"it's not called gymnicetics."

(I'm about to be specific to the floor event of gymnastics instead of talking about all four events, but my theory does apply to not only floor but also beam, bars, and vault.  Just keep that in mind plz.)

Fact I'm establishing:  Gymnastics is pretty much entirely based on body position.  The same idea of keeping your head in, staying tight, and hollow body position are carried throughout every aspect of it, and exceptions are few and are noted.

So given that gymnastics is entirely based on body position, it can be said that gymnastics is also a language.  Every individual body position you use in order to complete a tumbling pass is like a part of speech in English.  You can use different parts of speech, you can change where they are in the sentence, you can vary your sentence structure.  Either way though, you have a subject, a verb, and maybe a conjunction or two, some articles, and some adjectives.  In the same way, you can use different body positions to do different skills but essentially those same body positions can be used to make completely different skills.

Once you have your basic body positions down, you can get a lot of other skills based off of those same body positions, just connected.  Which is why when your coach tells you to try something new, if you've seen it before and know how it works, you should be able to get it within 3 tries.  It seems so alien to a person who has never tried it, but gymnastics gets easier the longer you do it because of  how familiar you are with how you do it.  

Now, given that gymnastics is all about body position and it's like a language:  Gymnastics is a language I do not speak.  It's like a first year language class to me.  In French I last year we learned how to say 

In the room, there are... 

                            and the way to say it is 

Dans la salle, il y a...

I knew that phrase, I knew the whole thing when it was together.  But when you deconstruct the phrase, I really didn't know how to use parts of it in other phrases to make different sentences.  I didn't know what "y" meant, I just knew that it had to be there in order to say "In the room, there are..."  

Now, for gymnastics, I feel the same way.  I can do lots of abnormal things that most of the world can't do, but I'm not any fantastic gymnast because although I understand the entire idea of body position, I don't apply it to myself.  I know that I should, so shut up, don't be sassy.  I can take out larger chunks of my skills and use them in other things, like for example I can take my round-off 2 back-hand-springs and turn it into round-off 1 back-hand-spring, but I can't take the same back-hand-spring and do it out of a rebound from anything but a round-off or another back-hand-spring.  

This idea is, I believe, also applicable in figure skating.  You learn small skills so that you can make connections into bigger ones later down the road when you're more advanced.  I don't really think I'll ever get to the point where I'm forming my own gymnastics sentences.  I only have about a year and a half left to do it in my life, and I'm probably just going to focus on doing the best I can improving skills I already have or learning skills that are very similar to ones I already have.  

A few sidenotes:

1.  I think that whenever I'm talking directly to the reader, I'm going to put it in italics to emphasize that I am physically trying to say something to the reader.  

2.  Another big issue with gymnastics is that someone in the gym is going to be judging you for you skill or your lack of skill whether you're in a meet or not.  There are always going to be moms and other gymnasts and coaches watching you fail and thinking you're stupid for it.  You have to get over that though and have some tough skin- because if you don't, you're not going to get through it.  It really does teach you to not care what other people think, because you know that haters are gonna hate.  

NSJFHSGHSLAGJ

I NEED SLEEP.  

maybe if I stopped getting such good compliments on this then I would maybe stop writing this and get some sleep once in awhile.  someone tell me I suck?

(jklol thanks everybody who reads this and tells me that they like it or hate it or whatever- I appreciate that you took the time to check it out!)