SCIENCE OF GYMNASTICS JOURNAL
Vol. 2 Issue 3 2010
EDITORIAL
Dear friends,
A year has gone by since we published the first issue of our journal, so we can congratulate ourselves on achieving our first birthday! As this issue is also our last of the year, perhaps some statistics are appropriate.
In 2010 alone we published 15 articles by authors from various countries including (in alphabetical order) Australia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Slovenia, and the United States of America. From the journals inception in October 2009 to the beginning of 2010, 6 articles were published also by authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, and Croatia. This results in a total of 21 published articles by authors from 11 different countries. Our friend from the editorial board William Sands (USA) wrote for the successful SIGARC symposium in Sao Paolo Campinas: less scientific articles on gymnastics topics have been published in recent years (by PubMed Database) comparing to decades ago. Through the SIGARC symposium and our journal we are increasing the number of articles in the gymnastics field. Authors have written from a wide range of scientific paradigms. We started in 2009 with medicine, biomechanics, didactics, and terminology; continuing in 2010 with psychology, motor control, metrics, history, and the theory of training. Topics dealt with high performance sport, physical education, and rehabilitation. Samples also represented a wide range of gymnastics disciplines and included participants from men's artistic gymnastics, women's artistic gymnastics, and rhythmic gymnastics. We hope in the near future to publish articles from trampolining, acrobatics, and aerobics. It is worth noting that studies were not solely concerned with athletes, but judges and Code of points were also analysed.
It is hoped that the research published in this journal will inform everyday practice in our field of gymnastics. Keith Russell (Canada) the president of the FIG Scientific Commission shares this vision, and supports our work. It should also be noted that from 1 October 2009 to 1 October 2010 our website received over 11,000 visitors from all over the world (101 countries).
The congress 'Current trends in the development of gymnastics' organised by the German Association of Sport Science was recently hosted by the German Sport University of Cologne. German scientists and their guests from Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, and the United Kingdom presented some interesting topics, and we hope to share this knowledge in the near future.
In the current issue we have five articles. The first article deals with training loads in women's artistic gymnastics in the pre-pubertal period. This piece of work will make coaches think about how to plan training properly and more safely, with consideration for the health of the gymnast. The second article analyses the contents of the gymnastics curriculum in school, and how the current curriculum is delivered. The third article is about rhythmic gymnastics and apparatus difficulty for group routines. The fourth article is concerned with manual guidance in gymnastics. This topic is rarely researched, and the article provides interesting results. The final article looks at how difficulty scores on apparatus affect all around scores in men's gymnastics. For all around gymnastics coaches there is still time to change training models in an effort to be more successful at the Olympic Games in London 2012.
Wishing you inspiring reading,
Ivan Čuk Editor-in-Chief
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