We explain everything about the history of gymnastics, its development in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modernity until today.
Gymnastics history
The gymnastics is an Olympic sports discipline that tests the physical abilities of human being, through a regulated series of exercises for balance, strength, agility, flexibility Y endurance.
It is one of the most practiced sports disciplines in the world, in its various meanings: rhythmic gymnastics, artistic gymnastics, aerobic gymnastics, acrobatic gymnastics, etc. Each one endowed with a set of rules, provisions, techniques and support tools.
The term gymnastics comes from the ancient Greek gymnastiké, word in turn derived from gymnos, "Naked", since the athletes of yesteryear exercised without clothes. This already gives us a good measure of the age of this discipline sporty.
Gymnastics in Antiquity
The history of gymnastics begins in the Antiquity. The Greek culture was devoted to physical activity, as part of her idea of earring or optimal condition of the human being.
At that time, gymnastic activities were reserved for male athletes, and many of them were part of the Olympic competitions, so called because they were consecrating the gods of Olympus. From there, sports activities were born that later developed their own identity, such as boxing, wrestling and Athletics.
The Romans, direct heirs of Greece, also received gymnastics, along with horsemanship, walking and other activities that were linked to the military. They transformed it into circus exercises that later gave rise to confrontations between gladiators. Instead, other ancient cultures as the Egyptian and Chinese did value athletic exercise, and there are samples of hieroglyphs and papyri that testify to it.
Gymnastics in the Middle Ages
The tumbling Trampoline gymnastics was one of the surviving gymnastic disciplines throughout the medieval, a period of strong religious imprint in the West in which the body and its needs were devalued, in favor of the cultivation of the eternal soul.
Gymnastics in Modernity
The first book in which this discipline is mentioned was published in the 15th century by the Italian acrobat and tightrope walker Archange Tuccaro (1535-1602): “Dialogues on the exercise of jumping in the air”.
In the 18th century, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) catalyzed a profound reform in the education European of the time, and thus gymnastics began to be revalued in the West. It was especially important in Germany, where schools called Philantropinum, in which gymnastic activities in the open air were encouraged.
From one of them emerged one of the greatest predecessors of modern gymnastics: Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths (1759-1839), who led one of these schools in Schnepfenthal. His thought is collected in his book Gymnastik für die Jugend ("Gymnastics for young people") of 1793, in which he classified gymnastics in two: natural and artificial, that is, utilitarian and non-utilitarian.
Natural gymnastics was thoroughly developed by the Swede Per Henrik Ling (1776-1839), founder of the Royal Gymnastics Central Institute in Stockholm, in 1813. But the recognized founding father of modern gymnastics was the German Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852). ), founder of the movement Turnverein, a sort of association of gymnastics clubs in Berlin.
His advanced conception of gymnastics was recorded in the book Die Deutsche Turnkunst ("The German Art of Gymnastics"), from 1816, whose co-authorship he shared with his assistant Ernst Eiselen. Germany's first gymnastics festival (Turnfest) was held at Coburg in 1860, following Jahn's school.
In 1881 the International Gymnastics Federation was founded in France to supervise competitions in this discipline, which was included for the first time in the Olympics Modern in 1896. For its part, the FIG organized the first international gymnastics competitions for men and women, thus establishing gymnastics as a sport of world practice.