Choreographer Ekaterina Belova talks about changes in the classes of the Academy gymnasts

Academy choreographer Ekaterina Belova talked about the changes she made to the choreography program following the advice of Olympic champion Alina Kabaeva.

"We implemented it literally right away for the next class. We started doing it without stopping. We still paid a lot of attention to the length of holding balances on the relevé. This is an obligatory part of our work, to work out each muscle, to give it a big load, so that the muscles are constantly working. And, of course, what Alina Kabaeva recommended was exactly non-stop repetition, that is, from one leg, from the other leg — we reduced the time for the part that we do with one hand at the barre, even with two at the beginning of our class."

She also explained how this affected the athletes’ training process.

"And now we have more time to do the combination already in the middle, in the middle without support. We have more opportunities to add jumps, which we did not always have time to do. That is, the tempo has really been increased, and it turns out that we are developing some physiological things necessary for a gymnast, for speed, for high-quality execution of elements, for a quick transition from element to element. Many thanks to Alina Kabaeva for her fresh perspective, an outside perspective and she immediately understood what we were missing. Now we work on the fact that you have a time frame, during which you have to do the right number of right approaches and perfectly well executed ones. It depends on you," Ekaterina said.

Earlier, during one of the training sessions, Olympic champion Alina Kabaeva drew Ekaterina Belova's attention to the fact that the choreography classes lacked tempo, and showed her at the barre what a warm-up should look like.