An introduction to USAG Power Tumbling

If you've seen an Artistic Gymnastics floor routine, then you are already familiar with the basics of Power Tumbling. Athletes perform skills on an elevated spring runway that gives them the ability to bounce high, sometimes higher than a basketball goal, as they demonstrate speed, strength and skill while executing a series of acrobatic maneuvers.

Instead of a square floor with multiple "tumbling passes" (and a sprinkling of "dance" moves for the women), though, Power Tumblers execute a single pass at a time on long, narrow floor ranging from 60' long for the lower levels to 85' for Level 10 (and Elite).

In general, the tumbling floors consist of a number of sections with fiberglass rods, such as the one pictured to the right, and covered with the floor material. These are commonly referred to as "rod floors" (for what I hope are obvious reasons).

For the exact details of trampoline specifications, check out this equipment spec sheet from the USAG website. For a history of how tumbling floors have evolved, check out Through The Years: How the Competitive Tumbling Floor Evolved by by Jim Bertz, the 1976 and 1978 Tumbling World Champion.

The number of skills, as well as the difficulty, that an athlete performs varies based on the level of the athlete, with the lower levels performing fewer, less difficult skills and the higher level athletes performing more skills and combination with a higher difficulty. A tumbling competition consists of two passes for athletes Levels 1-9, and three passes for Level 10. The athlete's final score is the total of all three passes.

As with trampoline and DMT, the athlete is judged on the quality of execution of each skill, and at the higher levels also receives points for difficulty of the routine. We'll cover the details of judging and scoring in later articles.

The following video gives you an idea of what a Level 10 tumbling pass looks like. This was the second pass in a Gold Medal winning performance at the 2009 J.O. National Championships:


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