By Jennifer Brookland, The Gazette

It’s Jay Wrathall’s first gymnastics practice, and his loose yellow tank top is dropping to his shoulders as he kicks his feet skyward. Across a variety of mats and springboards coated with a fine dusting of chalk a woman is swinging her body around a set of uneven bars, while a young woman in a bright pink skirted leotard bounces jubilantly up and down on a giant floor trampoline. 

There are a two things on Wrathall’s bucket list that he thinks this place and these people, the other gymnasts here late on a Wednesday night at 5280 Gymnastics in Wheat Ridge, can help him with. He wants to be able to do a handstand and a floor kip-up. 

Wrathall had been wanting to try gymnastics for years, he said, but never got around to it. Now, he’s 47 years old. Wrathall’s father passed away last year and it made him think about how little time we have. Wrathall didn’t want to wait anymore, didn’t want to leave things undone. 

In the public mind, gymnastics is a sport practiced by little girls, a muscular few of whom go on to be Olympians before retiring in their twenties. 

In fact, young children’s participation in gymnastics overall is low and stagnant or shrinking, at around 3% of kids ages 6 to 12 participating and just 1.3% of 13- to 17-year-olds  in the U.S., according to the State of Play 2024 report.

Meanwhile, participation in adult gymnastics is growing, up by about 25% over the last five years. Older gymnasts are doing layouts and handsprings in gyms across America and the world. Over the last 11 years, a Facebook group for adult gymnasts has grown from a handful of members to over 16,000. 

Adult gymnasts in Colorado are part of the trend, with the team at 5280 a notable leader. With around 35 members at its locations in Wheat Ridge and Littleton, it’s now one of the largest and most active in the country. 

They do it for the challenge and for the exercise, to be part of a community, to prove something to themselves and others, to make the most of their time and bodies for as long as possible. 

And they do it because flipping and flying at any age is just so darn fun. 

Handstands and myth-busting

Dru Heffington, a Phoenix-based bookkeeper for gymnastics gyms, has watched interest in adult gymnastics grow firsthand. 

She was in her early thirties in 2011 when a friend mentioned her kids’ gym offered an adult gymnastics class. Heffington hadn’t done so much as a cartwheel in two decades, but she knew immediately she wanted to get back to the sport she’d left at age 12. She pinched her penneys and took extra jobs to be able to afford it. 

By the next year, Heffington could pay the fees, and it wasn’t long before she was seeking out competitions. 

But there were typically only a dozen or two adults signing up. Sometimes, Heffington was the only adult competing. 

Things have changed. Now Heffington says she rarely competes alone. She began compiling a list of upcoming events that welcome adult gymnasts and has 240 people on the list. Many of them are also attending gymnastics retreats – even a summer adult gymnastics camp.

“People don’t realize it’s a thing,” said Angela Fuller, a Littleton native who competes on the 5280 team. “And then the minute they realize it a thing, they’re like, Oh, where do I sign up?”

But adult gymnasts still face challenges: the limitations of their older bodies but also, for some, a sense of embarrassment. 

“There is just that stigma that exists around our sport, that it’s not for older people,” Heffington said. “We just have to continue to bust that myth.”

Heffington is also working to make gymnastics more accessible to everyone. She’s creating a nonprofit to help those who can’t afford the training and travel get to competitions too. 

Building skills and confidence at any age

Shelby Vaulton neve got to participate in gymnastics as a kid for just that reason. She used to watch gymnastics on t.v. with her mom, but participating in classes and buying those sparkly leotards she envied were always out of the family’s budget. 

But Vaulton grew up, and started making her own money with a career in infant and child development. She couldn’t wait to experience what she had missed out on as a girl. So at age 24, Vaulton beamed as she bought herself her first leotard and took those initial tumbles at 5280.

Before long, she bravely entered a gymnastics competition and took second place on the vault. Vaulton cried as she received her award; it was the first medal she’d won in her life. 

She felt like her mom, who passed away from breast cancer when Vaulton was 21 years old, was proudly watching.

Now three years into her gymnastics practice, Vaulton loves the sport because it offers instant gratification. She either lands a back handspring or she doesn’t. She loves how it contributes to her mind and body control, and how mastering a skill builds a ton of confidence. “If I can do a back handspring,” she said, “I can do anything.” 

Finding a family

Adult gymnasts like Vaulton who come to the sport as beginners are in the minority. More of them practiced gymnastics as kids but quit for any number of reasons. 

Life gets busy, body changes make leaping in leotards less palatable. Fear sets in; adult minds can comprehend in an instant the potential dangers of landing wrong or falling hard. 

Not having fun was the reason 45% of adults say they quit sports as a kid; 31 percent said it was because they didn’t think they were good enough.

Katie Snitz, who competed in gymnastics as a kid, had felt bullied by her coaches and quit at age 13. Now the women’s team captain at 5280, Snitz said she’s never felt pressured as an adult gymnast. 

She says the Colorado team feels more like “chosen family.”

Other adult gymnasts aren’t so lucky. They live in an area where practices are harder to come by, and gymnasts their age are fewer and farther between. 

“It was definitely frustrating at first,” said Stephanie Schneider, who spent a lot of time working out by herself in Colorado Springs when she first returned to gymnastics after a 15-year hiatus at the age of 35.  

Schneider had participated in gymnastics for most of her childhood, from the age of 8 to 18. But she wasn’t good enough to compete at the collegiate level and her school didn’t offer club gymnastics. So she stopped. 

“I don’t know if I was necessarily ready to be done,” she said. 

About seven years ago, she listened to a podcast episode about adults doing gymnastics. Schneider, who was living in Seattle at the time, decided she’d give it a try again.

It felt different from doing gymnastics as a kid. “It can be competitive, but that’s not really why you’re doing it,” Schneider said. “You’re doing it to stay in shape, to have fun, to connect with people. You just approach it in a whole different way.”

“It’s not that my experience growing up was bad, because it wasn’t,” she said, “But it just feels very redemptive.” 

And it was just plain fun – way better than going for a run or to a regular gym, Schneider thought. Even after she moved to Colorado Springs and was doing gymnastics by herself, Schneider found herself truly enjoying it. 

She eventually found Kinetic Gymnastics. The gym she grew up practicing in was pretty bare bones, so getting to use equipment at Kinetic like the tumble track – a long trampoline suspended just over the floor to take away impact – feels like play. 

Schneider hopes to keep having fun in the gym for a long time to come. She has reason to believe she can; after all, she’s seen 60-somethings practicing their handstands and 70-year-olds on the balance beam and conditioning exercises. 

“It’’s such a great like thing for for your body, and just a way to stay in shape no matter what age you are,” Schneider said. 

No expiration date

Though far from a septogenarian, Angela Fuller says she is the oldest competitive gymnast in Colorado at age 45. And just five years ago, she wouldn’t have put money on herself to compete in anything. 

Although Fuller had been a gymnast as a kid, she’d left the sport after a leg injury on the balance beam at the age of 14. She had been working on giants: epic full-body swings around the uneven bars. 

A car accident in her twenties left Fuller with a severe back injury, and when she gave birth to her second child at age 30 it got even worse. She tried to reconcile the fact she would never be an athlete again.

Her best friend’s terminal breast cancer diagnosis in 2021 shook Fuller awake. She didn’t want to be on the sidelines anymore. “I have one life,” she thought to herself. “What am I doing?”

It had been 27 years since she’d done gymnastics. But the then-41-year-old stay-at-home mom felt a fire to get back in the game. At night, she dreamed of doing giants again, whipping through the air. “It was this unfinished business,” Fuller said. “It honestly kind of haunted me.”

Inspired by reading about an Olympic gymnast who returned to the sport in her thirties, Fuller walked into 5280 Gymnastics and started training. 

It was incredibly hard, and different from practicing as a tween. “I’m not throwing around a 70-pound body anymore,” Fuller said. 

Yet within a year, Fuller was doing the giants she’d been dreaming about. Soon she was removing the practice equipment, then she was doing a dismount with two backflips into the foam pit, her coach screaming from across the gym.

Last year, Fuller made history at the national competition of the National Association of Intercollegiate Gymnastics Clubs by being the oldest woman to compete in all 10 events in a single day. This year, she became the oldest gymnast ever to compete in all 14 competition events – women’s and men’s. 

“It’s just highlighting that we’re breaking barriers,” Fuller said. “Adult gymnasts- we’re not done. There’s no expiration date.”

Fuller is proud to be an example of perseverance to her teenaged boys, and an inspiration to other adults – especially moms.

“I think that’s the biggest lesson, is just to dream big, never give up, and also that it’s never too late,” she said. “I do think it’s God’s plan for me to do this and show all these women and moms out there what’s possible when we believe in ourselves.”