Back Handsprings

I am by no means an expert tumbler.  Want me to kick myself in the head?  Sure.  Need someone to lick their own elbow?  I'm your girl.  Want someone to demonstrate an over-split?  No problem.  But tumbling...well that's a different story.

I can whip out a side aerial no problem, same goes for front handsprings.  I've even been able to pull off a one-handed front handspring.  But all of that was self taught.  You see, my acro teacher for the majority of my training was not a trained teacher.  Don't get me wrong, she was amazing, she had the coolest ideas, she did all sorts of research to challenge us, she worked really hard!  But she wasn't completely comfortable spotting the bigger girls on tough tricks.  Fat by no one's standard, but being 5'9", I qualify as a "bigger girl".  So, as previously mentioned, I taught myself most of my tricks.

I'm scared by less than a hand-ful of things, but I will admit that the idea of launching myself backwards does kind of freak me out.  That's one of the main reasons why I never got any kind of backwards tumbling.  I wasn't just going to blindly fling myself around with no one there to catch me.

Recently, though, I started going to open gym tumbling classes at a local cheerleading center.  I've only gone to two sessions but during that time I just worked on back handsprings with the coaches.  Then, last night at a party some girls were tumbling and I decided to just go for it and........my arms gave out and I rolled out of it onto my stomach.  Then today I was messing around in my backyard and I decided I would try again.  After a few failed attempts I........................................................

GOT MY BACKHANDSPRING!!!!