliance: athletes feel safe expressing emotions and speaking up about behavior that makes them uncomfortable.
• Overall athlete health and wellness, especially through the tumultuous teen years

Below are some quick and easy strategies you can use right away to start building a positive environment at practice:

• • Greet every gymnast by name as they walk in for warmup

• • Say goodbye to every gymnasts personally as they leave (all of mine get a fist bump, or our special handshake.

• • Make eye contact when you talk to gymnasts. This might mean bending or kneeling. 

• • Use specific, non-judgemental language to recognize effort or success. “I can tell you’ve been very focused on correcting your tap in your giants” instead of “you finally did a good tap on that set of giants.” Yes, gymnastics is judged sport, but not everything we say has to be judgy!

• Use open-ended questions. This is probably the hardest to do consistently, but can result in the biggest change. It forces athletes to use their critical thinking skills and take ownership of their work. 

Remember, CONSISTENCY IS KEY. As Zari Goldman says over at  http://swingbig.org/  “what you do every day is more important that what you do occasionally.” If you are truly committed to giving your athletes a positive environment, everything you do in the gym should be to support that goal.

What’s one thing you can do to tomorrow to make practice a positive place? Let me know in the comments below!