Friday 28 September 2012

Origins of Trampolining

In 1937, an American called George Nissen saw a trapeze artist in a circus bouncing off his safety net and performing tricks as he did so. He heard the spanish word trampolin which means springboard in spanish. He decided to take this idea and start adapted it into his tumbling club.

The sport has grown in popularity since then, with small clubs all over the world. Trampolining is often viewed as a recreational activity, but Europe, Russia, America, China and many other countries have been producing world-champion trampolinists long before it became an official olympic sport in the year 2000.

Thursday 27 September 2012

More About My Trampolining

Trampolining is all about control, and in order to stay in control, you must have good body tension. In order to improve your body tension, you must exercise your core body muscles. I usually do this at home, as each trampolining class is only one hour long, so there is not enough time to work on your muscles during classes.

Each class is split into three 20 minute sections called 'rotations'.

 1. Routine work - In this rotation your coach gives you a list of moves in a certain order, and you must perform them in what's called a routine. The routine consists of 10 moves, and sometimes it is quite hard to remember the order of all the moves, but after a while it becomes easy and you perform flip after flip without even thinking about it.

2. Move work - This rotation involves learning new moves and perfecting moves you already know in order to score highly in you routines. The move I am working on at the moment is called a rudi. It is a straight bodied front flip with 1.5 spins incorporated. the hardest move I know is called a Lazyback Cody. It involves a 3/4 backflip landing on my front, and then from my front I do another 1 and 1/4 backflip.

3. Floor work - This is my favourite part of the class. In this rotation, we move off the trampolines and onto the floor, where some gymnastic equipment is set up. We do handstands, round offs, backflips, etc. on the mats, we do flips and spins on the mini tramp and we practise tricking on the air track. This is all do improve our balance and to train our core muscles.

Monday 24 September 2012

My Trampolining

I am a member of Supersonic Trampoline Club, one of the best trampoline clubs in Ireland. I used to train from 6-7pm on wednesday evenings with my friend Josh. I have recently moved to a different class where I will train on mondays from 7-8pm with my friend Sadbh. Her blog on gymnastics is here. I have only competed in one competition to date, and I won a gold medal in my category.

My favourite part of trampolining is the high bounce competition. In high bounce competitions, each competitor is timed on how long they spend in the air over 10 bounces. The higher they bounce, the longer their time is. My record for high bounce is 19.09 seconds, and I achieved this in a summer camp run by supersonic. My coach, Pauric, has achieved a high bounce time of 22.36 seconds. The world record high bounce time is over 26 seconds!

Thursday 13 September 2012

Competitions

In trampolining competitions, each gymnast is required to do a 10 move routine, consisting of flips, spins and shape jumps. Each bounce counts as the start of a move, but gymnasts bounce a couple of times to get to a suitable height to perform their moves.

Each gymnast starts their routine with 10 points. The gymnast's score is calculated by deducting points for incomplete moves, travelling or for bad form (not keeping their body straight, etc.). More points are added on for the degree of difficulty (tariff or DD) which is determined by the amount of half turns and quarter flips in a routine.

The highest ever DD at a trampolining event is 18.00, set by Canadian Jason Burnett in 2012. 16.5 is the usual DD for top olympic competitors.

Monday 10 September 2012

About the Trampolines

Competitive trampolines are tall and rectangular shaped. The bed of a competitive trampoline is made from rectangular piece of webbing, a strong, non-elastic material. The elasticity of the trampolines comes from the springs. There are around 110 steel springs set around the bed, and together these act to push you further away from the bed the stronger you push against it. This amount of springs give so much force that trampolinists sometimes jump over 9m high!

The bed of the trampoline is usually 2m above the ground, and the trampoline is surrounded by matting over 25mm thick. Trampolinist rarely fall off the trampoline, as they can control their bounces and keep themselves bouncing in the centre of the trampoline bed. The centre of the bed is marked with a large 'X' so trampolinists can see whether they are moving from the centre. Moving backwards, forwards and from side-to-side is called 'travelling' and severe marks are deducted for this in competitions.

Monday 3 September 2012

Introduction

My name is Eoin Long and I love trampolining. Not just bouncing around on some tiny garden trampoline doing small sumersaults. I mean getting massive air and doing crazy flips and spins on big olympic trampolines.

My goal for this blog is to provide information on trampolining. Things like; Where did it start? Where is it most popular? What does trampolining involve?

I should be updating this blog weekly, but I will try my best to post as much info as I can :)