Does Your Life Feel Out of Balance?

Let me start with full disclosure. I fell so irreversibly in love with gymnastics after watching Olga Korbut and Cathy Rigby compete in the Munich Olympics that I checked out books from the library and practiced my skills on lawns and curbs. I ended up competing in high school and college. In the decades after, I have scoured the television for coverage of meets in between Olympic cycles, read everything I could find on the sport, and participated in Masters Gymnastics classes and competitions. With the advent of the internet, my quest to follow the sport got much easier. Now I can follow live blogs of events, listen to year-round podcast coverage, and even play fantasy gymnastics. I am not an impartial fan of the sport.

However, as a psychologist, I have long tried to figure out why this sport, out of all the hundreds of alternatives, so captivates me. I am sure the musical elements, the beautiful leotards, and the thought of flying, even temporarily, are part of it. I also love the discipline of the sport, the camaraderie of training with other gymnasts and coaches, and the thrill of overcoming fear to perform a physical feat. But for me, gymnastics also embodies many critical aspects of human accomplishment and serves as an excellent metaphor for life.

Gymnastics began with competitive exercises developed by the ancient Greeks. The first book about the sport, intended to serve as a guide for youth, was published in 1793. Over time, gymnastics became a popular form of calisthenics in Europe, which spread to the United States. Male gymnasts competed at the first modern Olympic games in 1896, and women were allowed to compete in 1928.

In the intervening years, the sport has changed drastically. The skills are progressively more complicated, and the equipment has been altered to facilitate performance and safety. The beams are covered with suede instead of slippery wood, the bars are designed to flex with movement, the floor exercise mat is placed on a bed of springs, the original horse-shaped pommel no longer has a head, and vaulting has moved from relying on a pommel horse with the handles removed to a specially designed table. There have also been major changes in the rules governing the sport, and training practices, with the result that in each Olympic cycle, people are performing skills that were previously believed to be impossible.

Of course, these changes in gymnastics parallel the march of human life. If humans have a superpower, it is our ability to communicate, learn, and teach each other, which allows us to build on the knowledge of the people who came before us. With each generation we increase the quality of what we can accomplish, and our expectations for the future. While today’s gymnasts are performing skills never before imagined, equally impressive are the televisions, phones, and computers we use to watch them. And we continue to watch because our brains are designed to track the actions of others. This contributes to our fascination with sports since watching others move triggers cells in our brains called mirror neurons and activates transmitters such as dopamine that generate feelings of pleasure and belonging. While these responses are common to all manner of sports, gymnastics requires a set of skills that most of us admire but cannot replicate.

To succeed, gymnasts need to develop endurance, strength, and flexibility in equal measure. They have to repeat movements hundreds of times to master them, while overcoming the innate human fear of launching themselves into the air, over hard surfaces, while in motion. In addition, they must focus on perfecting artistic movements, sometimes to music, and to make the entire practice look effortless. American gymnast Frederick Richard has created a fascinating series of posts in which he and University of Michigan athletes attempt to replicate the skills required for each other’s sports that highlight how difficult gymnastics is.

But gymnastics is also a metaphor for life. Sometimes, we have to force ourselves to run full out and launch ourselves into an uncertain future to achieve our goals, just as vaulters and tumblers do. On other occasions, we need to glide into the swing of things and go with the flow, which is a key component of performing on the uneven and parallel bars, as well as high bar and pommel horse. Some life challenges require us to stay the course, while others can only be conquered by making a split-second decision, to change something we are doing, as gymnasts do when they realize they haven’t taken off correctly for a skill or are out of alignment for a movement.

I believe the balance beam best encompasses the human experience. On beam, as in life we have to remain balanced and present in the moment while relying on the things we have learned and practiced in the past, and keeping our eye on the future, which in this case is the end of the balance beam. Not only that, on beam and in our daily lives we need to regulate our emotions by using excitement or anger to motivate us, and by refusing to allow anxiety or fear to stop us from trying something. We also need to work to synchronize our minds and our bodies to achieve the moments of flow that characterize the highlights of our lives.

The message I hope people take from watching gymnastics is that we are all capable of maintaining balance by staying grounded, physically and mentally, we need to dream of big goals, and it is important to extend grace to ourselves when we make an error. But the most important thing of all is that after a fall you need to take a breath, center yourself, and get back on the beam. I intend to do just that until the day I die!