Gymnastics is an elegant and artistic sport that requires a combination of strength, balance, agility, and muscular coordination, which is generally performed with specialized apparatus. Gymnasts perform sequences of movements that require flexibility, endurance, and kinesthetic awareness, such as hand hops, handstands, split jumps, antennae, and cartwheels.

Gymnastics as we know it dates back to ancient Greece. The early Greeks practiced gymnastics to prepare for war. Activities such as jumping, running, throwing discs, wrestling, and boxing helped develop the muscles necessary for hand-to-hand combat. Additional physical conditioning practices used by the ancient Greeks included methods of mounting and dismounting horses and a variety of circus acting skills.

Gymnastics became a central component of ancient Greek education and was compulsory for all students. Gymnasiums, buildings with outdoor courts where training took place, evolved into schools where gymnastics, rhetoric, music and mathematics were taught. The Ancinet Olympic Games were born around this time.

As the Roman Empire rose, Greek gymnastics became more or less military training. In AD 393, Emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympics altogether. Games had become corrupt and gymnastics, along with other sports, declined. For centuries, gymnastics was almost forgotten.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, two pioneering physical educators, Johann Friedrich GutsMuth and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, created exercises for children and young people on various devices they had designed. This innovation eventually led to what is considered modern gymnastics. As a result, Friedrich Jahn became known as the “father of gymnastics”. Jahn introduced the horizontal bar, parallel bars, pommel side horse, balance beam, ladder, and jumping horse.

In the early 1800s, educators in the United States followed suit and adopted German and Swedish gymnastics training programs. At the beginning of the 20th century, the armed forces began to publish exercise manuals with all kinds of gymnastic exercises. According to the US Army Physical Exercise Manual, these important exercises provided adequate instruction for the bodies of active young men.

However, with the passage of time, military activity moved away from hand-to-hand combat and towards contemporary computer-controlled fighter jets and weapons. As a result of the development of modern warfare, the training of gymnastics as a connection between mind and body, so important to the Greek, German and Swedish educational traditions, began to lose steam. Gymnastics regained the aura of being a competitive sport.

At the end of the 19th century, men’s gymnastics was popular enough to be included in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. However, the sport was a little different from what we know today as gymnastics. Until the early 1950s, national and international competitions involved a changing variety of exercises that the modern gymnast may find a bit strange, such as synchronized calisthenics on the team floor, rope climbing, high jump, career and the horizontal ladder, just to name a few.

Women began participating in gymnastics events in the 1920s and the first women’s Olympic competition was held at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, although the only event was synchronized calisthenics. Combined exercises for women were first carried out in 1928, and the 1952 Olympics featured the first complete regimen of events for women.

By the 1954 Olympics, apparatus and events for both men and women had been standardized in a modern format, and scoring standards were implemented, including a 1-10 point system.

Modern men’s gymnastics events are scored individually and as a team, and currently include the floor exercise, horizontal bar, parallel bars, rings, pommel horse, jumping and all, combining the scores of the six other events.

Women’s gymnastics events include balance beam, uneven parallel bars, combination exercises, floor exercises, jumping, and rhythmic sports gymnastics.

Until 1972, gymnastics for men emphasized power and strength, while women performed routines focused on the grace of movement. That year, however, a 17-year-old Soviet gymnast named Olga Korbut wowed television audiences with her innovative and explosive routines.

Nadia Comaneci received the first perfect score at the 1976 Olympics held in Montreal, Canada. She was trained by the famous Romanian Bela Karolyi. Comaneci scored four of his perfect ten on the uneven bars, two on the balance beam and one on the floor exercise. Nadia will always be remembered as “a fourteen year old girl with a ponytail” who showed the world that perfection can be achieved.

Mary Lou Retton became America’s sweetheart with her two perfect scores and her gold medal in the All-Around competition in front of the home crowd at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

These days gymnastics is a household name and many children participate in gymnastics at one point or another as they grow older. Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton, along with all those gymnasts since then, have helped popularize women’s competitive gymnastics, making it one of the most watched Olympic events. Both male and female gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on all continents.