We all of bad days for what ever reason which is ok because not every day is perfect and its normal to have bad days. Sometimes I have bad days cause i woke up late or had a hard time with school but normally a bad day for me is usually because of gymnastics practice, and yesterday was a really bad practice.

Gymnastics is one of the hardest sports in the world and is an extremely mental sport. When you see a gymnast do a skill they were most likely scared of that skill at some point while learning it. When a gymnast gets really scared of a skill to the point where they can’t do it at all for a period of time we call that a mental block because it feels like when you try to do the skill theres something stopping you from doing it. It feels like theres a wall behind you stopping you from doing it no matter how bad you want to do it or how many times you’ve done it before.

While I was on balance beam yesterday I was doing one of my skills called a back handspring. Back handsprings on beam are one of the skills I have a mental block on so lately I have been doing it on a beam with mats under it so its less scary. This usually works and i work on making the beam higher and higher so I can eventually do the skill in competition on a high beam. When I went to go do the skill, I couldn’t I would hop off the beam reset and try to go again but I couldn’t which eventually started to make me really upset. I left beam that day not doing it on the beam I planned on doing the back handspring on which took a big tole on my gymnastics that day. Gymnastics is manly mental and can go wrong in many ways which is why something that may sound small to a non gymnast could be something that ruins a gymnasts whole day.