Very little is known about the gymnastics events of the 1908 Olympic Games. There was an individual and a team event, both held in the infield of the White City Stadium. The contests were conducted under the rules of Amateur Gymnastic Association of Great Britain.

It should be noted that in the team competition, it does not appear that the current system of distributing Olympic medals was followed. Per the Official Report, the first place team received a gold medal, and the team members each received silver medals. The second place team received a silver medal and the team members each received bronze medals. No prize is mentioned for the third place team.

We have not been able to obtain complete results for the individual gymnastics event, and it is the only event at the 1908 Olympic Games for which these results are not available. Be assured it has not been from a lack of effort. Our sources consulted in an effort to find these results include the following: Official Report, The Sporting Life, all major British and American newspapers, multiple Olympic record books, the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), the National Governing Bodies of gymnastics for every nation which competed in 1908 gymnastics, Olympic historians for every country which competed in 1908 gymnastics, the gymnastics historians of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany, and gymnastics magazines from 1908 in the United States, France, Great Britain, and Germany.

The results must exist somewhere, as is evident from Tony Bijkerk and Ruud Paauw's book on Dutch Olympians, Gouden Boek van de Nederlandse Olympiers, which contains the placements for all the Dutch gymnasts.

The individual championship was known in the Official Report as "The Heptathlon" because it encompassed seven events, although they were conducted on only five apparatuses. The winner was the Italian [Alberto Braglia], who had been runner-up in both individual events at the 1906 Olympics in Athens. Braglia used his Olympic fame to become a circus performer. Working on a trapeze, he sustained a serious injury from a fall in 1910. But he recovered from that setback to return in 1912 at Stockholm, where he defended his Olympic title in individual gymnastics. He then turned professional, returning to the circus as an acrobat. Braglia later returned to gymnastics and coached the Italian team at the 1932 Olympics.

The men's individual all-around, also known as the heptathlon, was one of two gymnastics events on the Gymnastics at the 1908 Summer Olympics programme. As suggested by the alternate name, the competition included seven events with the scores summed to give a final score.

The events were:

• Horizontal bar, swinging movements
• Horizontal bar, slow movements
• Parallel bars
• Rings, swinging
• Rings, stationary
• Vault
• Rope climbing

This event was somewhat like a scored gymnastics team exhibition, as teams could consist of between 16 and 40 gymnasts who performed voluntary mass exercises for up to 30 minutes. Teams could score up to a maximum of 480 points. In this era there was a battle over the best system of gymnastics to be used to promote health. The two main systems were the German turnverein system promoted originally by Johannes Guts-Muths and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, and the Swedish system of calisthenics and exercises, which was founded by Pehr Henrik Ling and was much less rigidly formatted. The 1908 team all-around was performed using the Swedish system and it is not surprising that Sweden won the gold medal, nor that their Scandinavian neighbors, Norway and Finland won the silver and bronze medal.