Which event in gymnastics is the hardest?

However, in this article, I look in-depth at each gymnastics event and analyze the key things that a gymnast needs to be successful in each one in an honest attempt to decide which one is the easiest.

Let’s get started!

Each discipline can be made up of multiple events. For example, Women’s Artistic has four events (floor, vault, uneven bars and beam) however Mens Artistic has six (floor, vault, high bar, pommel horse, rings and parallel bars).

Some gymnasts are considered all-around and will compete in all of the events whereas others will specialize in just one or two. As gymnasts get older, they are more likely to specialize in order to prolong their career and reduce the extremely long training hours needed to be an all-around gymnast.

In my opinion, vault gymnastics is probably the easiest artistic event.

This is because it is the quickest – a vault takes less than 10 seconds from start to finish. It doesn’t require as much upper body strength as other events like bars or rings and it doesn’t have multiple hard impacts like a floor routine would require.

Some of the oldest gymnasts to keep competing at the highest level have been vault specialists. The oldest vault gymnasts in recent times are:

Of course, not every gymnast excels at the gymnastics vault, and they would most likely disagree with me!

At competitions, gymnasts earn their scores in two ways. The first is through the difficulty score – the harder the skill they perform, the higher the value. The second is through execution. This is usually out of ten and gymnasts lose points for errors that they make.

Vault scores can have a higher average compared to other events because judges are only marking a small number of things such as take-off and landing. Whereas in a floor routine or bar routine there will be eight or more skills that can each lose marks. Because of this, you could argue that vault is easier to get a consistently high score on.

This table breaks down each discipline into its individual events and I have ranked the physical characteristics needed to excel at each one. WAG is the abbreviation for Womens Artistic Gymnastics, MAG is for Mens.

This table highlights that Vault relies on speed and power but not much else in terms of physical attributes. Other events require high levels of all-around physical attributes.

Most people would agree that in artistic gymnastics, male gymnastics is harder because there are six events as opposed to the four in women artistic. By the time gymnasts have reached the senior age groups, men will usually be performing skills with higher difficulties than women.

For example on the floor, the triple tuck has been competed by male gymnasts, but never females.

On Vault men regularly perform double somersaults but these are rarely performed by women on vault.

However, the floor routines performed by women have music and dance that the men don’t so you could argue that these are harder to perfect. The balance beam is another very hard apparatus only competed by women and the flexibility and balance needed would be near impossible for the taller, bulkier male gymnasts.

Most gymnastics fans are familiar with Artistic gymnastics events, but there are actually 11 gymnastics disciplines in total – more about them in this article.

Many people consider Artistic events the hardest because of the long training hours needed to master all of the apparatus. Events in other disciplines can be considered easier because they focus on one event and gymnasts can reach the top level of that discipline without the high workload of Artistic.

Which disciplines can be mastered more easily? Just bear in mind that even the ‘easier’ disciplines require high levels of physical conditioning and mental strength. This often leads to gymnasts retiring early – more on that in this article here.

Gymnasts run onto the DMT perform one somersault that lands on the top of the trampoline then jumps immediately into another somersault that lands on the mat. Double Mini Trampoline doesn’t require huge amounts of upper body strength or flexibility but it does create some huge (and dangerous) somersaults.

Aerobic gymnastics is often overlooked because it is so different from the other disciplines however it is one of the eight recognized FIG disciplines and has competitions all the way up to world championships.

It involves high-intensity movements and flexibility to music but doesn’t involve flips or other harder gymnastics skills.

Acro combines dance and lower-level tumbling with balances in both groups and pairs.

Although the tumbling skills are not that hard, the balances do require precision and are spectacular to watch. Acrobatic gymnastics doesn’t demand the 30 – 40 hours of training per week that Artistic does, so could be considered easier.

Vault gymnastics in my opinion is the easiest of the artistic events to excel in but this does depend on the individual gymnast and their physical attributes. Artistic is always considered the hardest of all the gymnastics disciplines because of the wide range of skills needed and high training hours needed.

The balance beam involves similar concepts. All the athlete has to do is keep her center of mass over the 4-inch-wide (10 centimeters) beam in order to balance. In other words, she could just stand there and not fall off, but it would be a rather uninteresting physics problem (and sport). Instead, gymnasts spin, twist and kick on the balance beam, testing the boundaries of the simple physics principle that could easily keep them stable.

Gerton said that the rings should also be counted as an event that's among the most advanced confrontations with physics that an athlete can face. The physics challenge that he notices specifically in this event is the lack of leverage that occurs when a gymnast pulls his body into a cross shape. It's one thing for a person to pull his body up to and through rings with arms that are near the body, but elite male gymnasts do this with their arms completely straight. The farther away from the body a gymnast holds his arms, the less leverage he has to move his body upward, Gerton said.

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" need to have an incredible amount of core strength to counteract that reduction in the leverage," he added.

In reality, there is no gymnastic event that is without extreme physics, experts say. Many of the events involve complicated balancing, such as handstands on the bars, and these maneuvers require the same coordination between center of mass and base of support as do the balance beam and pommel horse, but not as continually. Vault presents its own unique physics problem in the conversion of horizontal energy (running) into the vertical push and velocity required for the aerial skills gymnasts perform off the vault.

"You'll notice that people like Simone Biles do that really efficiently," Gerton said. "She takes her horizontal speed and she is able to convert that into vertical motion, which gives her a lot of time to do amazing things in the air."

However, vaulting doesn't require the same level of balance as do some of the other apparatuses.

Tumbling is notable because, when viewed through the lens of physics, it's somewhat the opposite of pommel horse and balance beam: There are fewer constraints on the gymnasts' movements but the physics involved are harder to understand. Gymnasts in this event aren't fighting to balance on a small surface, but the complex physics of a floor routine is sometimes beyond comprehension.

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"Tumbling on floor, from a physics perspective, is really, really complicated to deal with if you were to do an analysis of tumbling," Contakos said. In the world of biomechanics, motion analysis on tumbling is still at a really "primitive stage," he said.

Floor exercises are hard to analyze, because they have more variables than the other events, according to Contakos. For example, the floor is spring-loaded and the gymnasts are moving their bodies in more diverse ways that blend jumping, balancing, twisting and turning.

Olympic gymnasts in every event are performing at the limits of what is physically possible and showing laymen and scientists alike that they can do more than anyone realized.

"As soon as we think we've hit a wall on that ability of just one simple principle, someone comes along and does it bigger and better and faster, or makes up a new skill," Contakos said.

And this year's gymnasts at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are no exception.

"These amazing Olympic athletes are pushing the limits all the time," Gerton said. "They're figuring out how to push the physics to the edge as well."

RIO DE JANEIRO — Of all the playing surfaces in sports, none is more unforgiving than the balance beam.

It measures 10 centimeters wide — barely wider than a hockey puck — 5 meters long and stands 1.2 meters above the ground.

"It's the great equalizer," Michigan women's gymnastics coach Beverly Plocki said. "No other event requires the same mental focus. You stumble on the floor, it's a minor deduction. The beam is the event of perfection. No room for error."

"The most nerve-wracking event to watch," said former gymnast and coach Stephen Cook, now director of sales for AAI, the official supplier of gymnastics equipment for the U.S. Olympic trials. "A small mistake can become so obvious."

Consider Gabby Douglas, who twice fell off the beam during last month's trials, each time while performing a relatively simple move. The falls dropped her to seventh in the all-around competition and nearly bumped her from the six-woman Olympic team.

Many call the beam the most difficult event in women's gymnastics, one that requires all the skills a top gymnast needs: grace, power, control, rhythm, flexibility and — most important — mental focus.

"The beam is an incredibly challenging piece of equipment," said former Olympian and Florida coach Rhonda Faehn, now senior vice president of USA Gymnastics. "But when performed right, it's absolutely gorgeous."

The earliest reference to a balance beam, according to gymnastics.isport.com, was in an early 1800s German book titled "Gymnastics for the Youth," which included a chapter on balancing on a horizontal pine tree log.

By the middle of that century, the beam gained popularity worldwide for use in physical education classes. It made its international competition debut in 1934 in Budapest. Then it was a mere 8 centimeters wide.

By the time the beam became an Olympic event at the 1952 Games in Helsinki, it was widened to 10 centimeters. (In the U.S., most people refer to the width as 4 inches, but it is in fact exactly 10 centimeters — or 3.937 inches.)

Beam materials have also evolved. Until the 1950s, the beam was a laminated piece of solid wood, but as the skill progressed from simple poses to tumbling skills, a safer and more forgiving piece of equipment was required. The beam is now an aluminum tube covered with a synthetic suede that does not get slick with perspiration, Cook explained.

In the 1980s, the beam was tweaked again as mechanisms were added where the legs meet the beam to give more spring.

As the beam has become more flexible, routines have become more and more difficult, including skills one used to see only on floor exercise.

Take for example Simone Biles' routine in the U.S. trials: After her mount, she did a double pirouette, two leaps, a front flip with a twist, a backward-handspring-double-back-flip combination, a front flip, two leaps with splits, another back flip, a front flip, more split leaps, several turns, then two back handsprings leading to a twisting double-flip dismount.

Did we mention the 10-centimeter-wide beam?

In the Olympics, each gymnast must complete several skills as part of the routine, including dance and artistry essentials. If she fails to complete any of those, a deduction is taken. If the gymnast falls off the apparatus, it's a full-point deduction.

"In the Olympics, the scoring system is all about how much difficulty they can pack into a routine," Michigan's Plocki said.

Gymnastics coaches say teaching those difficult skills is one thing; teaching the psychological element is another.

"We teach 'mental choreography,'" Plocki said. That consists of breathing drills, relaxation and going through the routine over and over in their heads. "It's all about controlling what your mind is thinking."

Faehn, an alternate on the 1988 U.S. Olympic team and women's coach at Florida for 13 years, says the key to teaching the beam is to start training early and gradually.

"Once the athlete becomes comfortable with the beam, the coach will take away the mat or lower them," she said. "You transition. A coach won't rush you."

She said some gymnasts are natural beam workers. Others are not.

"Some said they felt like they were on a sidewalk," she said. "Other times they feel like the ground was moving underneath them."

Over the years, the beam itself has changed. Will it change again?

Cook said there has been discussion of further alterations to accommodate the more difficult routines and new generations of gymnasts.

"The skills are getting more treacherous," Cook said. "Gymnasts are getting bigger. They need to plant both feet together before the dismount. That's a narrow space."

The proposal, which Cook and Plocki said was unlikely to be implemented anytime soon, is to extend the length of the bar roughly an inch, or 2.5 centimeters, and widen the bar near the ends by about a centimeter.

Regardless of all the changes to the beam he has seen in his nearly 50 years in gymnastics, Cook says the event continues to astound him.

"When you're watching, it seems amazing," he says. "But it's even more amazing than you can imagine. If they were doing those moves on a diving board, it would be no big deal. But they aren't. They're doing it on a 4-inch beam."

tbannon@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @Timbannon

Simone Biles has made history as the first woman ever to pull off a triple double on floor during the U.S. Gymnastics Championships.

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Biles said that the triple double, which is made up of a double back flip with three twists, is "the hardest move in the world," and according to the New York Times, "The triple double is a skill that, until this point, had been done only on the men’s side, where it is still rare. None of the men at the national championships are expected to try one, and most of Biles's competitors can't even do a double double."

The 22-year-old gymnast had attempted the move during her floor routine at the championships on Friday but had an uneasy landing when she had to put both hands on the ground to steady herself. She then successfully pulled off the move on Sunday after she attempted it again and stuck the landing.

Biles also made history as the first woman to ever land a double-twisting somersault on the balance beam.

Fans of the Summer Olympics can't seem to get enough of American gymnast Simone Biles. The 19-year-old, who has already snagged gold medals in events for the team, individual all-round and vault competitions, can jump, flip and twist in ways the average person likely never will. Biles may make it look easy, but between all the different events that gymnasts have to master — from balance beam to the vault for women, and the pommel horse to the rings for men — what's the most challenging apparatus, according to science?

The answer is complicated, experts say. Generally, the gymnastic events that have the simplest explanation in terms of physics tend to also be the ones where athletes push the limits of physics the most.

For example, the physics of the pommel horse, an apparatus that male gymnasts must tackle, is easy to understand, said Jonas Contakos, a gymnastics coach with a Ph.D. in kinesiology and a master's in biomechanics.

"The principle is quite simple: Keep your center of mass over the base of support at all times," Contakos told Live Science. In action, however, the ways in which gymnasts manipulate this basic principle places it among the most difficult events, he said.

The main challenge of the pommel horse, from a physics point of view, is dynamic stability, which means that the gymnast has to stay balanced enough to remain on the pommel while also moving his body.

"I think their center of mass is actually swinging around as their legs swing around, but they have to do that at the right rates, so, as they start to fall over, their legs are already having moved to the other side," said Jordan Gerton, an associate professor of bioengineering, physics and astronomy, and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Utah. Basically, gymnasts are trying to keep from falling while making that objective as hard for themselves as possible.

The balance beam involves similar concepts. All the athlete has to do is keep her center of mass over the 4-inch-wide (10 centimeters) beam in order to balance. In other words, she could just stand there and not fall off, but it would be a rather uninteresting physics problem (and sport). Instead, gymnasts spin, twist and kick on the balance beam, testing the boundaries of the simple physics principle that could easily keep them stable.

Gerton said that the rings should also be counted as an event that's among the most advanced confrontations with physics that an athlete can face. The physics challenge that he notices specifically in this event is the lack of leverage that occurs when a gymnast pulls his body into a cross shape. It's one thing for a person to pull his body up to and through rings with arms that are near the body, but elite male gymnasts do this with their arms completely straight. The farther away from the body a gymnast holds his arms, the less leverage he has to move his body upward, Gerton said.

" need to have an incredible amount of core strength to counteract that reduction in the leverage," he added.

In reality, there is no gymnastic event that is without extreme physics, experts say. Many of the events involve complicated balancing, such as handstands on the bars, and these maneuvers require the same coordination between center of mass and base of support as do the balance beam and pommel horse, but not as continually. Vault presents its own unique physics problem in the conversion of horizontal energy (running) into the vertical push and velocity required for the aerial skills gymnasts perform off the vault.

"You'll notice that people like Simone Biles do that really efficiently," Gerton said. "She takes her horizontal speed and she is able to convert that into vertical motion, which gives her a lot of time to do amazing things in the air."

However, vaulting doesn't require the same level of balance as do some of the other apparatuses.

Tumbling is notable because, when viewed through the lens of physics, it's somewhat the opposite of pommel horse and balance beam: There are fewer constraints on the gymnasts' movements but the physics involved are harder to understand. Gymnasts in this event aren't fighting to balance on a small surface, but the complex physics of a floor routine is sometimes beyond comprehension.

"Tumbling on floor, from a physics perspective, is really, really complicated to deal with if you were to do an analysis of tumbling," Contakos said. In the world of biomechanics, motion analysis on tumbling is still at a really "primitive stage," he said.

Floor exercises are hard to analyze, because they have more variables than the other events, according to Contakos. For example, the floor is spring-loaded and the gymnasts are moving their bodies in more diverse ways that blend jumping, balancing, twisting and turning.

Olympic gymnasts in every event are performing at the limits of what is physically possible and showing laymen and scientists alike that they can do more than anyone realized.

"As soon as we think we've hit a wall on that ability of just one simple principle, someone comes along and does it bigger and better and faster, or makes up a new skill," Contakos said.

And this year's gymnasts at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are no exception.