Classes Take a Tumble, Happily

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/fashion/adults-catch-the-gymnastics-bug.html

Version 0 of 1.

FOR Carmen Hernandez, something flipped last summer when Gabby Douglas did.

Watching the bubbly gymnast win two Olympic gold medals, Ms. Hernandez, 40, whose previous workouts were exactly as daredevil as her home elliptical machine, said she thought, “God, it would be so cool if I could try something like that.”

She was wary of injury, so she took a cautious approach to her $28 classes at Sky Zone (a chain of basketball-court-size trampolines), slowly mastering jumps and leaps.

“I can jump up in the air and touch my legs, and my core is so much stronger, so maybe I could do a flip soon,” she said proudly.

Ms. Hernandez, a Santa Monica, Calif., digital media consultant and mother of one, added, “I would never have imagined that at my age I’d be trying to do things that I wouldn’t have done as a kid.”

A rise in the number of children signing up for gymnastics classes after watching the Olympic Games is now as predictable as the arrival of the Games themselves (which is to say, so predictable that some organizations like the Y.M.C.A. Woodmont Program Center in Arlington, Va., brace for demand by hiring extra instructors). But now adult women are leaping, if not backflipping, to channel their inner Gabby.

Watching Olympic gymnastics is “almost like a reminder, like an alarm clock went off,” said Salil Maniktahla, owner of Urban Evolution gyms in suburban Washington. “They see people on TV doing amazing things, and then they look in the mirror and think, ‘What happened to me?’ ”

Mr. Maniktahla in September asked an adult beginner class at his Alexandria, Va., location how many of them turned up because of the Olympics. Half raised their hands, he said. Other anecdotal evidence abounds: Erica Schietinger, a spokeswoman for Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, said revenue for the sports center’s adult gymnastics program jumped 76 percent during the Olympics, compared with the same two weeks in 2011. Video and fan Web site Gymnastike clocked a 50 percent jump in visits to its nationwide directory of adult classes in August, according to site figures. And in the two weeks after the London Games, Sky Zone had a 20 percent increase nationwide in attendance at its gymnastics-inspired adult aerobics class, where participants frequently try tumbles and flips.

“I don’t think I bounce as high as some of the other people in the class because I do get scared,” said the actress Candace Cameron Bure, 36, who began attending Sky Zone’s classes in August. So far Ms. Bure, perhaps best known for her childhood role as D. J. Tanner on ABC’s “Full House,” has stuck to jumps like pikes and one she called “moving seat drops,” but she said she planned to channel Gabby’s determination and try a flip. “Who isn’t inspired by the Olympics?” she said. “And my kids can flip. So I have to at least try.”

Also propelling gymnastics’ rise in popularity among adults: This year, competitors in their 20s and 30s outnumbered teenagers like Gabby, 16, according to figures posted by Masters Gymnastics, an organization that promotes “gymnastics for grown-ups.” An article in The Atlantic Monthly wondered if — 40 years. after a pig-tailed Olga Korbut backward-aerial-somersaulted her way to being the sport’s first teen star — the era of the “little-girl gymnast” was ending. (Probably not.)

“When I looked at the gymnasts 12 years ago, I wanted to throw a sandwich at them,” said Edith Halasik, 38, of Chicago. “Years ago I wouldn’t have been interested in a gymnast’s body. But Gabby and the girls today look healthier and stronger. You see their muscles, not their ribs. For me, that was the attraction.”

So Ms. Halasik began driving an hour each way (dazzled by the promise of instruction by a Mongolian national circus alumna) to take 90-minute beginner’s classes at the Actor’s Gymnasium in Evanston, Ill., where 10 sessions cost $178. Ms. Halasik is a personal trainer and ultramarathoner, but fitness credits don’t necessarily transfer: It took her four weeks to pull off a handstand, she said. Next up: flips.

“Sure, I can flip,” she said, pausing to add that she lands on her backside.

Carrie Tucker, 40, a Brooklyn Heights freelance writer, said she was slacking on her workouts, mostly the elliptical trainer and free weights. While watching the Olympics, she began turning cartwheels in her hallway, tried a couple of yoga classes (“there are some moves that mimic gymnastics,” she noted), and then ended up at Chelsea Piers, practicing handstands and aerials, or hands-free cartwheels.

After two months of twice-weekly classes, which cost $28 a session, Ms. Tucker has scored some of the best results possible off the medal stand: defined abdominal muscles, better-fitting clothes and “crazy muscular arms,” she said.

“Nothing else gives you that feeling of childhood possibility: that anything is possible,” she added — even, no matter how improbable, Olympic glory.

When she’s poised in the corner awaiting the signal to tumble, sometimes Wheaties-box-cover fantasies flash through her mind, she admitted. “You’re like, ‘All right, I’m ready, give me that 10,’ ” she said. (Since a scoring change in 2005, a perfect 10 no longer exists — today it’s a lousy score — but Ms. Tucker is steeped in girlhood memories of watching Mary Lou Retton earn one in 1984 clinching the first ever women’s all-around gold for the United States.)

Ms. Retton, perhaps America’s pre-eminent pixie, may have had a hand in today’s adult gymnastics surge, said Joe D’Emidio, who for 30 years has been the director of the Y.M.C.A. Woodmont Program Center. Her victory in the Los Angeles Games “was our first big burst — every kid in America wanted to be her,” he said. “Now all these kids who took some lessons then are in their 30s. They’re in the work force and probably they work out at a gym and they see the Olympics and think: ‘I wish I could find a beam or a barre again.’ ”

Sarah Bouvier, a new mother, quit gymnastics at age 6, after a Bela Karolyi-style taskmaster yelled at her for not being able to do a cartwheel after four weeks of lessons. But recently she and a group of friends in their 30s scored a free class at Rise Gymnastics in Coventry, R.I., and, she said, “we laughed from beginning to end.” (Classes are usually $10.) She managed not to fall off the balance beam, but couldn’t make it over the vault — or land that cartwheel.

“Not even close,” she said, laughing, of her non-cartwheel. “But at this point you just say, ‘I’m not going to be good at this, and I’m just going to have fun with it.’ ”