Gestão de competições e federações de Gymnastics

Gymnastics is a group of sports that includes physical exercises requiring balance, strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, artistry and endurance. The movements involved in gymnastics contribute to the development of the arms, legs, shoulders, back, chest, and abdominal muscle groups. Gymnastics evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks that included skills for mounting and dismounting a horse.

The most common form of competitive gymnastics is artistic gymnastics; for women, the events include floor, vault, uneven bars, and balance beam; for men, besides floor and vault, it includes rings, pommel horse, parallel bars, and horizontal bar.

The governing body for competition in gymnastics throughout the world is World Gymnastics, formerly known as the International Gymnastics Federation or FIG (from the French Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique). Eight sports are governed by the FIG, including gymnastics for all, men's and women's artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics (women's branch only), trampolining (including double mini-trampoline), tumbling, acrobatic, aerobic, parkour and para-gymnastics. Disciplines not currently recognized by FIG include wheel gymnastics, aesthetic group gymnastics, TeamGym, men's rhythmic gymnastics (both the Spanish form which is identical to the women's version and the Japanese version which is a different sport) and mallakhamba.

Participants in gymnastics-related sports include young children, recreational-level athletes, and competitive athletes at all skill levels.

The word gymnastics derives from the common Greek adjective γυμνός (gymnos), by way of the related verb γυμνάζω (gymnazo), whose meaning is to "train naked", "train in gymnastic exercise", generally "to train, to exercise". The verb had this meaning because athletes in ancient times exercised and competed without clothing.

Gymnastics can be traced to exercises performed in Ancient Greece, specifically in Sparta and Athens. Exercise of that time was documented by Philostratus' work Gymnastics: The Ethics of an Athletic Aesthetic. The original term for the practice of gymnastics is from the related Greek verb γυμνάζω (gumnázō), which translates as "to train naked or nude," because young men exercised without clothing. In ancient Greece, physical fitness was highly valued among both men and women. It was not until after the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC that gymnastics became more formalized and was used to train men in warfare. On Philostratus' claim that gymnastics is a form of wisdom, comparable to philosophy, poetry, music, geometry, and astronomy, the people of Athens combined this more physical training with the education of the mind. At the Palestra, a physical education training center, the disciplines of educating the body and the mind were combined, allowing for a form of gymnastics that was more aesthetic and individual and that left behind the focus on strictness, discipline, the emphasis on defeating records, and a focus on strength.

Don Francisco Amorós y Ondeano—a Spanish colonel born on 19 February 1770, in Valencia, who died on 8 August 1848, in Paris—was the first person to introduce educative gymnastics in France. The German Friedrich Ludwig Jahn began the German gymnastics movement in 1811 in Berlin, which led to the invention of the parallel bars, rings, the horizontal bar, the pommel horse and the vault horse.

Germans Charles Beck and Charles Follen and American John Neal brought the first wave of gymnastics to the United States in the 1820s. Beck opened the first gymnasium in the US in 1825 at the Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts. Follen opened the first college gymnasium and the first public gymnasium in the US in 1826 at Harvard University and in Boston, Massachusetts, respectively. Neal was the first American to open a public gymnasium in the US, in Portland, Maine, in 1827. He also documented and promoted these early efforts in the American Journal of Education and The Yankee, helping to establish the American branch of the movement.

The Federation of International Gymnastics (FIG) was founded in Liege in 1881. By the end of the nineteenth century, men's gymnastics competition was popular enough to be included in the first modern Olympic Games, in 1896. From then until the early 1950s, both national and international competitions involved a changing variety of exercises gathered under the rubric, gymnastics, which included, for example, synchronized team floor calisthenics, rope climbing, high jumping, running, and horizontal ladder. During the 1920s, women organized and participated in gymnastics events. Elin Falk revolutionized how gymnastics was taught in Swedish schools between 1910 and 1932. The first women's Olympic competition was limited, involving only synchronized calisthenics and track and field. These games were held in 1928 in Amsterdam.

By 1954, Olympic Games apparatus and events for men and women had been standardized in a modern format, and uniform grading structures (including a point system from 1 to 15) had been agreed upon. In 1930, the first UK mass movement organization of women in gymnastics, the Women's League of Health and Beauty, was founded by Mary Bagot Stack in London. At this time, Soviet gymnasts astounded the world with highly disciplined and difficult performances, setting a precedent that continues. Television has helped publicize and initiate a modern age of gymnastics. Both men's and women's gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on every continent.

In 2006, a new points system for Artistic gymnastics was put into play. An A Score (or D score) is the difficulty score, which as of 2009 derives from the eight highest-scoring elements in a routine (excluding Vault), in addition to the points awarded for composition requirements; each vault has a difficulty score assigned by the FIG. The B Score (or E Score), is the score for executio