The desire for a high mobility-to-size ratio in mobile robots has led to the exploration of many new methods of locomotion, one of which is tumbling. To the authors’ knowledge, there are very few tumbling robots in existence and no formalized methods for their control. In this paper we begin addressing these issues by presenting an approach for deriving motion primitives for tumbling robots. We apply our method to the specific case of a two-armed tumbling robot and include the final derived motion primitives. Additionally we discuss in general the motion of tumbling robots and introduce 3 useful gaits derived from the resulting primitives of our approach.