Learning As an Adult Can Be Hard. It’s Even Harder on a Balance Beam.

Learning a new skill as an adult can be daunting, especially something as difficult as gymnastics. One adult gymnastics class shows there are serious benefits to adult learning.

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Rachel Wu is an associate professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside. She studies the way children learn and how those patterns might help adults learn too. She says that in some ways, learning is easier as an adult. Adults generally grasp concepts more quickly. They’re less distracted, and they have better motor control than kids. But learning as an adult requires time, money and quality teachers, which can all be harder to find. She also says adults are often convinced they simply lack a talent for something.

WU: I’ve never been good at languages, or I’ve never been good at art, or I don’t have a musical ear or something like that – that kind of, like, very fixed mindset. So you’re either born with some talent or you’re not.

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