The term gymnastics, derived from a Greek word meaning “to exercise naked,” applied in ancient Greece (ancient Greek civilization) to all exercises practiced in the gymnasium, the place where male athletes did indeed exercise unclothed. Many of these exercises came to be included in the Olympic Games, until the abandonment of the Games in AD 393. Some of the competitions grouped under this ancient definition of gymnastics later became separate sports such as athletics (track and field), wrestling, and boxing.

Of the modern events currently considered to be gymnastics, only tumbling and a primitive form of vaulting were known in the ancient world. For instance, Egyptian hieroglyphs show variations of backbends and other stunts being performed with a partner, while a well-known fresco from Crete at the palace at Knossos shows a leaper performing what is either a cartwheel or handspring over a charging bull. Tumbling was an art form in ancient China as well. Stone engravings found in Shandong province that date to the Han period (206 BC–AD 220) portray acrobatics being performed.

Tumbling continued in the Middle Ages in Europe, where it was practiced by traveling troupes of thespians, dancers, acrobats, and jugglers. The activity was first described in the West in a book published in the 15th century by Archange Tuccaro, Trois dialogues du Sr. Archange Tuccaro (the book contains three essays on jumping and tumbling). Tumbling seems to be an activity that evolved in various forms in many cultures with little cross-cultural influence. For instance, the hoop-diving illustrated in Tuccaro's book looks very similar to a type of tumbling seen in ancient China. Tumbling and acrobatics of all kinds were eventually incorporated into the circus, and it was circus acrobats who first used primitive trampolines.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques)'s novel Émile; ou, de l'éducation (1762; Emile; or, On Education) is credited by historians as the catalyst of educational reform (education) in Europe that combined both the physical and cognitive training of children. Rousseau's work inspired educational reformers in Germany, who opened schools known as Philanthropinum in the late 1700s that featured a wide variety of outdoor activities, including gymnastics; children from all economic strata were accepted. The “grandfather” of modern gymnastics, Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths (1759–1839), was a leading teacher at the Philanthropinist school in Schnepfenthal. In his seminal work, Gymnastik für die Jugend (1793; Gymnastics for Youth), Guts Muths envisioned two main divisions of gymnastics: natural gymnastics and artificial gymnastics. These two divisions may be thought of as utilitarian and nonutilitarian gymnastics. The former disciplines emphasize the health of the body, similar to the exercises developed in Sweden and Denmark under Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839) and Neils Bukh (1880–1950), respectively. Modern aerobics also falls into this category; indeed, sports aerobics has recently been added to the disciplines sponsored by the International Gymnastics Federation. In contrast, nonutilitarian gymnastics is characterized by modern artistic gymnastics, the maneuvers of which are geared to beauty and not function. For example, in feudal Europe young men were taught to mount and dismount a horse, useful knowledge during a time when armies rode. Modern “horse” work in artistic gymnastics has evolved to a point where there is no practical connection between gymnastic maneuvers on a horse and horsemanship. Only the language of riding remains, with the terms “mount” and “dismount” still being used in gymnastics.

The prime developer of natural gymnastics was Per Henrik Ling. In 1813 Ling founded a teacher-training centre, the Royal Gymnastics Central Institute, in Stockholm. Ling devised and taught a system of gymnastic exercises designed to produce medical benefits for the athlete. calisthenics are attributed to him, including free calisthenics—that is, exercises without the use of hand apparatus such as clubs, wands, and dumbbells. Although Ling did not promote competition, free calisthenics have evolved into the competitive sport now known as floor exercise.

The acknowledged “father” of gymnastics, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig), founder of the turnverein movement, is credited with the rapid spread of gymnastics throughout the world. Gymnastic competition can be traced to the outdoor playground (Turnplatz) Jahn opened in a field known as the “Hasenheide” (rabbit field) on the outskirts of Berlin (Germany). Ernst Eiselen, Jahn's assistant and the coauthor of Die Deutsche Turnkunst (1816; The German Gymnastic Art), carefully noted and explained the various exercises developed on the playground. The pommel horse was used for leg-swinging exercises and for vaulting. Jahn invented the parallel bars to increase the upper-body strength of his students, and immense towers were erected to test their courage. Balance beams, horizontal bars (horizontal bar), climbing ropes, and climbing poles were also found at the Turnplatz. Primitive pole vaulting was practiced along with other athletic games. The wide variety of challenging apparatus found on the playground attracted young men who were then, in addition, indoctrinated with Jahn's dream of German unification and his ideas on the defense of the fatherland and ridding Prussia of French influence.

The Prussians and leaders from surrounding countries became wary of nationalist sentiments, and Jahn and his followers were viewed with suspicion after the defeat of Napoleon (Napoleon I) in 1813. By 1815 student organizations such as the Burschenschaft (“Youth Branch”) were in favour of adopting a constitutional form of government, arming the citizenry, and instituting greater civil freedoms. In 1819, after the murder of the German playwright August von Kotzebue (Kotzebue, August von) by a Burschenschaft gymnast, the Prussian king Frederick William III closed approximately 100 gymnastics fields and centres in Prussia. Other Germanic states followed suit. Jahn was arrested, jailed as a democratic demagogue, and placed under house arrest for the next five years. He was eventually acquitted but was admonished to relocate far from Berlin to a city or town with neither institutions of higher learning or gymnasia. He was awarded a yearly stipend and settled in Freiburg. The time was a period of personal tragedy for Jahn; two of his three children died while he was under house arrest, and his wife died shortly thereafter. Three of his close followers, Karl Beck, Karl Follen (Follen, Karl), and Franz Lieber (Lieber, Francis), fearing arrest, fled to North America, bringing gymnastics with them. The Turners remaining in Prussia went underground until the ban on gymnastics was lifted by King Frederick William IV in 1842.

The first German gymnastic festival (Turnfest) was held in Coburg in 1860. The festival attracted affiliated Turnverein clubs and marked the beginning of international competition, as the growing family of Turners outside of Germany were invited to participate. Americans had been introduced to gymnastics by followers of Jahn in the late 1820s, but not until 1848, when large numbers of Germans immigrated, did transplanted Turnverein members organize clubs and establish a national union of Turner societies. (A similar movement, the Sokol, originated and spread in Bohemia and was also transported to the United States.) By 1861 American Turners and Turners from Germanic regions bordering Prussia attended the second Turnfest in Berlin. By the time of the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, eight Turnfests had taken place in Germany with the participation of a growing number of countries.

In 1881 the Fédération Internationale Gymnastique (FIG) was founded to supervise international competition. The 1896 Olympic Games fostered interest in gymnastics, and the FIG World Championships in gymnastics were organized for men in 1903, for women in 1934.

The 1896 Olympic Games marked the advent of true international, open competition in gymnastics. The Games featured typical German, or “heavy apparatus,” events and rope climbing. Gymnastics competitions were not standardized nor free of track-and-field events until the 1928 Olympics, when five of the six events presently held in Olympic gymnastics were contested—pommel horse, rings, vaulting, parallel bars, and horizontal bar, with both compulsory and optional routines required. Women first competed in the Olympics in 1928 in events similar to those of the men except for the addition of the balance beam. Floor exercise events were added in 1932.

Many of the world's greatest gymnasts have come from eastern Europe. Larisa Latynina (Latynina, Larisa Semyonovna) of Ukraine, later the coach of the Soviet Union team, is widely considered the greatest female gymnast of all time; she was the all-around champion in two Olympics (1956 and 1960) and two world championships (1958 and 1962). No other gymnast has achieved this distinction. Latynina's prime rival was Věra Čáslavská (Čáslavská, Věra) of Czechoslovakia, who later became the Czech Republic's Minister of Sport. Čáslavská was all-around champion three times, including two Olympics (1964 and 1968) and one world championship (1966).

In the 1970s a major change had occurred in women's gymnastics as younger and younger girls began competing in events. Russian gymnast Olga Korbut (Korbut, Olga Valentinovna) and the Romanian Nadia Comăneci (Comăneci, Nadia) were both young teens during their Olympic triumphs. The presence of a preponderance of teenage girls in international gymnastics competition from the late 1970s and into the 21st century was directly related to the Korbut-Comăneci phenomenon. Many of these younger gymnasts, especially those who trained long hours for competitions, had not yet reached menarche, and some used doping techniques to delay the onset of physical maturation and its resulting changes to a gymnast's centre of gravity and weight. Coaching these youngsters posed difficulties since many were lured from or pushed by their families to train in unfamiliar surroundings. By 2000 the age requirement for Olympic participants in gymnastics had been raised to 16 to offset some of these problems.

In men's gymnastics the greatest champions were Viktor Chukarin (Chukarin, Viktor Ivanovich) of the Soviet team and Katō Sawao of Japan—each two-time Olympic all-around champions (Chukarin in 1952 and 1956, Sawao in 1968 and 1972)—along with Vitaly Scherbo (Sherbo, Vitaly) of Belarus, an Olympic (1992) and world (1993) all-around champion.

Sports acrobatics has been contested internationally since 1973. In 1998 the International Federation of Sports Acrobatics voted to dissolve and the sport was subsumed by the FIG. The events in sports acrobatics are: women's pairs, mixed pairs, men's pairs, women's trios, and men's fours. Pairs and group exercises are performed to a musical accompaniment on a free-exercise-type platform. There are several routines, some of which must include “human pyramids” that are created by the gymnasts and must be held for four seconds to be scored; the pairs exercise must contain at least six partner-balance elements held for two seconds; and throws with twisting and somersaulting interspersed with tumbling elements must also be included.

The final discipline sanctioned by the FIG is sports aerobics. Aerobics exercise has been a popular form of physical training for the general public since the mid-1970s. The highly competitive sports version of aerobics features routines of less than two minutes' duration performed by individual men, mixed pairs, individual women, and trios. The sport was first found in the program of general gymnastics in the late 1980s. In 1994 the FIG congress decided to organize the World Aerobic Championships and to structure sports aerobics similarly to its other competitive disciplines. The first official world championships were held in 1995 in Paris with 34 countries participating. In 1997 the International World Games Association included sports aerobics in the fifth World Games. Sports acrobatics and sports aerobics have not yet attained Olympic status.