How does gymnastics work? How are gymnasts able to manipulate their bodies while in the air? It seems unreal.
In: Physics
Honestly, I have a opposite expectation. They haven’t perform things that are weird enough. We live in a world where there are things like [torque-free gyroscopic precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession), [Dzhanibekov effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem), [boomerang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang), and [curveball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect) that exist, so what the gymnasts do doesn’t seem all that unreal.
When you see people do all sorts of weird tricks in the air, the biggest factor is the interaction between angular momentum and moment of inertia. Angular momentum can be difficult to change in the air (impossible without air drag), but what can change is moment of inertia by changing mass distribution. The most basic example of this is increasing rotational speed by retracting your hand.
Smaller effects are air drag and optical illusion. Air drag are generally small (compared to human moment of inertia), so this effects is negligible for indoor gym, but is much more significant to things like snowboarding. Optical illusions are hard to quantify, but human eyes are not actually as accurate at judging movement as you might think.
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