Holding something in both hands should dramatically improve your ability to somersault and do back flips.
But seriously, it allows you to use the Full Defense option
with one of the weapons, so if your melee skill is one of the components of your gymnastics dodge, I don't see why it would be
that different. Conversely, you would not be able to get it for "free" if you used the dice pool of dodge + dodge + reaction, or dodge + gymnastics + reaction.