When Gymnasts Enter the World of Dance: Body, Limits, and state of “Flow”
A girl “Banned” from Competition by Her Parents, Secretly Trained Her Way to the National Team
At three in the morning, Qilin crawled out of bed and tiptoed down to the basement.
That was during her second year of middle school in Canada. By day, she was an ordinary international student, sitting in classrooms taking academic courses; by night, she was a rhythmic gymnast practicing in secret—something her parents knew nothing about.
Her father had made it clear to her coach: “Don’t let her train competitively.” In her parents’ eyes, sending their child abroad was the proper path; sports were, at most, for fitness. But Qilin had her own mind. From a young age, she knew her body was made for something extreme.
Eventually, the truth came out because of a competition entry fee. Her mother saw the event title on the registration form and sensed something was off. “What kind of competition is this?” Qilin had no choice but to confess. But by then, she couldn’t stop—her coach had discovered her talent, and she had found her place in the sport.
This was just the beginning
Understanding body movement from physics
Qilin first realized her body was “different” when she was 10.
She was learning Chinese folk dance recreationally. The first time her teacher tried to press her back into a stretch, the teacher was startled: “I’ve never stretched you before—why are you this flexible?” Qilin herself couldn’t explain it. Later, when she joined rhythmic gymnastics, she noticed that movements others had to drill repeatedly seemed almost instinctive to her.
Take a wave, for example. The dance teacher would spend ages explaining, yet her classmates couldn’t find the feeling of “rolling the spine down vertebra by vertebra.” Qilin didn’t understand what was so difficult about it. “It’s just the spine—starting from the thoracic vertebrae, one segment at a time…” She couldn’t quite articulate it, but her body simply knew.
There’s nothing mystical about it. Later, studying sports anatomy, she learned the term: neuromuscular recruitment—the efficiency of communication between brain and muscle. Some people are simply better wired to “do exactly what they intend,” and her ability happened to align perfectly with rhythmic gymnastics.
Rhythmic gymnastics training is brutal. Each session lasts four hours, with one or two sessions a day. It starts with fifteen minutes of jumping rope, followed by an hour of floor basics: stretching the top of the foot, flexing and extending the foot, knee awareness, hip alignment, core and back strength, spinal mobility, leg lifts, and backbends. Endurance holds—five minutes per leg, front, side, back, no exceptions. Then comes the apparatus work: putting routines together and drilling for success rates—if a sequence has three toss-and-catch elements, you need to land eight out of ten before moving on.
This system shows no mercy. It asks only one question: What else can your body do?
Qilin’s body answered. In her second month of training, she won her first competition. A year later, she won the Chinese Students Rhythmic Gymnastics Championship. She made district teams in basketball, showed promise in track, but only rhythmic gymnastics made sense. She knew how to improve, how to execute each movement, how her body should move through space.
“My body was just made for rhythmic gymnastics,” she says.
The Child “Abandoned” by Her Coach
But a lingering shadow has always cast over Qilin’s athletic career: she was a “child abandoned by her coach.”
Her first coach had been told by her father not to train her competitively, so she was largely ignored. Later, a Ukrainian coach worked with her for six months before leaving due to visa issues. In Canada, her coach recommended her to a high-level training group comparable to national camps—but her father only allowed her to train four days a week, so the coach didn’t invest much in her.
“I was a people pleaser as a kid. I just thought my coaches didn’t like me,” she says.
Another coach wanted to take her on, but four months later, the pandemic hit. After returning to China, she went back to her first coach, who later embezzled five or ten million yuan and fled. Not only did he refuse to coach her, but he also barred her from entering domestic elite competitions—because he had a beef with the system, and as his student, she couldn’t even get her physical fitness or insurance forms.
“I was pretty depressed during that time,” she said.
In her junior year of high school, she didn’t train at all with a team—she practiced alone in her basement. Strangely, her technical skills improved significantly that year. Later, she returned to the national rhythmic gymnastics team and rejoined the national-level individual rhythmic gymnastics program—due to citizenship issues, she couldn’t join the official national team in Canada.
Then came long COVID.
When the body betrays you
The aftereffects of long COVID showed up as vestibular dysfunction and autonomic nervous system issues. Simply put, she would get dizzy mid-training, her vision drifting. Walking too fast made her faint; standing on a bus without a seat could make her collapse. At her worst, her exercise tolerance was measured at 5.0, where normal is 7 to 9, borderline disability is 4 to 5, and athletes are usually 18 to 22.
“I couldn’t move at all,” she says. Once, during a fire alarm at school, she walked out — but couldn’t walk back. Her heart rate spiked; she had to sit down every few steps, wait for it to settle, then stand up, take two more steps, and sit down again.
During that time, she began to ask: if my body can’t move anymore, who am I?
Until then, her entire sense of identity had been built on what her body could do. She did well academically only because she treated school as a task — finish it, and you can train. Sport was her only passion. On the competition floor, there were moments when everything went quiet — when it was just her and the apparatus, in total focus. That state, she says, was the closest she had ever come to happiness.
And now, that passion had been taken away.
From sports to art, the body remains
In December 2024, Qilin officially retired. But in reality, she had started dancing as early as 2023, after stopping competition.
She started with commercial street styles, then discovered that heels suited her perfectly — the upright posture, knee awareness, and tight Achilles tendons honed through rhythmic gymnastics made wearing high heels surprisingly comfortable. Later, she tried krump and realized that the pursuit of intensity and power was exactly what she was looking for.
Her krump teacher told her: it’s okay if you can’t hear the music — listen to your body’s dynamics. If you can’t see clearly, that blur can inform new movement. She found that when she improvises, the first thing she does is make her vision unclear — so she can “listen” to her body, quiet her mind, and her thoughts stop racing in all directions.
“I don’t want to see things clearly,” she says. “That way, I feel more grounded.”
This is actually a clash between two bodily logics. In rhythmic gymnastics, the body exists to execute difficult moves, meet standards, and earn points. Every movement has a clear objective: leg control must be 180°, spins must include an extra rotation, and tosses and catches must be successful. But in dance, the body exists to express. You don’t have to meet a fixed standard; what you must do is let your body speak.
Qilin moves back and forth between these two logics. In heels, her gymnastics foundation gives her stability, straight knees, and clean lines. In Krump, she pursues raw power.
“I’m still chasing the extreme,” she says. “Just in a different form.”
No obsession, no mastery
Looking back on her movement history, Qilin says that if she could give her younger self one piece of advice, she would say: manage your weight carefully during puberty, and don’t take school too seriously.
“My entire movement journey has been for this one passion,” she says. School was merely an obligation — an inescapable duty for East Asian kids. To fulfill this duty, she slept five or six hours a day, woke up at 4 a.m. to do homework, trained during the day, and returned to the dorm at 11 p.m. Her severe long-COVID symptoms later on were likely related to this.
But she has no regrets. Every decision was one she made herself — except, perhaps, for taking her studies too seriously.
“Actually, if I’d been able to take things a bit less seriously back then, if I’d been a bit more self-centered — just focusing on what I wanted and cutting away those so-called obligations — it might have been better for my body.”
But she also knows that, given who she was, she wouldn’t have listened anyway. People pleaser. Competitive. Obsessed with extremity. These traits are built into her body, just like her flexibility and strength—both gift and curse.
Now, the life she wants is simple: teach heels classes, go out drinking after, sleep, choreograph, teach again. “I just want to live like an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old,” she says. “I didn’t get to have fun when I was younger.” What you suppress will eventually return.
As for the future, she isn’t quite sure. She might join a contemporary dance company, or she might continue with fine arts — much of her work involves the body: installations, video, and performance. “Movement is the only thing that brings me peace,” she says.
She has wondered: what if one day her body no longer allows her to dance? But she also doesn’t think that will really happen.
“In dance, even someone with very limited physical ability can create something equally valuable,” she says. “Dance isn’t about testing the limits of the human body — it’s about expressing what your body wants to say.”
The Weight of Existence
Toward the end of the interview, Qilin said something that sounded quite grand.
She said she could not accept submitting to any power, nor did she wish to establish a power of her own, because power inevitably leads to oppression. She simply wanted to exist as an individual. If one day she ceased to exist, so what?
“I think there’s only one reason I’d want to continue existing: I’d rather feel something than feel nothing.”
She said this with great calm. In her early twenties, her body still bears the scars of long COVID; her ankle injury could flare up at any moment; she has mild tricuspid regurgitation — the doctor warned that if she kept training, the tendon in her big toe might rupture, to which she replied, “If it ruptures, it ruptures.”
What kind of mindset is this? “If you don’t go all in, you aren’t living”.
Her body is her best tool, and also her greatest enemy. It has taken her to the world stage, and it has trapped her in a daily life where she can barely walk. It has allowed her to experience the hyper-focused flow of the moment, and it has forced her to get up at 4 a.m. countless times to do homework. It has been stretched, strained, exhausted, overused — then rediscovered, repurposed, redefined.
Now, she’s still using this body to dance. Not for scores, not for rankings, not even to prove anything. Just because she needs to feel something — and the body is the way she knows best how.
“I guess I just want to move,” she says.
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Rednote@麒麟 qilin @麒小麟在加油ins @yunqiqilin
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