What It’s Like to Take an Adult Gymnastics Class

IEvery four years, I become a gymnastics fan. It’s the only summer Olympic sport I reliably seek out, and I stare from my couch at athletes performing tricks that seem to defy the laws of physics and human ability. Since my own gymnastics career ended around the time I started elementary school—in other words, around the time that lessons started to involve more than diving into a pit filled with foam blocks—I figured this occasional experience would be the closest I’d ever get to the sport in my adult life.

Until recently, on a Monday night, I joined about 20 other people for an all-level adult gymnastics class at Chelsea Piers Field House in Brooklyn, New York. Even though the Summer Olympics were over, the enthusiasm for gymnastics had not died down. I was lucky to get into the class, because I had heard several people say that the waitlist had been filling up quickly lately. And apparently, a similar trend is happening across the country.

“There are so many waitlisted classes now, and that was rare before the Olympics,” says Gina Paulhus, who maintains a list of adult gymnastics classes on her website. That list has grown dramatically over the years, from 231 gyms offering adult classes in 2015 to 590 this year, Paulhus says. She also runs a Facebook group for adult gymnasts that has grown from 300 members in 2014 to nearly 14,000 a decade later.

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Why are so many adults suddenly trying to become gymnasts? It could be that people are simply looking for fun, community-based ways to train, Paulhus says. Or it could be because some of the stars of the U.S. team, like 27-year-old Simone Biles and 25-year-old Stephen “the Pommel Horse Guy” Nedoroscik, are proving that mature adults can succeed in a sport once dominated by teenagers, she says. Former Olympic gymnast Chellsie Memmel also made national news a few years ago when she retired from competitive gymnastics at age 30.

If Memmel could do that, surely this thirty-something could do a cartwheel for the first time in decades?

As I nervously waited for my class to start, I chatted with a few people standing outside, trying to understand what made them flip and tumble—and whether I was going to be humiliated by my lack of experience. The first person I spoke to was a newbie with no gymnastics background who had only signed up because the class sounded fun, which would make me feel better. The second was a professional dancer, which it wasn’t.

“Is the class difficult?” I asked the dancer, who said she had taken the class a few times before.

“No,” she replied – before adding that some warm-up exercises “would make you realise how weak you are.” Awesome!

Her assessment proved correct. The warm-up began like a high school sports routine: high knees, butt kicks, lunges, before I moved on to a series of humiliating strength exercises, including sliding across the floor in a plank position with my feet on a glider disc. I was sweating profusely by the end of the warm-up, at which point we began stretching. As we did so, the pair of instructors asked if anyone was brand new. My hand went up, along with a few others. Was anyone a former gymnast? Just a few hesitant hands. Okay, I thought, Maybe I can do this after all.

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After stretching, we split up into two groups of about the same size: beginners and advanced. While the advanced group worked on tricks like handsprings and flips, we beginners tried to master the basics, like handstands, cartwheels and roundoffs.

Here I will reveal my illusion. Despite the fact that a) I am not very flexible or have particularly good upper body strength and b) I have not done gymnastics in 25 years, a small part of me hoped that I would be surprisingly good at it. Not Simone Biles good, of course, but passable. Maybe all those Pilates and yoga lessons over the years would somehow pay off and I would amaze everyone with my grace and skill!

That hope was dashed during our second exercise: backflips. When the instructor demonstrated the move, he rolled over smoothly and sprang up to a standing position as if it were nothing. When I tried it, I was stuck with my feet above my head, like a turtle that has fallen on its back. This was not worthy of a medal.

Despite my devastating lack of hidden talent, I enjoyed the rest of the class. The instructors were as patient and supportive as ever, and none of my fellow beginners seemed to take anything too seriously. I’ve taken plenty of group fitness classes that felt quiet and serious, but in this class, students complimented each other and chatted between exercises. We were all in it together, perhaps because we were pretty far outside our comfort zones.

Were my handstands perfectly straight or my cartwheels smooth by the end of the hour? Not at all. But it was fun to give it a shot and do exercises that were completely different from what I normally do in the gym, where every marginal improvement felt like a victory. Who cares that I had to brace myself against a wall to hold a handstand for more than a second? I was still upside down. I felt a little like a kid again, in a good way.

At least, until I realized I had pulled a muscle in my leg doing a cartwheel. Then I remembered I’m in my 30s.