Gymnastics is an extremely varied sport, with numerous disciplines within gymnastics itself. According to Collins Dictionary, “Gymnastics consists of physical exercises that develop your strength, co-ordination, and ease of movement.” Even its definition, which is supposed to be short and to the point, is very vague! This is because there are simply too many aspects of gymnastics to describe properly in a sentence.
So what insane person decided to invent such a dangerous way to spend the time? I’ve been asking myself that question for years! To answer this question, I decided to do some digging. I found two very useful websites, scholastic.com & olympic.org (if you want to learn more about this topic, check these out!) Gymnastics was first invented in Ancient Greece. Although, then it consisted of very different activities such as running, jumping, swimming, throwing and wrestling. At the time gymnastics was not practised merely for leisure, but to train the body physically in preparation for battle. Even Plato and Aristotle praised its fitness benefits. It was one of the sports included in the very first Olympics. The Ancient Greek term for gymnastics, gymnazein, translates to “to exercise naked”! The Roman civilisation later adopted this form of exercise to train soldiers.
As the Roman Empire declined, people began to practise gymnastics for leisure. When modern day Olympics returned in Athens, 1896, gymnastics came with it. It has since developed into six pieces of apparatus for men and four for women. Two men called Gutsmuths and Jahn played major roles in this. These still challenge a person’s flexibility and strength, but their purposes are based around leisure.
Gymnastics, Credit: en.wiktionary.org
That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed this brief description. In the next few posts I'll go into deeper detail. See you then!
No comments:
Post a Comment