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Four months of training
Posted: Monday December 20, 1999 01:36 PM
Since becoming head coach in 1990, Valorie Kondos steadily built UCLA into one of the premier gymnastics programs in the country. In 1997, UCLA became only the fourth school to win the NCAA championship. Kondos has coached 26 athletes to 89 All-America honors in her 16 years as an assistant and head coach, and in 1996 and 1997 she was named National Coach of the Year. The Bruins are ranked No. 4 in SI for Women's Winter Sports preview. Check out Coach Kondos' diary every other week on CNNSI.com.
November 19, 1999
Gymnastics is an odd sport. What the common person would classify as insignificant smaller muscles, which aren't needed for day-to-day activity, are imperative for someone to perform gymnastics. It is the fine-tuning of all of these muscles, along with the strength of the major muscle groups, that make it essential for a gymnast to train year round. Regardless of how much aerobic conditioning and strength training an athlete might do in the off-season, nothing simulates what the muscles go through when performing gymnastics. For this reason, most NCAA gymnastics teams have their athletes report as soon as possible in the fall. Our UCLA team has been training since the second week of September. We are currently three weeks away to the start of the 2000 NCAA gymnastics season. My husband (Bob Field) happens to be a football coach here at UCLA, and he can't believe that we would have the team report and start training four months before our first competition (football reports 3 weeks before their season opener). Other sports also can't believe that we train our full NCAA-allotted four hours a day straight. In fact, this is often a difficult adjustment for incoming freshmen who are used to training six and seven hours a day before they get to college. Many college gymnasts find the transition from private club training to college training an even greater challenge because of the changes they feel their bodies go through with the advent of puberty. Considering the low body fat percentage that gymnasts need to maintain in order to excel in such a physically demanding and pounding sport, many gymnasts don't go through puberty until they are 16 or 17 years of age. The change in their distribution of weight often plays havoc with their gymnastics skills. We had an athlete grow four inches in her senior year of high school (from 4'6" to 4'10"). The biomechanic differences her body experienced in her gymnastics skills literally forced her to retrain her muscles to work with a totally different body. In her case, the wear and tear it took to re-train her body proved too much to handle physically, since she had already endured 13 years of seven hours a day training. Due to the fact that collegiate gymnasts work with a more physically mature body, we spend a great deal of time strengthening the major muscle groups surrounding their joints to prevent injury as much as possible. Our athletes also need to concentrate on aerobic conditioning to maintain a good fitness level. Because we use every minute of our allotted four hours a day for gymnastics training, it is up to our athletes to get on an aerobic program that they enjoy on their own time. In the fall pre-season, we like to introduce them to many different types of aerobic possibilities. This season we've had them swimming, walk/jogging, biking, stadium climbing, and doing Tae Bo, which they LOVE. So far, things have worked out well, and each of the athletes has been able to find some aerobic activity they enjoy doing on their free time and for study breaks. I have to say, living in Los Angeles and being at UCLA makes this rather easy considering the weather is always beautiful, and the campus is surrounded by some of the most beautiful residential areas in the country -- Beverly Hills and Bel Air. With our season opening in three weeks, we are currently training full routines and working on the athletes' endurance. The hardest part of their training right now is getting the endurance to make the last part of their routines with ease. It's typical at this time of year for them to lose steam going into their bar dismount, beam dismount, and especially their last tumbling pass on floor. What many people don't realize is that gymnastics is NOT an aerobic sport. The longest period of time they are constantly moving is about 1 minute and 20 seconds, not enough time to build any sort of endurance. It's therefore up to our training assignments to help build the needed endurance. For example, on floor, they would do one full routine (they may need to do their last tumbling pass into a pit or a softer landing surface so they don't get injured) and then immediately do another routine with easier, more basic tumbling passes, or even stop the music when they get to their tumbling pass and have them run from corner to corner three times per tumbling pass (of which there are usually three). Each athlete is different in their training needs, so we individualize the assignments for each athlete. There are some athletes who don't need to train the actual skills as much but need more endurance work, while others need to work a lot of repetitions of skills to maintain proper form and technique. We are extremely excited about this season. We return three of the top gymnasts in the country in junior (Mohini Bhardwaj) and seniors (Lena Degteva and Heidi Moneymaker) and have a phenomenal freshman class of athletes who are as committed academically and athletically, as they are talented. We open our season at the "Super Six Challenge" at the University of Georgia, which will be televised on ESPN. Whereas most of our regular season meets are dual competitions, this will be a six-way meet, and all six teams are in the Top 10 nationally. It's hard to win in the SEC, but we have as good of a chance as any other team there to start off the season with a win. I'll leave you this week with a comment made to me by one of our men's basketball players: "You all have a HARD sport. There's no one to pass the ball to!"
-- Coach Kondos
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