Prepare for the meet!

You got to warm this stuff up!

Any gymnast can tell you that warming up at a meet is drastically different than in practice. Especially on beam and bar, you have to be ready for it.

At a meet, you get to warm up on the apparatus for a time proportional to your team. In level 7, each gymnast gets 90 seconds. You add up the total amount of gymnast in a team, and that team gets to warm up for that long. This year, my team gets 4 1/2 minutes to warm up.

Because you get a limited amount of time, a lot of the drills that we would regularly do, can't be done. On floor, we usually warm up round-offs and back handspring drills. At a meet, you can't do all of that.

Most of us are ok with the shorter floor prep, but it's more of an issue on beam. I got my back handspring on the beam about a week before my first meet. So I had to get ready for the warm ups pretty fast. For difficult and scary skills, like back handsprings, we usually start on a low beam and work our way up. We like to use the low beam first to build confidence. If we can get our hands on a low beam, we can get them on the high beam. Unfortunately, most meets don't have a low beam to practice on, so you have to be ready to go from  the floor to the high beam. I remember this before our routines. I stopped doing back handsprings on the low beam, because I know that I won't get to at the meet. If I can't do a back handspring right away at my home gym, in my own territory, I probably will freak out at the meet.

Most of us like to warm these up on a low beam first.

On bar, you have to be consistent. Today, I got to warm up a couple of cast to handstands before I did the giant. I don't get to do that at the meet. You have to be able to do your skills right away, without the warm up. It's pretty important to be ready for that.