#MaleGymnastics #ObscuredSport #Calisthenics #IronCross #Planche #GymnastsVsWeightlifters
Have you ever wondered why male gymnastics seems to be so obscured and rarely admired, despite being arguably much harder than weightlifting or calisthenics? 🤔 In this article, we will delve into the world of male gymnastics and explore the reasons behind its lack of mainstream recognition.
## The Difficulty of Male Gymnastics
Male gymnastics is a highly demanding sport that requires incredible strength, agility, flexibility, and skill. Here are some reasons why male gymnasts deserve more recognition for their athleticism:
1. **Iron Cross and Planche**: These are just a couple of the incredibly difficult moves that male gymnasts perform. The strength and control required to hold these positions are unparalleled in other sports.
2. **Years of Dedication**: Male gymnasts train for years to perfect their skills and routines. The level of dedication and discipline required is truly admirable.
3. **Incredible Muscle Proportion**: Male gymnasts have a unique physique that is a result of their rigorous training. They are incredibly strong, yet still maintain a level of agility and flexibility that is unmatched.
## Misconceptions about Male Gymnastics
Despite the undeniable difficulty and athleticism of male gymnastics, there are still many misconceptions that surround the sport:
1. **Positive Impression of Bodybuilders**: When people think of a bodybuilder, they often have a positive image in their mind. However, when they hear the term gymnast, they may associate it with something less masculine or impressive.
2. **Lack of Media Attention**: Male gymnasts do not receive the same level of media coverage and recognition as other athletes, such as weightlifters or basketball players. This lack of exposure may contribute to the obscurity of male gymnastics.
3. **Perception of Ballet**: Some people may mistakenly believe that male gymnasts are simply performing graceful ballet routines, rather than executing incredibly difficult and physically demanding tricks and maneuvers.
In conclusion, male gymnastics is a highly challenging and impressive sport that deserves more recognition and respect. The next time you see a male gymnast in action, take a moment to appreciate the incredible strength, skill, and dedication that goes into their performance. Let’s give male gymnasts the recognition they truly deserve! 💪🤸♂️
So, why do you think male gymnastics is so obscured and rarely admired? Share your thoughts in the comments below! And don’t forget to check out our website for more articles on sports and fitness. Thank you for reading!
For those that don't know, male gymnastics is absolutely different from the female gymnastics sport. It's basically a much much harder version of the calisthenics tricks you see random street dudes pull off.
Things like Iron Cross and Planche require years of dedication to even do in the first place and these athletes need to be insanely ripped with far better muscle proportion than a bodybuilder.
So why doesn't male gymnastics get any media attention or respect at all? When people hear bodybuilder, they get a positive impression of a man. But when they hear gymnastics, they think the man is just doing ballet dances or something
The same reason why you never hear about women’s basketball/football/baseball etc. Theres less money in it
They aren’t scantily clad women so it attracts less interest.
Weightlifting isn’t popular because people like to watch it, it’s popular because men want to appear stronger to attract women, and weightlifters are generally considered more desirable than gymnasts
It was a lot more popular decades ago before the internet became a thing. It was more televised when tv programming was far, far more scarce than it is today. No idea why it dropped off in interest.
A few unsubstantiated ideas:
1. It’s a sport where the athletes make it look much easier than it is, to the point where it’s not entertaining. More people would watch if dudes wrecked themselves more often.
2. There are far more female gymnasts than male. Most of the people I know who are excited to watch gymnastics are women. I think women appreciate getting to watch a sport where women are the stars.
3. It’s kinda gay. For the same reason women like to watch female gymnastics, a lot of men don’t want to watch male gymnastics.
On body building: I don’t think it’s a wildly popular sport, but I think it’s easier for the average person to understand. Also, in body building, the built body is the spectacle. In gymnastics, the body is the tool to do the job. The physique is there but it’s not the focus.
When you’re comparing gymnastics to bodybuilding and saying gymnasts look better is something that is entirely subjective. Not to mention from what I can tell, you’re unaware of the many different divisions that exist in bodybuilding. These divisions look vastly different from one another even aside from the differences of the competitors themselves. Bodybuilding is also entirely focused on the look as opposed to gymnasts which is fully performance based.
While what gymnasts do is far more skillful, to the layman it’s significantly less hype than something like powerlifting or olympic weightlifting. People can’t really conceptualize the nuances that go into a gymnasts performance. While weightlifting, powerlifting, and strongman ANYONE can understand how impressive it is. It’s just visually more entertaining for most people to watch a man deadlift 1000lbs or pull an airplane than it is to see a gymnast perform.
I hate that this is true, but it is probably because there are not many 6ft 2 male gymnasts.
You know why.
Bc women’s is better
Gymnastics became popular for girls in America when the women’s team started winning, specifically when Mary Lou Retton won the first all around gold for the US in ‘84. The more winning the team the more money becomes available, women’s gymnastics was able to build a great program and continued winning. The US gymnastics team have been the darlings of the Olympics ever since.
Men’s gymnastics never made it to the mainstream like that. Never got the popularity boost. It’s treated as obscure because it kind of is. There is no boys program at the club we take our 3yo to. They don’t have parallel bars or rings or a pommel horse or even a freaking high bar. If he wants to go past kindergym, we have to find somewhere else. And there aren’t a lot of options.
I think your comparisons aren’t really helpful here. A couple points:
* Comparing men’s and women’s likely comes down to who actually does the sport. Girls in gymnastics outnumber boys 10:1 or more, so thousands more women have experience and connection to the sport than men do. There’s a quirk that more women have had big media moments with the olympics, but that’s likely because the US tends to be more successful in the women’s division than the men’s.
* Comparing with bodybuilding doesn’t make much sense because bodybuilders don’t really do anything, and I don’t think many people watch active sports just to see cool bodies.
* What is more surprising is that men’s gymnastics hasn’t gotten more attention given the increased interest in stuff like Crossfit and other functional or competitive fitness activities.
‘Hard’ doesn’t mean attention.
Ultra marathons / cycling etc are incredibly hard at pro levels. Number of people watching these events even in Olympics: handful.
it’s not harder than the other stiff you named. it’s just hard in a different way.
There is not that much correlation between how popular a sport is and how difficult it is.
It probably doesn’t help that male gymnasts tend to be very short. Average height is only 5’4″. I imagine there is some bigotry about that.
it takes more time to understand, i have no fucking clue how hard the ring tricks actually are. they seem hard but i have no reference. but weightlifting? so easy to understand even if you dont workout. if a guy benches 700 pounds and you weigh 160 pounds you know thats crazy with no experience
1. I am assuming you are American, because places like China, Russia, and Japan admire men’s gymnastics A LOT and it’s not obscure at all. Part of this is due to the American sports market being very very saturated with other options to watch, part of it is due to the US national team not having as much success to capitalize on.
2. Gymnastics is just an inaccessible sport tbh. If you compare it to other sports as a spectator, the rules and scoring take more time to learn and aren’t necessarily intuitive. If you show a Shewfell vs Dragulescu vault to someone who has never watched gymnastics before, you’d have to explain why one has so much more difficulty than the other despite looking more “simple”. Gymnastics requires much more knowledge and attention as a viewer than just counting how many times a ball goes through a net, and that’s going to turn people away.
3. Inaccessibility part 2: If you are comparing it to weightlifting and calisthenics, even worse because any guy can go to their local gym and try those out, but they’ll hurt themselves terribly if they try to touch an apparatus without at least months if not years of training first. And it’s much easier to find a place to learn weightlifting than it is to find a place to learn gymnastics.
4. Sexism doesn’t make sense, it is useless to try to apply logic to it. If someone hears gymnastics and thinks of a man doing ballet, not only are they ignorant of what men’s gymnastics even is, they are ignorant of how hard men doing ballet is too. You’re not going to win those people over, they just like being able to look down on things that are girly.
It’s the tights haha
In addition to what’s already been said there’s Title IX which basically killed non-revenue Olympic sports at colleges. There’s just not the opportunity to compete in gymnastics past a certain age for most men.
Harder for who, exactly? Your logic is flawed.. If you train gymnastics your whole life / vs weightlifting- you’ll obviously get good at what you’re practicing. A weightlifter doing gymnastics would struggle- and the same would be the case if a gymnast tried a snatch / clean&jerk.
I’ve been a powerlifter for my entire life- and I couldn’t do what a gymnast did. I wouldn’t expect them to follow me for a squat/bench/deadlift session either.
It’s about branding, unfortunately.
I have mad respect for both male and female gymnasts, but this is my perception of why the media/people in general don’t fawn over male gymnasts:
1. Gymnastics hasn’t been branded as “cool” by the media (unlike e.g. most contact sports). Instead it is often put into the “aesthetic sports” category, which seems to take away some of the focus on just how physically demanding it is.
2. The outfits. Men wear tight pants and no cool protective gear and unfortunately, the general public appears to associate that with being “not cool”. People love watching women in tights. But men – not so much.
3. This is a big one: The stuff gymnasts do is so far out of reach for the average spectator that we cannot begin to grasp how difficult it is. Most of us have lifted something heavy many times in our lives, and so when we see a person on tv lifting a really heavy weight, we instantly have a sense of how impressive it is by comparison to what we could do ourselves. But few of us have done enough gymnastics to really grasp how difficult it is to do three flips on a set of rings, hold that Jesus pose, flip into a ring handstand, change direction and spin around a few more times, and then do a double flip onto the ground.
Our toxic trait is to think “they make it look so easy, I bet I could do something at least close to that if I practiced for a year”.
4. Male gymnasts are really small, haha. Small man no be impressive to dumdum big man lol.
5. “Women should be graceful, men should be strong and violent”. I don’t agree with this, but you can’t disagree with the fact that the prevailing pop culture touts this message. As per the other points in this response, male gymnasts are (perhaps unfairly) seen as graceful rather than strong, badass warrior types.
6. “But what about other sports where people balance on stuff, do flips, and tricks? Parkour is considered cool, so why isn’t gymnastics cool?”
Again, the answer is mostly branding. Many extreme sports in the “freestyle” category evolved when people got tired of the serious, rigid and (comparatively) nerdy vibe that permeated the original community of the sport. Freestyle skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, parkour etc. was a counter-reaction, aimed at creating a different, cooler culture for the different, cooler athletes. This creates a juxtaposition where to the viewer, people who do flips in baggy clothes are the cool ones, while people who do flips in spandex must therefore be un-cool.