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Shahana Prakash
Honors Intermediate English Composition
31 January 2014
The Key to Perfection in Gymnastics: Combining Literacies
I was a late reader. As a child, I had no patience for solitary, quiet solitude. Instead, I was
active. I jumped on all the beds, coursed swiftly through our neighborhood with my friends in
bare feet, ran through the halls of our house, jumped on the washing machine and stood up and
then climbed back down again only to repeat. My mother could hardly keep track of me: one
minute I would be in her hands after taking a bath, and the next minute I had disappeared, having
run outside with just a diaper, standing in the middle of the road, vulnerable to oncoming traffic,
my mother trying to chase me down in her nighty. To my mother, I felt like two kids combined,
and my fathers absence he was studying in college far away left her exhausted. Eager to
channel my energy elsewhere, she enrolled me in gymnastics classes.
I was hooked from the start. There was nothing more fun than flipping, jumping high in
the air, balancing on a narrow beam propped up from the ground, rotating around a bar. Day in
and day out, in my house, in the gym, on the playground, I lived for gymnastics, thrilled by its
combination of skill, adventure, and most importantly, danger. I progressed rapidly, always
getting back up when I fell down. For 10 long years, gymnastics had defined me, emboldened
me, shaped and sculpted me, taught me to know my mind and my body, and most importantly,
guided my physical literacy, which I later realized, was a type of literacy not so different from
that of books and writing.
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But by the time I was thirteen, I cared less about books than about the full twisted flip I
needed to master to enter another world of higher and harder gymnastics at a more mature,
competitive level. Everything else I required to progress to level 8 the handstand on bars, the
tsuke on vault, the back handspring and back flip on beam was there, concrete, steady, and
elegant. All that was missing was this coveted, seemingly elusive skill. No matter how many
times Id attempted it, no matter how many times Id visualized that twist and flip in my head,
closed my eyes and saw it, it seemed lost to me, always slipping miserably from my hands. Then
one day, two years later, after reading an inspirational novel, magically and suddenly, I firmly
gripped it.
I remember the day vividly dark rain clouds, gloomy weather, only exacerbating my
frustration at not having accomplished my goal yet. But by the time I had gotten to gym that day,
it was not anger flashing in my eyes or doubt lining my irises but instead, fierce determination,
the words I had read in a book imprinted in my mind. I told myself this was it. No more time to
be scared, no more time to back away. I had learned every tumbling skill before this and each
was a stepping stone to this twisted flip, every element Id mastered before just combining.
After stretching and practicing easier tricks beforehand, I stood at the corner of the floor,
looking fixedly at the opposite side. My teammates were calling my name from behind, yelling
encouragingly that I got this, that I can do this. My hair was pulled back tight and my legs and
hands were at my sides, covered in white splotches of chalk. Finally, I focused, and everything
went quiet and I saw my movements slowly, my peripheral vision gone all I saw was the floor
and the ending mat. Letting my heart and intuition guide me, I ran hard against the floor, felt
every nimble footstep rise and descend, reached desperately and hungrily for the floor,
rebounded, and lifted high off the ground, entering the world for which I lived. I saw blurred
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images of the gym and my teammates, took in everything from my surroundings, gauging my
position while enjoying this magical altitude of bliss, and then flipped and twisted, fully and
completely, and landed.




Figure 1: Full Twisting Layout
When I felt myself back on this earth, I was living in a mixture of awe, satisfaction, and
accomplishment. It was the pinnacle of my career before my injury thats probably why this
moment stands so clearly, so deeply etched in my memory. On the car ride home in my mothers
car, the clouds had lifted, revealing quiet light and blue skies. The windows were down and my
elbow rested on the edge and I looked outward, beaming. I felt like the master of my own body
and my own mind, felt like I was in sync, felt like I had reached a proficient stage, like I was
fluent in a language, which was exactly what gymnastics was when I stopped to think about it
years later.
Gymnastics has its own set of symbols, its own vocabulary, its own syntax, its own
cadence, and it was my understanding of those elements that led to my twisted flip. The lexicon
of gymnastics is enormous, but having started young, I had begun breaking down the jargon of
the sport, understanding it, and implementing it at an early age, slowly building my dictionary as
I listened to my coaches and followed their instructions, which were plentiful as I tried to gain
the twisted flip. If they told me to stay square, it meant I had to keep my hips in line, not
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crooked. If I had to spot, it meant I had to keep a center of focus while turning. If I had to point,
it meant I had to keep my toes in line with my leg.
When I turned optional, a code name for higher level gymnast, the terms grew complex
but I understood it all the same, having lived in the gym practically half my life. My coach tells
me to do a back, back, full on floor into a tuck and I see the movements that need to happen. My
coach says Im missing a C level skill and I know thats a problem because it will reduce my
starting score. My teammates and I, too, have our own vocabulary. If someone ripped, you know
their hands are a bloody mess. If someone split the beam, you usually wince, the pain of it
familiar.
But gymnastics was less about the slang and the names we used to describe movements,
positions, skills, and scoring rules than about the tricks we wanted to perform and how we
achieved them. It was about reading my environment, reading my position in the air, reading my
body and its movements at every single second, reading my muscles, my capacity, reading my
place in space, reading the power, intensity, and rhythm of my steps.
Rhythm, a seemingly displaced term in an athletic, not musical, setting, was still
especially crucial. The day I achieved the twisted flip, I remember my coach reminding me
again, urgently pleading with me to get the beat and rhythm of my footsteps and back
handsprings right. Hed lay out his palm flat in front of me and tap on it in regular beats to show
me how my skill is supposed to sound: du dum, dum, dum.
It was only until I could read gymnastics proficiently, fully aware of the dexterity
required to achieve a skill that I could finally, at age fifteen, turn, twist, and flip, writing in the
language of gymnastics by performing it, making it come alive, translating it from a mental
vision to a physical reality. The flip was composed of letters: footsteps, rebounds. The letters
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built words: round off, back handspring, back handspring. And the words drew the full sentence:
full twist pass. Then multiple sentences could be woven together in lyrical, fluid prose, and with
practice, I could write and perform them confidently, boldly, and with flair, creating a story
through a routine. Gymnastics taught me how to read my body, write my movements, and
perform them; it taught me to have fun and to play; and more importantly, it taught me to be
aware of my bodys potential and its capacity.
The development of my physical literacy reached a peak the day I achieved my twisted
flip but it was only because it was finally combined with something just as essential mental
strength. A pose on the beam was nothing if it was shaky; a series of dance elements on floor
was nothing without confidence; and a tumbling pass was nothing to judges if they couldnt see
the determination blazing in your eyes. Mental strength was what I had lacked before I got the
twisted flip. Before then, I crumbled under pressure, my walls breaking in frustration when my
hard work seemed futile. By the time I was in high school, though, I found my support in an
activity that was not active. It was quiet and solemn, but I grew to enjoy it all the same, drawing
my mental strength in gymnastics toward the end of my career from another source: reading and
writing.
During the time in which I was struggling with the twisted flip, two of my dreams and
passions converged. One was still for gymnastics, but the other was medicine I was aspiring to
become a doctor. Excelling at academics suddenly became more important, and I put the same
determination and hard work that I had put in gymnastics into school. It was then that I began
taking advanced courses, challenging myself, and studying for tests not only to get the desired A,
but also to learn.
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Nowhere was my learning curve sharpest than in my advanced English classes, in which I
suddenly had to read at great volumes every day. Initially, I felt that the general reading process
was cumbersome, navigating dense texts, connecting seemingly disparate ideas, looking up
words in the dictionary at a frequency that interrupted my natural reading flow. Reading
literature seemed like such a laborious task, and I found little enjoyment in it.
Two things, however, forever altered my outlook on reading: 1) the SAT and 2) Robert
Warrens All the Kings Men, a novel. Ironically, the SAT, which is supposed to measure
intellect, actually pushed me to become a better reader, my dream of becoming a physician
motivating and inspiring me to score well on the test. The reading section was particularly
troubling, but I worked hard at it, memorizing but also understanding and applying the
definitions to hundreds of vocabulary words. No longer did I have to search definitions in a
dictionary. I suppose this was the enlightenment Malcolm X found as a new world opened
after had had copied the dictionarys pages (355). Suddenly, the language in literature and
books and novels was my language; it was not so foreign or abstruse and I could speak and
understand it.
My increased word base combined with my increased reading speed the SAT is also
timed unfolded a new place where I could actively seek knowledge and grow as a student,
gymnast, and person. Reading, just like gymnastics, was a skill, and it felt second nature the
more I practiced it. Soon, I began less reading word by word than I did idea by idea. I could read
through a book and not even know I was flipping the pages thats how natural and fast the
reading process became for me. There was no intermediary between reading and transferring the
thoughts on the page to my mind.
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It was with this skill set that I approached books after books about gymnastics and past
stars Nadia Comaneci and Dominique Moceanu being the most prominent of them. I perused
their biographies, gained insight from their memoirs. I learned about their challenges in
gymnastics, their setbacks, and what helped them move forward. With each notable teaching
moment in those memoirs, I applied it to my own gymnastics, eager to learn from their tactics.
The piece of literature, though, that dramatically increased my capacity as an athlete was one not
directly pertaining to gymnastics. It was a school read, assigned by my teacher, Mrs. Caton. The
book was called All the Kings Men.
Before I read this novel and before my sudden reading phase (which, Im happy to say
is not a phase as reading it still an enduring, important part of my lifestyle), I used to shoot
dubious looks at people who said that reading could change your life, that it could alter your
perspective, give you new hope. The clich had been worn out by overuse, and it seemed at best
a dose of wishful thinking.
Reading All the Kings Men, however, changed my thinking. I was reading that novel
quickly, flipping through its pages, until I finally got to the end. When I closed that book, a wave
of understanding passed over me. I saw the light. Everything was falling in place and in my
hands were all the answers to all my problems, the key to easing all my qualms in gymnastics.
Jack, the main character in the novel, finally realizes in the end that he had been so caught up in
the past, haunted by it, ensnared by his history that he had failed to live his life in the present. It
was a sad, regretful moment of realization for Jack, but for me, I was still young and I felt
enlightened.
There, the platitude of living in the present, portrayed through the story of one
individual, tracing his life and his emotions, gained new meaning. All this time, I had been
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defying that aphorism, shunning it. Whether at practice, at home, or at school I was either
consumed with my past or my future. I would think gloomily of previously agonizing practices,
in which Id twisted an ankle or hurt myself attempting the twisted flip. I would think about the
failure in the past, the hardship. And then there was the converse, in which I was caught in the
future, stressing over impending deadlines, medical dual admissions plans, and my career as a
doctor. Almost never did I stop to enjoy the day as a singular unit and focus on a task at hand.
When I realized this through the novel, I pushed myself to avoid Jacks destiny and pave
a positive one for me, one in which I lived day by day, not year by year. Within weeks, in my
gymnastics practices, I cleared my mind of the past and the future alike and focused
determinedly on the twisted flip, erasing both mental negativity and my past physical memory of
flipping and twisting the wrong way. During this time, Mrs. Caton had urged me and my
classmates to write regularly, to document our life experiences. Writing, she claimed, was at the
core of self-improvement. I implemented her strategy immediately and reaped the benefits as I
wrote, as if putting my goals down on paper and experiencing my feelings through the written
page solidified them and made them real. Stephen King would be proud I never [came] to the
page lightly (307).
Through writing, I could improve; I could change. Through reading, I learned more life
lessons than I could ever learn through the mistakes of my own lifetime. And eventually, my
body and mind changed, and one day at practice I got that twisted flip. My mind was suddenly
focused and strong, tough and unwavering. And my body was just the same: ready, willing, and
able.
It was in this way that I developed both my physical literacy and my mental literacy,
gymnastics providing the former while reading and writing provided the latter. In a way both
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literacies were the same. My physical literacy gave me an awareness of my body, its health, its
movements, and its position. My mental literacy, aided by my alphanumerical literacy, gave me
awareness of the world around me, made me cognizant of my mind, my thoughts, my emotions,
my mindset, the way in which Im living. In the end, physical and mental literacy an
understanding of both my body and mind worked in tandem, each helping and complementing
the other, both equally essential in gymnastics. Even as a retired gymnast, the skills Ive gained
have not been lost they are in the way I run, the way I walk, the way I nimbly dodge an
obstacle on the ground, and in the way I try to be determined in anything I do.
Sometimes, in my busy days, I forget that I was and will always be a gymnast, that
everything Ive learned through that sport is still part of me. Every now and then, though, in a
vacant hallway when no one is looking, Ill run into a cartwheel to remind myself.












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Works Cited
King, Stephen. What Writing Is. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Ed. Elizabeth
Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 305-307. Print.
X, Malcolm. Learning to Read. Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Ed. Elizabeth
Wardle and Doug Downs. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 354-360. Print.