SCIENCE OF GYMNASTICS JOURNAL
Vol. 3 Issue 1 2011
EDITORIAL
Dear friends,
last October we attended the World Championship in Artistic Gymnastics in Rotterdam. We had a lot of meetings, but the most important was meeting with the president of the International Gymnastics Federation professor Bruno Grandi. We presented him our work during the last year. At the end of December we have reached agreement about collaboration between FIG and Science of Gymnastics Journal. We have got a new editorial board member -Keith Russell, Ph.D., who is the president of the FIG Scientific Commission and Hardy Fink, M.Sc., a member of editorial board as the director of the FIG Academy. Both FIG institutions - scientific and educational ones will be involved in further development of our journal.
The last issue of Journal was visited by more than 5500 visitors, what gives us a true compliment for our endeavor. However we would also like to have some feedback from you, the readers and researchers, as well. Researchers and authors show their interest in specific topics and their articles are blindly reviewed before publication. But we would like to hear positive or negative opinions about articles, perhaps some suggestions and additional ideas, anything in your opinion beneficial to further research. We will therefore open a forum for visitors to express their views and you are kindly invited to join the forum but also to send letters to the editor whenever feel appropriate. The letters will be published in the journal if judged so by the editor and editorial board.
February issue of the Journal starts with the article on Brazilian women gymnastics development in the last 30 years. Lauritia Marconi Schiavon and Roberto Rodrigues Paes performed a comparative analysis of their Olympic gymnasts sport life. All those federations who are starting with the first steps in gymnastics and want to win medals as soon as possible will highly value this excellent article. It is worth to note again that the coach's expertise is a key point on the way to success. It is always better to learn on somebody's other mistakes than to make your own.
The second article is by Portugese team of authors Joana Carvalho, Cristina Côrte-Real and Antonio Silva lead by José Ferreirinha. They analyzed evolution of the real difficulty value of uneven bars routines from elite gymnasts in the last 5 Olympic cycles. From their article the coaches can obtain important information about where the routines on uneven bars are headed in the future.
The third article comes from Serbia. Saša Veličkovic, Dragoljub Petkovic and Emilija Petkovic report interesting research dealing with the problem why their gymnasts can not perform the most difficult vaults well. They found the causes to lie in the runway strategy and technique. Sometimes we do forget the runway is the most important part of the vault.
The fourth article is from rhythmic gymnastics and deals with teaching and learning process. Brazilian authors Marise Botti and Juarez Vieira do Nascimento found that the teams investigated presented almost the same structure of trainings and differed only in their teaching methods.
The last article is about the history again. The Greeks Vasilis Kaimakamis, George Dallas , Panagiotis Stefanidou, George Papadopoulos write about the spread of gymnastics in Europe and America by pedagogue-gymnasts during the first half of the 19th century, an overview of era before our time and to whom we have to be grateful for the development of our beloved sport.
I wish you pleasant reading and a lot of inspiration,
Ivan Čuk Editor-in-Chief
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