Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Adults gymnastics class at Chelsea Piers, where revenue for the program jumped 76 percent during the Olympics this year, compared with the same two weeks in 2011.
FOR Carmen Hernandez, something flipped last summer when Gabby Douglas did.
Watching the bubbly gymnast win two Olympic gold medals, Ms. Hernandez, 40, whose previous workouts were exactly as daredevil as her home elliptical machine, said she thought, “God, it would be so cool if I could try something like that.”
She was wary of injury, so she took a cautious approach to her $28 classes at Sky Zone (a chain of basketball-court-size trampolines), slowly mastering jumps and leaps.
“I can jump up in the air and touch my legs, and my core is so much stronger, so maybe I could do a flip soon,” she said proudly.
Ms. Hernandez, a Santa Monica, Calif., digital media consultant and mother of one, added, “I would never have imagined that at my age I’d be trying to do things that I wouldn’t have done as a kid.”
A rise in the number of children signing up for gymnastics classes after watching the Olympic Games is now as predictable as the arrival of the Games themselves (which is to say, so predictable that some organizations like the Y.M.C.A. Woodmont Program Center in Arlington, Va., brace for demand by hiring extra instructors). But now adult women are leaping, if not backflipping, to channel their inner Gabby.
Watching Olympic gymnastics is “almost like a reminder, like an alarm clock went off,” said Salil Maniktahla, owner of Urban Evolution gyms in suburban Washington. “They see people on TV doing amazing things, and then they look in the mirror and think, ‘What happened to me?’ ”
Mr. Maniktahla in September asked an adult beginner class at his Alexandria, Va., location how many of them turned up because of the Olympics. Half raised their hands, he said. Other anecdotal evidence abounds: Erica Schietinger, a spokeswoman for Chelsea Piers in Manhattan, said revenue for the sports center’s adult gymnastics program jumped 76 percent during the Olympics, compared with the same two weeks in 2011. Video and fan Web site Gymnastike clocked a 50 percent jump in visits to its nationwide directory of adult classes in August, according to site figures. And in the two weeks after the London Games, Sky Zone had a 20 percent increase nationwide in attendance at its gymnastics-inspired adult aerobics class, where participants frequently try tumbles and flips.
“I don’t think I bounce as high as some of the other people in the class because I do get scared,” said the actress Candace Cameron Bure, 36, who began attending Sky Zone’s classes in August. So far Ms. Bure, perhaps best known for her childhood role as D. J. Tanner on ABC’s “Full House,” has stuck to jumps like pikes and one she called “moving seat drops,” but she said she planned to channel Gabby’s determination and try a flip. “Who isn’t inspired by the Olympics?” she said. “And my kids can flip. So I have to at least try.”
Also propelling gymnastics’ rise in popularity among adults: This year, competitors in their 20s and 30s outnumbered teenagers like Gabby, 16, according to figures posted by Masters Gymnastics, an organization that promotes “gymnastics for grown-ups.” An article in The Atlantic Monthly wondered if — 40 years. after a pig-tailed Olga Korbut backward-aerial-somersaulted her way to being the sport’s first teen star — the era of the “little-girl gymnast” was ending. (Probably not.)
“When I looked at the gymnasts 12 years ago, I wanted to throw a sandwich at them,” said Edith Halasik, 38, of Chicago. “Years ago I wouldn’t have been interested in a gymnast’s body. But Gabby and the girls today look healthier and stronger. You see their muscles, not their ribs. For me, that was the attraction.”
So Ms. Halasik began driving an hour each way (dazzled by the promise of instruction by a Mongolian national circus alumna) to take 90-minute beginner’s classes at the Actor’s Gymnasium in Evanston, Ill., where 10 sessions cost $178. Ms. Halasik is a personal trainer and ultramarathoner, but fitness credits don’t necessarily transfer: It took her four weeks to pull off a handstand, she said. Next up: flips.
“Sure, I can flip,” she said, pausing to add that she lands on her backside.
