Floor Exercise
Floor exercise has been round as long as the sport of gymnastics. For women, the floor exercise is performed with music. The music must not have words and has to be between 70 and 90 seconds long. It originally consisted of primarily dance and dance skills with the occasionally tumbling pass or salto. The requirements for floor are a full turn on one foot, flips in both directions, multiple flips as well as twists, a dance pass with leaps and jumps connected together by running or dance, and choreography that uses all of the floor space (iSports). There are many different variations on tumbling passes a gymnast can perform. Usually a punch, round-off back handspring, or front handspring entry is used. The athlete then may do multiple saltos consisting of flips and twists or both. Turns have the gymnast’s foot at coupe, passé or some other position and may consist of a 360 degree turn or greater. There are a wide variety of dance skills that a gymnast can perform. The basic shapes are tuck, pike, wolf, spit, strattle, and sheep jumps. These also often are accompanied my twists and are connected to leaps, which are similar to running splits and can be done in a variety of ways. The choreography portion of floor is what draws the crowd. This dance between skills shows the gymnasts personality and is fun to watch. The personality of the gymnast shines in their floor routine. Below is a video of the evolution of the floor routine from 1950 to 1989.
Aly Raisman, Olympic gymnast in 2012, won gold in the floor event finals. She scored a 15.6. Her floor routine is the current pinnacle of floor gymnastics.
Floor is challenging because it is so long. 90 seconds of tumbling dance and other skills is extremely tiring, especially since one pass takes up so much of your energy. Also, tumbling when tired and be extremely difficult because it becomes harder to control a tired body and harder to sustain the energy needed to complete the pass successfully. The most common type of fall on floor is under-rotation due to exhaustion or improper timing. Floor is the hardest of the events to get injured on. Ankle and foot injuries are common due to landing short and hard. Typically, people do not get mental blocks on floor though some people get the “twisties,” where they twist when they aren’t trying to. Here are some floor falls.
For the most part, people regard floor as fun to compete and interesting to watch.