My name is Amaya Leslie and I am a senior artistic gymnast. Many people ask me what that means so I am going to provide you with an insight into this amazing sport and what it takes to be a senior gymnast.

There are four apparatus in artistic gymnastics; vault, asymmetric bars, beam and floor. I am currently competing at step 8 and train sixteen hours a week. I have a set of skills I have to learn on each apparatus and I perform these skills as a routine and combine skills with dance choreography on the beam and floor exercise.

Being a gymnast at this level takes a lot of hard work, determination and you need to be passionate. You have to deal with big calluses on your hands from training on the bar, your muscles can ache from all the forces that you put through them and you can get really tired after a day at school then three & half hours of training.

A normal training session involves our senior group starting in a line up with our coach - my coach is my mum, Carmel. She checks how we're all feeling, checks if anyone is carrying injuries, then talks us through the session plan for the day. The first fifteen minutes we do a variety of running exercises, then do some dynamic stretching. The next forty five minutes we spend conditioning. This includes upper body strengthening exercises, plyometrics for the lower body and at least 15 minutes of core fitness. By 5pm we move on to apparatus training where we do a lot of drills to improve our skills.

During our competition season which is from May until October we train routines. At the end of each session we stretch and use our rollers to roll out our muscles.

I absolutely love gymnastics - it is so challenging and there are always news skills to learn. It is physically so tough but I love it. I enjoy seeing my gym buddies every day and supporting each other with our goals.

I have had a great competition season so far and I am so excited about representing Otago and the upcoming Gym Sport Nationals in October.

In my very first competition, competing step 8, I got into finals for all apparatus and came 2nd on bar, and 3rd on floor. After that comp I flew up to Nelson to have another comp, and came 1st overall out of all the unders on day 1, and 1st overall out of everyone on day 2. I also came 1st on bar and 3rd on beam. Lastly, in my most recent competition I came 1st overall out of everyone, 1st Floor, 1st beam, 1st bar, 2nd on vault and got the Otago step 8 champion trophy.