Gymnastics and KinderGym

Find your local club delivering gymnastics or find out more about our other sport and recreation activities.

What are the Benefits of Gymnastics?

Participation in gymnastics must be recommended as a great foundational activity for children and can provide opportunities for physical development, character development, and education that are hard to find anywhere else. Key benefits from participation in recreational and competitive gymnastics are:

• Enhanced development of most of the fundamental motor patterns
• Potential for enhanced flexibility
• Enhanced general strength and postural control
• Enhanced balance
• Enhanced anaerobic endurance
• Unique long-term bone forming and strengthening advantages over most other activities available to children
• Enhanced academic performance benefits
• Enhanced Task Mastery orientations for more appropriate children’s physical education
• Enhanced skill goal setting, and the ability to focus on a task to a high level

Moreover, gymnastics is inherently fun. In summary, it can be argued that gymnastics participation enriches and physically educates the lives of its participants in ways that are unreachable by most other activities and sports (Sands, Caine & Borms, 2005).

(Taken from BENEFITS OF GYMNASTICS – a foundation in children’s growth and development T.Dowdell EdD (2006, revised 2010))