For years, gymnastics has been revered as the foundation sport for excellence in all other sports and new studies prove gymnastics, more than any other sport, helps students get better grades in school too!

The brain is divided into two hemispheres (or halves) – a right hemisphere that controls the left side of the body and a left hemisphere that controls the right side of the body. During gymnastics, students are asked to repeat movements that use the two hemispheres for both coordinated skills and opposing skills. Take jumping on a trampoline as an example of a coordinated skill – an athlete must keep both feet in a similar position and use the same amount of force in both legs to bounce straight up and down repeatedly or they will lose control and fall. Next, athletes are asked to demonstrate an opposing skill by doing a left split – their right hemisphere is working to keep the left leg forward while their left hemisphere is working to keep their right leg back. Most sports perform opposing skills like this during training – bouncing a ball with one hand, swinging a bat across your body or gaining speed while running – but not many also repeat coordinated skills like gymnastics does with jumping on the trampoline, holding a handstand or throwing a back tuck on a beam.

The addition of coordinated events to a child’s training is very important for brain growth. “Bilateral activities, common to all gymnastics programs, require both sides of the body to work together and separately” sites reading specialist Debra Wilson, M.A.. She credits gymnastics with creating more fluent readers and higher literacy rates in students in her report Tumbling to Success. “The more a child tumbles, climbs, creeps, and crawls, the more densely wired the brain becomes” and the more efficiently it performs all tasks that require bilateral activity such as reading, which requires the left side of the brain to process the letters and the right side of the brain for interpretation. A brain that has been practicing both coordinated and opposing skills will have the most efficient set of bilateral pathways and can process those letters and concepts quicker and therefore score higher in literacy and fluency testing.

In conclusion, all sports repeat opposing skills during their training but the addition of numerous coordinated skills during gymnastics training helps create the most efficient and strongest set of bilateral pathways in the brain that benefit a child not just in sports but reading and literacy too!

Check out this video below describing opposing and coordinated skills.

Thanks for reading and watching! This has been a collaborative research essay between EVO coaches and staff with more than 75 years of combined experience in gymnastics, coaching, teaching, and early childhood development.

Collaborators include:
Tammy Armstrong
Summer Armstrong
Nickie Garron
Brenda Harrison
Ellie Lawton
Rachel Mayle