Some people try a backflip and land on their feet. Others make an attempt and land on their face. The most unfortunate land on YouTube.
Then there’s Santa Maria’s Trevor Henning. His acrobatics landed him in Cincinnati to compete in the Junior Olympic National Championships, running through May 13.
Henning, 14, started training in gymnastics after a neighbor took notice of him climbing walls and scaling them with ease. The neighbor told Trevor’s family about a place that taught kids how to perform tricks. The thought of learning how to flip and “getting air” sparked excitement in Henning, and he soon began serious training.
For the past seven years, Henning’s life has revolved around gymnastics and school. Five days a week, from 6 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., he’s either catching up on homework or attending classes. After school, he goes to San Luis Obispo for gymnastics practice. When he gets home around 9:30 p.m., he eats dinner and soon afterward hits the sheets to get some rest before doing it all over again.
“Trevor does his routine all season all year every day—summer, winter, spring, fall—five days a week, and 3 1/2 hours a day,” said his mother, Teggy.
Henning’s hard work and dedication to gymnastics have paid off. He’ll be putting his hard-earned skills up against the nation’s top athletes of his age group, competing in six events: the floor, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and horizontal bars. Henning said his best events are the “p-bars and the rings,” but the event he enjoys most involves the horizontal bars.
“I like jumping off a high bar and doing a double back flip,” Henning said. “You get really high. Getting air is the best part of gymnastics.”
During training, Henning said he’s been doing lots of “intense strength training” to improve his skills. He described a typical strength workout as putting on a weighted vest or ankle weights, and doing dips and pull-ups. He also does visualization training.
“Usually I just do my routine in my head, because it’s pretty close to doing it in real life,” he explained.
But training gymnastics full-time hasn’t kept Henning off the walls. One of his favorite hobbies is freerunning, also known as parkour. He said one of the most thrilling stunts he’s done was clear a gap from one rail to another while doing a 180-degree spin. One day he hopes to visit France, the Mecca for parkour practitioners.
Henning has been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA, and said his goal is to eventually take gymnastics to the collegiate level, setting his sights on UC Berkeley or Stanford. His advice to conquering fear when attempting a new and a scary move? Just do it.
“Then you realize right after that it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
This article appears in May 10-17, 2012.