Niels Bukh's Gymnastics School in Denmark, 1912–1933: Gymnastics,Erotics, and Male Bonding

Around 1916–1917 the Danish gymnastics pedagogue Niels Bukh (1880–1950) created, in an international sense, a revolutionary men's gymnastics, and in 1920 he established Denmark's and the world's first folk high school of physical education and sport. During the 1930s, Niels Bukh and his team of gymnasts first became a symbol for the dynamic Danish farming community, and then for the face of Denmark both at home and abroad. Bukh changed the stereotypical male expression of bodily dynamics, which in Danish rural gymnastics had been almost military. He made it legitimate for the young lads to get in close physical contact and to work in pairs in order to create beautiful masculine gymnastic choreographies. Within the aesthetic history of masculinity, it has often been male homosexual aestheticians, designers, musicians, dancers, and so on who have opened new avenues for the expression of male emotion, which was a trademark of Bukh's achievements, too.     

Statistics,gymnastics and the origins of sport science in Belgium (and Europe)

Abstract

This paper analyses the introduction of statistics in the field of gymnastics and its effect on the institutionalisation of physical education as a fully fledged academic discipline. Soon after Belgian independence, Adolphe Quetelet's research already resulted in large-scale anthropometric statistics – indeed, he developed an index that is still being used and is better known under the name of the body mass index. His insights were applied by promoters of gymnastics who wanted to make physical education more scientific. Thus, Clément Lefébure, director of the Ecole Normale de Gymnastique et d'Escrime in Brussels, set up a comparative experiment (with pre- and post-test measurements) by which he intended to show that the ‘rational’ method of Swedish gymnastics produced much better results than the ‘empirical’ method of Belgian/German Turnen. Lefébure's experiment, which was cited internationally but which was also strongly contested by opponents, was one of the factors that led to Swedish gymnastics being officially institutionalised in 1908 at the newly founded Higher Institute of Physical Education of the State University of Ghent, the first institute in the world where students could obtain a doctoral degree in physical education. Although it rested actually on very weak scientific foundations, the bastion of Swedish gymnastics built in Belgium in that pre-war period collapsed only in the 1960s. From then on, sport science could develop fully within the institutes for physical education.     

Sport physiology research and governing gender in sport—a power–knowledge relation?

This article sets out to show how physiological knowledge about sex/gender relates to power issues within sport. The sport physiology research at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (Swedish acronym: GIH) during the twentieth century is analysed in relation to the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation during the same period. The analysis is constituted by Michel Foucault's notion of power–knowledge relations and regimes oftruth. The construction of sex/gender in the physiological research changes over time. Comparative studies on the function of ‘sexual difference’ during strenuous work, which, in hindsight, might be seen to restrict women's sport participation, was gradually displaced by a lack of interest in sexual difference, and later by a growing fascination with sexual difference from a ‘gender perspective’ in terms of women being ‘different but equal’ to men. This displacement goes hand in hand with a displacement of the political rationality concerning gender at GIH and within the Swedish Sports Confederation, where a pre-World War II strategy of excluding women's competitive sport participation, restricting women's physical exercise to gymnastics, was after 1945 followed by a strategy of including women. This was at first in the name of ‘women's right to do sport’—where the physiological research advocated this endeavour—and later in the name of ‘women's right to do sport on their own terms’. However, the research was still being conducted based on the male physiology as the norm.     

Physical education in Tunisia: teachers' practical epistemology,students' positioning and gender issues

This paper explores gendered student learning in physical education (PE) viewed as a situated emerging process involving a triadic relationship between teacher, student(s) and forms of knowledge that are socioculturally bounded. It concerns gymnastic teaching and learning in Tunisia. It was conducted against the background of the Joint Action Studies in Didactics (JASD). Three Tunisian PE teachers having different expertise and experience and 12 male and female students with contrasted skill levels were observed within a gymnastics unit. Based on the video record of the lessons and on teachers' interviews, the findings stress the personal, institutional and cultural dimensions that shape the observed PE practices with special attention to the gendered content taught and learned. The use of the JASD framework highlights the intertwined processes during classroom interactions that influence the co-construction of gendered learning. It makes visible the interplay between the teacher's practical epistemology and the students' gender positioning and its consequence on inequalities in terms of students' learning and the maintenance of gender order in the gym.     

Moving into and out of high-performance sport: the cultural learning of an artistic gymnast

Background: High-performance sport has been described as a formative environment through which athletes learn sporting skills but also develop athletic selves. Within this process, career movements related to selection for and de-selection from representative teams constitute critical moments. Further, retirement from sport can be problematic as the athletic self becomes ‘obsolete’. This dilemma is acute in sports that demand an early entry, extreme time investments and a high risk of retirement before adulthood. Women's artistic gymnastics (WAG) is such a sport.

Purpose and scope: This article considers an artistic gymnast's (Marie) experiences of movement into and out of this sport. Marie's construction and reconstruction of her athletic self when she entered gymnastics at the age of six, relocated to a different city in order to train with the national team at the age of 15, and retired from the sport one year later receives particular attention.

Method and theoretical perspective: An in-depth biographical interview was conducted with Marie. Further, the first author's personal knowledge of this gymnast's career experiences was used for contextualisation. The analysis of data involved the identification of learning outcomes during her time in high-performance WAG and post-retirement. Storied accounts surrounding the key learning experiences were compiled. In order to understand Marie's learning, cultural perspective of learning developed by education scholars and the respective metaphors of ‘learning as becoming’ and ‘horizons for action’ and ‘horizons of learning’ are employed.

Findings: Marie's choice of relocating to train with the national team involved her assuming a temporary orientation towards the requirements of the high-performance WAG context she entered. To achieve this, Marie suppressed the dispositions she had brought to this setting and adjusted her training philosophy, relationship with her coach, diet and socialising. Further, despite Marie intending to only momentarily adjust to the practices of the high-performance context, her learning was deep. Upon retiring from gymnastics, she could not leave the high-performance gymnastics self behind. The subsequent process to adjust to life without gymnastics was difficult and testing, and could only be realised with professional treatment.

Conclusion: Learning in sport is not limited to athletic skills. Athletes’ selves are formed in interaction with sporting contexts and actors. This embodiment can become durable and cause significant conflict when moving out of sport. To handle life without sport, adjustment may be challenging and lengthy.

Recommendations: Sporting cultures should allow for more interactive learning and athlete diversity. Coaching practices that allow athletes to voice difficulties should be provided. Athletes should be encouraged to reflect upon their sporting experiences and upon leaving high-performance sport, should be (professionally) supported.     

‘The Cradle of American Champions,Women Champions Swim Champions’: Charlotte Epstein,Gender and Jewish Identity,and the Physical Emancipation of Women in Aquatic Sports

Charlotte Epstein advocated ardently for American women's competitive swimming and expanded swimming for women nationally and internationally in the early twentieth century. In her leadership as chair of the Athletic Branch of the National Women's Life Saving League (1913), and in battling the United States Olympic Committee to allow girls from the swim club she founded, the Women's Swimming Association of New York (1917), to compete in the 1920 Olympics, Epstein as an athlete and administrator advanced women's aquatic sports. This article explores the importance of Charlotte Epstein, an American Jewish woman, and the gender and ethnic contexts of her efforts in increasing women's participation in various swimming events. Epstein's ties with Jewish organizations such as the Young Women's Hebrew Association and the Maccabiah Games shaped her identity in aquatic sports. This analysis of Epstein's activism in swimming, such as in promoting swim races for suffrage and bathing-suit reform, illustrates her vital role in women's physical emancipation in the water and in American culture.     

勇于实践的逐梦者——记中国男子体操队教练员白远韶

2008年北京奥运会上,我国体操小将邹凯一战成名,勇夺男子团体、单杠、自由体操3枚金牌。赛后,当记者问他最想感谢谁时,邹凯脱口而出"白指导"。邹凯口中的白指导就是教练员白远韶,他从10岁开始接触体操,尽管从未进入过专业运动队,但这样一位"外行"却培养出了奥运冠军郑李辉、"吊环王"董震、世锦赛冠军张津京等一批优秀体操运动员。在距离伦敦奥运会开幕不到100天的时刻,记者在北京天坛公寓见到了这位素来低调的金牌教练。开朗、热情、平易近人是白远韶给人的第一印象,交谈起来更像是在与故人话家常。     

Care,Cure and Training of the Body According to Italian Medicine of the Nineteenth Century

Sometime in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the idea that progress in science and technology would lead to solutions for, or at least control over, human ills had reached Italy as a result of positivism. The Parliament of the new Kingdom of Italy, formed in 1861, worked, among other things, towards increasing the processes of modernisation and industrialisation that were already ongoing in northern and central Italy. This was done to combat the backwardness of the poorer regions in the south and towards augmenting the size and quality of the newly created Italian army so that it could compete on an equal footing with the powerful nations of Europe. In the same period, the government was legislating in favour of public education to fight the great problem of illiteracy, upgrade the teaching classes, improve existing schools and procure the funds needed for social hygiene and care of the body as factors in the physical and moral regeneration of the race. A campaign to increase physical education for both sexes in schools was successfully begun by the then Education Minister, Francesco De Sanctis, who made this subject obligatory by law throughout the nation in 1878. Much has already been said of the Italian doctors of the time who were strongly in favour of gymnastics, traditional games and/or modern sports, as well as other hygienic and recreational physical activities for people of all ages; suffice to mention the ‘apostle of Italian sport', Dr. Angelo Mosso (1846–1910), and the ‘father of Italian gymnastics', Dr. Emilio Baumann (1843–1917). However, not enough has been said about the support for these same activities offered by another famous doctor from the same period, Paolo Mantegazza (1830–1910), on whom the first part of the essay will focus. The latter part will propose a comparative consideration of the works of Mantegazza, Baumann and Mosso, showing similarities but also notable differences in their personality and philosophical approach.     

Le Numéro Barbette: Destabilising Gender on the High Wire and the Flying Trapeze

In the autumn of 1923, Barbette (Vander Clyde) took Parisian theatres by storm with a provocative amalgamation of trapeze artistry and female impersonation. His act in interwar France was timely and daring. While the destructive results of the First World War had left the country with deep concerns about the degeneration of the male body and the nation as a whole, Barbette's performance signified a homosexual identity and a questioning of traditional categories of masculinity and femininity. Fostering the interest of controversial poet and film maker, Jean Cocteau and his artistic entourage, Barbette's performance received much praise and was immortalised in Cocteau's 1926 essay Le Numéro Barbette. Drawing on a number of under-examined performance reviews by French critics, as well as Steegmuller's interview with Barbette, I focus on how Barbette's career and performances contributed to debates about the constructedness of gender and how they were indicative of the tensions of a post-war culture that wanted to ‘return to order’. Barbette's blurring of gender categories during his aerial performances embodied these post-war tensions and signified a liminality in which gender could be destabilised and reimagined without severe repercussions.     

Biomedical Discourse on Women's Physical Education and Sport in France (1880–1922)

This article aims at studying the contradictions in scientific discourse on physical education for women in France from 1880 to 1922. In 1880 a law made gymnastics compulsory at school, and physical practices became a topic of public and scientific debate. 1922 is the date of the first medical congress on women's and children's physical education. Our study is based on a corpus of more than 200 scholarly texts about physical education or sport. They discuss women, exclusively conceived in their biological functions as procreators, thus physiologically qualifying the socially constructed properties of femininity. However, as soon as the first steps towards female physical practices appeared, contradictions came up. On the one hand, some doctors wanted to preserve reproductive organs from any violent exercises. On the other hand, other doctors wanted to reinforce female bodies through sport practices.     

普通高校体教专业女生体操学习兴趣的调查与研究——以吕梁学院为例

本文通过对影响吕梁学院体育教育专业女生体操学习兴趣因素的调查与分析,发现影响其学习的主要因素有:恐惧心理、自身条件不适合练习体操、对体操没有兴趣等,以此有针对性地提出了具体的改进方法和途径,从而提高女生对体操的学习兴趣。     

Reconsidering the Female Tradition in English Physical Education: The Impact of Transnational Exchanges in Modern Dance

Histories of the female tradition in physical education in England tend to celebrate the unique early twentieth-century achievements of dedicated women successfully creating their own profession to train the female body in healthful gymnastics and games through the establishment of specialist training colleges. Yet, the female tradition has also been painted as a ‘time-limited achievement’ where female physical educators erroneously tied their fortunes to particular movement practices and modes of training. Their perceived inability to change with the times has been blamed for their loss of power in determining the direction of post-WW2 physical education. Yet, the so-called ‘demise’ of the female tradition was not so straightforward. Female physical educators had already moved well beyond obedience to Ling's gymnastic regulations or Laban's notions of effort and flow by mid-century and were increasingly alert to emergent movement philosophies. Once interest in a variety of somatic practices along with the promise of modern dance had seeped into the worldview of forward-thinking female physical educators their authority to direct their profession may have been diminished, but it was also enhanced and diverted into important transnational streams of dance and therapeutic movement-related professional opportunities which have been less acknowledged.     

Between sport and tragedy: Hemingway's passion for bullfighting

ABSTRACT

‘It is a sport’ writes Hemingway on the subject of bullfights in public places, ‘a very wild and primitive sport and, mainly, a true sport of amateurs. I fear however that because of danger of death which it implies, it never has great success among the sporting-men of America and England’ (Death in the afternoon, Gallimard, 1938, p. 27). Hemingway was interested in sport since his young age: athletic, a follower of sports at Oak Park's High School, fascinated by horse racing and later an enthusiast for deep sea fishing, hunting, boxing etc, in other words what we would call today the ‘extreme sports’, he had a passion for bullfighting in Spain, which he tested, although unsuccessfully. In his papers for the Toronto Weekly Star, his novel The Sun also rises published in 1926, and especially in his essay Death in the afternoon, a true treaty of bullfighting, he undertakes a close study of the specific techniques of this very particular sport; yet what interests him most of all is its artistic value. Art or sport? Such is the key question that he poses throughout the pages of this work, which are actually a deep reflection on the origins of the sport and the finality of art; the relations between sport and art are quite complex and, according to him, have to be reconsidered, since writing for him is also linked to moral and physical effort, and is even a kind of ‘intimate bullfighting’.     

中国优秀女子体操运动员邓琳琳2012年奥运会赛前训练方法监控

通过对中国女子体操运动员邓琳琳2012年奥运会备战工作的总结,对国家女子体操队训练计划和机能状态监控进行梳理,为后续体操项目的训练做好理论基础[1]。以国家优秀运动员邓琳琳为研究对象,对其在备战2012年奥运会期间的大负荷训练期前、中、后的训练计划结合血液指标进行监控,总结在备战奥运会期间训练强度与训练负荷的周期特点[2]。结果显示：赛前每周的训练负荷大、中、小穿插安排,技术动作采用间歇训练法,遵从循序渐进的训练原则。科学合理的训练计划安排加之生化指标的监控便于运动员适应训练,也有助于机体疲劳的恢复。     

Girolamo Cardano and De sanitate tuenda: A Renaissance Physician's Perspective on Exercise

Abstract

The concepts of exercise as presented in De sanitate tuenda (Care of Health), 1560, written by the Renaissance physician, Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), were the focus of the inquiry. In this work, as well as in his personal and professional life, Cardano was an advocate of physical activity for the development of physical and mental well-being. The benefits accrued from participation were: the harmonious development of mind and body; good health; emotional stability; a strong, firm, beautiful body; and a long, robust life. Physical exercise was perceived as a lifelong task ranging from childhood to old age, with activities geared for the needs and limitations of each age grouping. Vigorous activities were recommended for both children and youth. As one grew older, moderate physical exercise with longer rest periods was advised. A comparison of this work with Sir Thomas Elyot's Castel of Helth, 1541, revealed that Cardano was significant in the realm of Renaissance exercise for his advocacy of physical exercise for all ages, particularly the forty to seventy age group, as well as for the delineation of appropriate activities for this older adult group.     

The Life and Achievements of Eugeniusz Piasecki: A Renowned Polish Co-founder of Physical Culture Sciences

Abstract

Professor Eugeniusz Piasecki’s multiple contributions to the development of physical education as well as his activities in various educational, scientific, and social organizations place him among the elite physical education theorists in Poland and abroad. Until 1918, Piasecki was active in the cities of Kraków, Lvov, Kiev, and Zakopane, and in the years 1919–1939 and 1945–1947, he became firmly associated with the city of Poznań. Eugeniusz Piasecki was persistent in implementing his reformist ideas, especially in the field of training of physical culture professionals. Piasecki’s activities brought about significant advances in the theory and practice of physical education – called later physical culture sciences. Despite hardships and obstacles in his school and academic path, Eugeniusz Piasecki displayed a unique talent for propitiating medical and pedagogical professionals and for contributing to the development of the Scout Movement, school sports clubs, therapeutic gymnastics, university departments, and the League of Nations. The aim of the paper is to discuss and evaluate the original achievements of Eugeniusz Piasecki – a Polish scholar, physician, polymath, role model, and a co-founder of physical culture sciences, who made invaluable contributions to the training of PE teachers and instructors and the development of school and extra-school sport movement.     

快乐体操对5~6岁幼儿基本协调能力的影响

运用文献资料法、实验测试法和数理统计法等研究方法,选取江苏省苏州市某幼儿园2个幼儿大班作为实验组和对照组,对实验组进行持续3个月的快乐体操干预,探讨快乐体操对5~6岁幼儿基本协调能力的影响。通过12周的快乐体操练习后,幼儿的平衡能力、节奏能力、感知判断能力、空间定向能力、肢体配合能力、肢体活动范围都得到了显著提升,即快乐体操练习对幼儿的基本协调能力提升具有积极作用。     

The Association of Objectively Determined Physical Activity Behavior Among Adolescent Female Friends

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which physical activity among adolescent female friends is interdependent. The participants were 318 adolescent girls with a mean age of 16.0 years (range: 15–18 years). Pedometry was used to assess physical activity over 4 days. The relationship between an individual girl and her first-nominated reciprocal friend's physical activity level was moderate (r = 0.45, 90% confidence interval = 0.31, 0.56), when the friendship was nonreciprocal it was trivial (r = -.06, 90% confidence interval = -.36. .25). Friends' physical activity levels explained between 27% and 32% of an individual's pedometer-determined physical activity level. Reciprocity of friendship is an important variable to consider when understanding the relationship between adolescent female friends' physical activity. When friendships are reciprocal, there is a stronger relationship between friends' physical activity.     

A genealogical analysis of Peter Arnold's conceptual account of meaning in movement,sport and physical education

We write as critical theorists who share an interest in how conceptions of physical education are taken forward in policy and practice. In this respect, we are particularly intrigued by Peter Arnold's conceptual account of meaning in movement, sport and physical education, and the subsequent ways in which his ideas have informed national curriculum ambitions. Despite the prominence of Arnold's influence, we are concerned that there has been an insufficiently rigorous and robust review of his theorising to date, particularly in relation to where his ideas originated from. Accordingly, we critically discuss the merits of adopting a genealogical approach in order to support a detailed analysis of Arnold's conceptual account of meaning in movement, sport and physical education; one which especially focuses on learning ‘about’, ‘through’ and ‘in’ movement. We conclude by questioning a number of the complex strands of Arnold's work in the expectation that greater lucidity and purpose can emerge. This it is argued will be beneficial in terms of providing clarity on aim or aims statements in physical education, which in turn can secure greater policy coherence and practice gains.