Every four years, I become a gymnastics fan. It’s the only summer Olympic sport I reliably seek out, gawking from my couch as the athletes perform tricks that seem to defy the laws of physics and human capability. Since my own gymnastics career ended around the time I entered elementary school—in other words, around the time classes began to involve more than diving into a pit filled with foam blocks—I assumed this occasional experience was as close as I’d ever get to the sport in my adult life.
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Until a recent Monday evening, when I joined about 20 other people for an all-levels adult gymnastics class at the Chelsea Piers Field House in Brooklyn, New York. Even though the summer Olympics had already ended, enthusiasm for gymnastics hadn’t died down. I was lucky to get into the class, as I overheard multiple people saying the waitlist had been filling up fast lately. And apparently, a similar trend is playing out across the country.
“So many classes are waitlist-only right now, and that rarely happened before this past Olympics,” says Gina Paulhus, who keeps 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 almost 14,000 a decade later.
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Why are so many adults suddenly trying to become gymnasts? It could be that people simply want fun, community-oriented ways to work out, Paulhus says. Or it could be because some of the U.S. team’s stars, like 27-year-old Simone Biles and 25-year-old Stephen “the Pommel Horse Guy” Nedoroscik, are proving that grown adults can succeed in a sport once dominated by teens, she says. Former Olympic gymnast Chellsie Memmel also made national news a few years ago when she un-retired from competitive gymnastics in her 30s.
If Memmel could do that, surely this 30-something could attempt a cartwheel for the first time in decades.
As I nervously waited for my class to begin, I chatted up a couple people idling outside, trying to get a sense for what brought them out to flip and tumble—and whether I was about to be humiliated by my lack of experience. The first person I spoke with was a newbie with zero gymnastics background who signed up just because the class sounded fun, which made me feel better. The second was a professional dancer, which did not.
“Is the class hard?” I asked the dancer, who said she’d taken it a few times before.
“No,” she replied—before adding that some of the warmup exercises would “make you realize how weak you are.” Great!
Her assessment turned out to be correct. The warmup started out like a high school sports practice—high knees, butt kicks, lunges—before moving into a series of humbling strength exercises, like scooting across the floor in plank position with my feet on a glider disc. I was fully sweating by the end of warmups, at which point we began stretching. As we did, the pair of instructors asked if anyone was brand new. My hand, along with a few others, went up. Was anyone a former gymnast? Only 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 roughly equal-sized groups: beginners and advanced students. While the advanced group worked on tricks like handsprings and flips, we beginners tried to master basics like handstands, cartwheels, and roundoffs.
Here, I will let you in on my delusion. Despite a) not being very flexible or having particularly good upper-body strength and b) not having done gymnastics for 25 years, a tiny part of me hoped that I would be surprisingly good at it. Not Simone Biles good, obviously, but passable. Maybe all those Pilates and yoga classes over the years would somehow translate and I would stun everyone with my grace and skill!
Those hopes came crashing down during our second exercise: backward somersaults. When the instructor demonstrated the move, he rolled over smoothly and popped up into a standing position like it was nothing. When I tried it, I got stuck with my feet over my head, like a turtle flipped onto its back. Medal-worthy, this was not.
Despite my devastating lack of hidden talent, I enjoyed the rest of class. The instructors were unfailingly patient and supportive, and none of my fellow beginners seemed to take anything too seriously. I’ve taken plenty of group fitness classes that felt silent and serious, but in this one, students complimented each other and chatted between exercises. We were all in it together, maybe 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 try exercises totally different from what I normally do at the gym, with each marginal improvement feeling like a victory. Who cares that I needed to brace myself against a wall to hold a handstand for longer than a second? I was still upside down. I felt a little bit like a kid again, in a good way.
At least, until I realized I’d tweaked a muscle in my leg doing a cartwheel. Then, I remembered I’m in my 30s.
