Why Off Season Matters: Mastering Workloads in Gymnastics

So , unfortunately , that was the first thing to go when you're very busy , is I ? Actually I forgot to mention this last time , but I think that people forget that we have like jobs and we're treating clinicians like all the time .

So like the online stuff is cool and the research is cool , but that's like a side hustle for like your real clinic work and so , yeah , I like actually treat people all day long and like have stuff to do . So the podcast and social media is an added bonus , but yeah , so I couldn't really keep up with it for a while .

And then I was trying to think through some formats that would allow me to essentially put podcasts out that are quicker , that are helpful but are not these long two hour deep dives with guests and interviews , and I had the idea to essentially just take my notepad , which is like where I work through all my ideas and kind of write stuff down that I'm thinking

about , um , and put them into like a long journal kind of list and then see if we could summarize a topic in maybe one episode that's shorter , for like a half hour or 40 minutes , not these two hour long deep dives .

So that's where this format of the podcast came from , and I thought of no one other than the wonderful Aaliyah to help me out , because she's smart and also I think that she sees things similar to me . But obviously I think you're what ? Three years out of school , yeah .

So give the people a little background on you and then we'll we'll get into this first one , yeah , so I'm from Michigan .

undergrad and then I'm not currently coaching , but I've coached for quite a while perspective too and now I'm just working full-time there we go in the big , real shoes .

So , yeah , and we'll kind of break these up into episodes on one topic , right .

So like a smaller topic and the first one that actually started my entire like thought process for wanting to do podcasts is , um , a lot of the um thoughts around like workloads and like college gymnastics season were coming up because to timestamp the episode , unfortunately , but we're just at the end of college season , we just finished college season and we have

like regionals and nationals going on in Easterns and Westerns for the club kids , um , and so I always just have like a big step back uh , between like , okay , all the people in the clinic that I'm seeing of , like how did the season go ? Did we plan the season ?

Well , you know also I do a lot of college consulting work behind the scenes and a lot of club consulting work behind the scenes , which I don't really talk about cause . It's like keeping their information private .

But a lot of colleges reach out to me at the end of a season and ask me to share thoughts on kind of how I think about their program and so I help them and then throughout the entire year we keep in touch and you know , seeing a lot of programs finish up this year , I was reflecting a lot back on who I worked with last year and what's coming up now

and it just kind of like I don't know .

It just generated a lot of like thoughts that I wrote down , particularly because the workload paper that we worked on for like four years with Tim Gabbit and some other people , which we'll talk about that just got published this year and it was like a very long end or a long road that finally ended in like a good paper being published , I think .

And I was just thinking a lot about like how hard pre-seasons are and like injury rates and like things that people are going through . So yeah , that's my bird's eye view of the , I guess the the entire kind of like thought process . But do you have any opening thoughts about workloads and college stuff and season , being in the trenches yourself ?

So it's hard for me from the perspective of depending on the gym and how much time they let off the kids off in the summer or if they elect to take off more time in the summer , they could be jumping right back into season pretty much and then just kind of coming back in .

And then I see a lot of like growth plate injuries , because I see younger kids , so I'm not seeing . I do see overuse injuries and like the higher , like the older , like high school kids , but a lot I see a lot of grip plate injuries that like pretty much like preseason or like rate . A season starts .

They are like 16 , 17 , 18 , they understand a lot about the sport , they can speak up , they know a lot about , like you know what they're feeling and what they're going through . They can articulate a lot more what stresses them or what's bothering them , whereas , like you know , 10 , 11 , 12 year olds

are kind of just doing what the practice routine is or what they're going through .

And so I think it's challenging sometimes because in younger kids they have like a set season with school and with stuff like that and there's no kind of like give and take sometimes on their competition season layout , whereas I think in college in particular , there's a lot more wiggle room with like , who can take days that are modified , or who can do more , who

do less , based on what they have going on . So , yeah , I agree , it's hard . It's hard to kind of manage workload and try to like build somebody up and get them ready for a season , but then also not , you know , get too ahead of your skis where you start getting , like you said , growth plate issues or stuff like that .

So , um , I guess just to review sorry , you have something else , nope , oh , um , just to review , I think , a couple of papers before we talk about ours , um , and kind of set the stage of how we got to where our paper was to eventually end the episode with helping people with advice .

Um , so Tim Gavin is probably the most well-known person in this kind of field . He kind of uh , was , was uh person in this kind of field . He kind of was , I guess , the one who popularized a lot of like workload type science .

And this first paper that came out in 2015 , essentially was like Tim's claim to fame , which was essentially looking at sports and saying that is there a correlation between a spike in workload and injury risk ?

And so when we say spike in workload , we mean like the classic example that comes up to me is like you're in preseason and you're doing skills and you're doing combinations . Then you realize like oh my God , the meets a month away and like we have to go , we have to go faster .

So you start doing like a lot more routines , a lot more hard impacts , a lot more vaults , um , you just do a like a lot more um of certain skills or reps and what that does is it more or less spikes someone's workload .

So the average workload that someone has done , maybe like in a week , so say , it's , like you know , 15 to 20 volts per week , if that is the average , and then all of a sudden you're like , oh man , we need to go , we need to go , and you keep doing more and more and more and you do 20 or 25 or 30 or 35 , you could have doubled someone's workload in

a week . So that means what Tim showed in this paper was that if you spike someone's workload over a certain amount in one week , compared to the last two weeks , you have an increased risk of overuse , injuries or something going wrong . So it doesn't mean that you have an increased rate .

It doesn't mean that if you spike your workload you're going to , you know , tear your Achilles . It's not what we're saying . What we're saying is that as you increase workload , maybe in an unplanned way , you start to have an elevated risk week after week , and the paper also showed that it wasn't during the week in which you spiked workload .

It was almost always like a week or two delayed , which I think is really important . So yeah , if you're , if you're not planning like a 12 month period and then all of a sudden you panic a bit , you double a lot of workload or you do a lot more strength conditioning , a lot more plyo , I see that one a lot .

There's a risk of overuse injuries like shin splints or like Achilles issues or low back type stuff coming up . So that is kind of the big picture .

But this paper in particular and if you're watching the podcast you can see this graphic is that this graphic is kind of what Tim got very famous for is essentially showing that there's like this middle sweet spot where maybe you can train hard and train smart and get somebody like harder and , you know , fitter and more prepared for season without pushing that

threshold . So essentially around like 1.3 . So if you do like 20 , 10 to 20% more per week and you're getting you know more conditioning , more routines , more ramp up , whatever you're probably in that you know risk , that's probably okay .

Which is , if you spike like 50% or more and you start going like in the you know 50% , 60% , doubling their workload , you start to go into that exponentially increased risk of issues going sideways .

And so that's one side of the curve , which is , yeah , if you don't plan a sudden increase in workload and you just throw a bunch at the athletes , and I see that as like conditioning drills , plyos , you know new active flexibility drills their hips aren't ready for tons of series where they're backbending a lot , there's just a higher risk of things going sideways

in a couple of weeks . And also , importantly , on the other side of the curve , you under load somebody and you just don't really work hard for multiple weeks on end and then expect somebody to go to season and be ready .

You're also increasing someone's workload risk because they're not ready for season and then you say , okay , by the way , let's go vault on concrete , you know , in the middle of a Coliseum or something like that .

So there's a risk of over and under loading and you have to try your best to work very hard but very smart is kind of the takeaway of Tim's work in this first paper . So do you have any thoughts on this one Leah , before we go to the next one .

And I think something that I see a lot from like coaches , like gyms that I've coached at , are you have to pay attention to not only the skills that you're doing but also the conditioning or the like drills that you're doing , cause I see a lot of like impact .

So they're doing more like back handspring drills , front tuck drills , back tuck drills , and that's just like increased impact .

So making sure that you're not forgetting about not just the skills , not just the event work , but also the conditioning work and making sure you're not overloading the kids too much , because the growth light injuries that I see or the overuse injuries that I see a lot of times I'll hear from the kids that they're doing like , like their conditioning block is just

more skills and more impact and more drills , and we just have to make sure that we're monitoring that side of it too , to make sure that you're not giving these kids too much impact force yeah , no , I couldn't agree more .

So they're doing lots and lots of impacts on their conditioning but they're also going to harder surfaces for vaulting and for actual tumbling and stuff like that . So yeah , that's a huge part and I think the pair with that is that also you have to realize that lots of skills overlap in terms of like areas . They stress .

So like low back is the most probably common example . But like if you have a level nine that is doing you know , a layout step out on um beam . They're working handspring , handspring or layout step out for 10 . They're also doing arching skills on floor . They do your Chanko . Then maybe they're working like a pack or a Maloney .

Literally all four events have arching Right and so it's very easy to just give someone an assignment and not realize you're up in the clinic I have Al , the girl who had a flare up of like an . She had an old stress reaction .

Got better last year but I had an old flare up and I was like what do you think Like maybe it was different about the last couple of months ? She's like well , we started doing a lot of back walkovers in our warmups and also for , like basics and conditioning , which you know , high pressure situations .

So there were times when I would do , like you know , 10 to 15 beam routines in one practice . So we have like all a bunch of new back walkovers and warmups and also in our drills and then we also have a huge spike in how many beam routines they're being asked to do per week . And over the course of a month her back got worse and worse and worse .

So it wasn't like she did the first day of back walkovers and a lot of her teens and her back hurt . It was like three weeks after that it started to get sore on kips and she couldn't really like sit comfortably in school . And then I saw her yesterday and she was like pretty flared up .

So like , yeah , that's like a pretty good example of like all this maybe in the gymnastic setting is good intentions , of like doing harder drills and maybe like getting your skills together , but like you don't realize that you're probably throwing like two , if not three to four times the workload on somebody when you say , do 10 beam routines or 15 beam routines

and you're not quite ready for it .

So , like versus a running , like if you were trying to ramp up your running , it's pretty easy to like calculate out a percentage and be like , okay , you're doing this amount of mileage this week and then next week we'll do this amount of mileage and then kind of spread it out , whereas the gymnastics it's like the amount of time that it would take to make

sure that you're the amount of skills that you're doing and like categorizing them by the type of impact that it is , and then trying to make sure that you ramp up slowly is a lot more challenging .

from person to person , which I think will hopefully lead to why we had to make a different workload system of what just running in place is not the same as gymnastics .

Yeah , so this is a second paper that I actually think came out a little while ago , but it's like one of the more helpful visual um kind of markers that I think tim tries to share , because from the first um studies that he did , a lot of people said like okay , we're always going to back off , we don't have to , we have to be very careful .

I think the analogy we use with the college coaches is like a glass cannon , like these athletes are , like we don't want to break anybody , we don't want to hurt anybody , we don't want to hurt anybody , we don't push them too hard .

But the opposite is true is that you , if you want someone to try to successfully survive a full season and have as much performance successes as possible , you have to work extremely hard , but just in a very smart way .

So I think that , as we'll talk about in the ending , the summer and the preseason is is just so important to train very hard and very smart , so like .

I think If you don't do that and you don't instill the mindset of like , well , the way we reduce the risk of injury and also increase the risk of hitting our team goals is to work really hard into , into , like , really , um , you know , take care of ourselves when we recover after a really hard training session . Um , that's well thought out .

I think that is really the marker , and this paper came out and I use this a lot when I , when I consult with people is , essentially , you're trying to get somebody from their start of season readiness level . So , can you walk in and hit four routines right now ? That is what's called the floor .

And then you're trying to get somebody to the point where , in season , right when they first start their meets , or ideally a little before , they're getting to this like peak ceiling .

So the floor is the status in which they enter their like off-season summer into pre-season or they get back to school and the ceiling is probably like what , january , when you want someone to be ready to go for skills and full routines and be really confident .

So and then , of course , time is like the distance between how far do you have to get somebody from . They're not really ready for floor routines , they don't have the endurance , they don't have their skills together . How much time you have to the ceiling is dependent on , kind of when you start this preparation .

And I think these visual graphics are really helpful sometimes because they explain maybe what the goal is of a lot of people , which is getting somebody ready for a season , um , but also the constraints we have , which is that time is really not your best friend , especially in , like the college and high school setting , when you know you have summer things going

on , you have , you know , school things going on . You can't just like magically change the structure of the entire season . That would be a lot .

And so you know , ideally , in one situation , if you , if you could have a magic wand and you can maybe start season later in February , and only do February , march , april , you would essentially be extending out the time in which you have to prepare .

So this slope of this green line would be a lot slower and you wouldn't risk , you know , spiking someone's workload too aggressively . So that is like the fairytale situation of like we'll just start season in February and , like you know , have , you know , an extra two months to kind of work with .

The reality is that that's probably not going to happen , and the problem is that if you get a little bit lost in the preseason and you don't have enough time , what happens is that you have to dramatically increase someone's workload to be ready for meets , and that's where injury risk tends to go up .

So if you , like I said , panic in the last month of season because you didn't really do your homework for September and October , but then November comes , like , oh my God , we have a meet in a month , right , or an inner squad in a month , generally , this is where people get injuries or get really frustrated .

They don't have enough time to get their skills or routines or cardio , their endurance up , and so they either don't perform well or they have some sort of an unfortunate injury risk that goes up . So that's the unfortunate reality of times . It does not work .

But the thing that we can do and this is Tim's kind of big point is that maybe we can start our off-season preparation a bit earlier so that somebody comes into season at a higher baseline floor level , right . So this is like the college situation or in the high school situation .

What you're doing in like June , july and August , I think makes a massive difference on how ready and how fit and how prepared you feel to handle a really hard preseason which should be challenging and get you ready for season .

So this is kind of like the main modifiable point I tend to tell college people and high school people is like , well , if you really want to have a good next April in states , regionals , nationals , westerns , easterns , whatever , or conferences and D1s , you have to be really thinking about well , like , where can I get my edge ?

It's probably in the off season months where everybody else is maybe not working as diligently or as hard as I am .

So you know , getting a couple of weeks off after may and then getting in the gym and doing a cross training program , doing a lifting program , doing a basics program , you know , getting a lot of your fitness levels up in the off season is honestly one of the biggest things that we've seen change programs for the better in the last five years as , like lifting

has become more popular . So raising the floor obviously makes it a little bit less of a slope to get to that same level of , you know , performance at the height and then , ideally , in Tim's world .

You know , this graph shows that if we can raise the floor coming into preseason , and then we also have this time component worked out where we're not rushing too fast , we can have this penthouse , so to speak , which is that you're actually entering season overprepared , you're like doing back-to-back floor routines and you're feeling really competitive or you've built up

a really high chronic workload of routine volume and that's obviously great , right ? Everyone does their off-season work and we work really hard during the pre-season . We're more than ready for in-season and we can manage people .

And the last thing before this is the longest explanation of workloads ever is that sometimes people unfortunately have issues where they get hurt right , or it has to take time off , they get sick , they have to step away from the gym for a while . They , you know , tear their Achilles or their ACL , they have rehab .

Those people are entering in the same group of a team setting but below the average level of floor preparation because they've been in rehab right , they haven't had time to train , so they're quote unquote in the basement .

So those people we have to be extra careful with , whether it's good rehab or just a slower reintroduction into the season setting Um , because those people are probably chronically underloaded from , uh you know , six months of rehab or whatever else it is . So , yeah , I think these graphs are very helpful . Um , aliyah , what do you think about these ? Any thoughts ?

So make sure that you don't forget that piece , cause I think that can make a big difference when you're transitioning somebody back into a sport , so like if they're completely ready when they're done with rehab , with everything else except for maybe transitioning to like some of that skill work or some conditioning that's a little bit more higher , higher like impact

heavy , depending on what your injury is . I think that can make a huge difference and you being able to like gradually progress someone back up .

Because if they're going , if you get to the point where you're done with rehab and you're ready to start gradually progressing them back to sport and they like can't run for three minutes because they're so tired and fatigued , haven't done anything for the last you know , however many months that I think that makes a big difference in their progression back and just

in general , like being fatigued at practice because you didn't have enough like cardiovascular muscular endurance can just put you at higher risk of being at injury anyway . So then when you add that in and then having like a having not been at practice for three months because of an injury , I think that can just be a bad .

So you know , we have people who are like four weeks at a Tommy John or ACL surgery that are like doing more or less not a full gym program but they like are on their crutches , they sit for all their box work they do .

There's a lot of stuff you can still do once you get past the first month and like your stitches are out and you're not obviously in so much pain . So I forget the paper . I don't have it on top of me .

It's from the Australian Institute of Sport , but essentially they showed that I think Tim was working on this too , but essentially they showed that like the percentage of workload that you can maintain in your off time like dramatically reduces the time to get back .

So even if you maintain like a 60% workload of like doing your upper body and your core and your other leg , there's so much benefit to that on the other side , which is that it's easier for you to get back into that kind of big picture cardio , big picture , three hour practice if you maintain a bit of your workload .

So I think that's a bit of a slippery slope Sometimes , like I'm not saying somebody's like four week at ACL they should be doing bar conditioning and like swinging that under the guide of like a good strength coach or a good PT .

Together you can make a program that has like a lot of stuff along with your rehab , and I think that's probably very wise for someone to try to investigate . You know what I mean .

That way they're there , they can get the social component of being with their friends , they're still in that environment . That helps with accountability because hopefully their coaches will kind of , you know , cue them like hey , you need to do your exercises , whatever you need to do , and then like participating in as much conditioning as they can within reason .

is like I can't just put a GPS monitor on someone and say , run and tell me like how many miles per hour you're running . For how long . I was like , yeah , tim , it's like there's a lot of skills , a lot of services , blah , blah , blah . So Tim and I worked together for a year to come up with a system where essentially we can create a .

I wouldn't say it's like a perfect way , but it's a way to start measuring workload in gymnastics . And essentially what we did is I used to do this with like paper sheets and my optional kids that I was coaching and plug it into Excel .

But we would essentially take , you know , the time in which somebody spent on an event , so say 30 minutes , and we would then ask the athlete , on a zero to 10 scale , how hard do you think just bars was ? So they say it's a seven out of 10 . So you would multiply 30 minutes times seven . Right , that is a way to get what's called a session RPE .

And then the last thing is that's different for gymnastics we did is Tim suggested making a weighting factor system , and so essentially we know that in gymnastics there's like levels of intensity for what you're doing , like doing basics , and your warmup is not the same intensity as doing a floor routine .

So we categorized four levels of intensity of one would be basics , two would be like individual skills , three would be combinations or half routines and then four would be like a mock competition or a competition setting .

And so that's a way for us to look at like objectively time and then take an opinion of the athlete of what they feel is going on and multiply that by a weighting factor which is typically designated by the coaching staff . So it's like a mixed uh , mixed marker of how the athletes feeling versus the actual objective workload they're doing .

But when you multiply like 30 times seven times three , for example , I don't know what that math is off the top of my head , but it gives you a number which is a good way to kind of track um about how hard certain events are or one person is really got a challenging bar routine versus somebody else . So it's just a way to individualize workload .

And so this started out as like a Excel spreadsheet experiment . And then it went to a validity study that we did with um , ellen Casey , dr Casey , who's the women's team national position , um and Marcia together . We essentially said like is this a valid way to measure it ? And that worked well .

So this paper that just got published , that I presented last year to the college coaches at um club nationals , was essentially summarizing that we followed four programs um and measured workloads across the entire season , from preseason all the way to division one , championships , and I um let me just make sure I scrub the name yes , so I this is actually the

original data from um . I pulled up one of these , which is this was essentially looking at um at the bottom here . This is like kind of those training loads by day .

So this is where somebody would put in okay , like 30 minutes of bars multiplied by whatever my RPE is , multiplied by my coach's uh assignment waiting factor , gives us , like you know , okay , this much workload for bars , beam , vault , whatever and this obviously this athlete , for example , doesn't do one event I can't tell which one off the top of my head , but

she doesn't do one event and so you don't see that event kind of like represented here . She's a three event person .

So essentially this is our daily workloads from that system we did right , which then gives us a weekly workload so we can see like , okay , monday , tuesday , wednesday , thursday , friday is like her entire workload , which then leads to a weekly workload up here . So 11,250 arbitrary gymnastics units would be like what you , what you mark that as right .

But this is just the first time that we've been able to present a system that's like okay , can we look at individual workloads by person , by event , and then take that to a weekly in a monthly fashion , and then this orange line up here , if you're watching this , starts to accumulate an acute to chronic workload ratio . That red line is at 1.3 .

So essentially , after a few weeks of data we can look at is somebody spiking their workload week to week ? Too high , too low ? And then these other markers on top of here were wellness markers . So how well did you sleep ? How sore are you , how tired are you ? Blah , blah , blah .

So , yeah , this was essentially from the start of just me and Tim talking was essentially a full week long of this is a full . What is this ?

Uh , seven weeks of one person's data , um , before I think they had an illness , so this was seeing like the entire thing , but we tracked all the athletes for all 13 weeks throughout season and then we're able to look at some of the data of like , okay , what does this tell us about competition ? I don't know .

Do you have any thoughts on this , leah , when you see like all the graph stuff together ?

So in preseason you can see here right , this was actually a big takeaway that was representative is that preseason is hard in college gymnastics and also club , and it should be hard . That's when you're training the most . So as you go farther down the season you tend to have less total workload but the mental strain goes up .

So people's wellness factors would sometimes go down even though their workload was also going down . Because in season , you know , hitting in front of a coliseum of people is really stressful and you have life and you have the rest of school and exams and stuff . The pressure of later season is much higher versus the early season .

So I think in the beginning we see that the pre-season is very , very challenging and very , very hard and it should be that way .

But we have to be very careful about how we approach that first two months in particular when someone's coming back from competitive season and then so , yeah , that's kind of one big takeaway is that it's preseason is the hardest , postseason is the most stressful , I would probably say , and that tells me that the summer is so important as a takeaway .

But then also the injuries that I tended to hear about or see were often always like shin splints , achilles issues , you know , overuse , knee stuff , back pain , just from like , the volume in which they're trying to do is just so high .

Like , of course , there are accidents , there's ACL tears , there's stuff , ankle sprains , whatever happened , but like 75% of most gymnastics injuries , based on the study you look at , are overuse .

So that just tells me that like one , we can modify stuff and hopefully make that change , but then also that a lot of our work should be done in the off season for kind of what we're looking at . So , yeah , that is your question .

this was the paper that we published . It's myself , tim , ellen , a bunch of other people who worked on it really hard . Shout out to the whole team . I feel like sometimes papers take like years off my life . I'm already happy when they're done , but , like the amount of work you have to do to get a paper published is crazy , um .

So this is a good example of like one person's um , one person's uh training load throughout the entire year of 16 weeks and then like warmup versus vault versus beam versus whatever .

So we can essentially see , event by event , acute to chronic workload ratios , which is really awesome , right , you have a bar specialist who's just a really good on bars is two other event . And then , like that's the main component , they do , like they deliver a high value routine on .

You have to really be much more specific and track that workload for their upper body versus lower body , for floor and vault .

So this essentially was like looking at some of the graphs in the paper is is seeing it in real form and seeing like , okay , this preseason volume is really hard , really high , right , and then here's conference championships , regional championships and national championships .

You can see that the overall workload is descending down , but obviously this part of postseason is the most important and the most stressful for people .

So you're trying to play with fire , a bit of like how do we make sure we do enough routines to make sure we stay kind of with it and together and in shape mentally to get to hit a routine , but also not beating somebody up as the season goes longer and longer , goes longer and longer ?

And I think the big takeaway for me is that a lot of the prep work has to be done in preseason to get somebody over prepared and build up a really high chronic workload to make sure they can safely go through the season , and that also we have to be very careful about how we manage those , like you know , 10 weeks of season itself to not burn somebody out

too early , too fast .

And so in terms of like advice and kind of maybe practical takeaways for some of these , these things in the episode is , I think that it's really really important that the summer and the preseason is is is treated well and I think to Aaliyah's point , you have to plan the whole year and then , once you have that plan in place , you have to find a way to

make sure in the off season in the summer that people are doing you know hard training , particularly in the strength conditioning side , the cross training side , the lifting side , because that is really the only time you have to get somebody truly stronger , like if you really want to get someone's legs substantially stronger , to have a bigger vault or do a one and

a half or land to double flipping skills on floor . You know you are only going to have eight to 10 weeks in the summer to truly get someone's legs stronger and truly get someone's you know core stronger . And that requires , you know , two to five days per week of training and working hard and backing off and deloading and adding more and subtracting .

It's just like a good periodization program and so , like , conceptually it makes sense like , okay , we should work hard in the summer , but having worked with a lot of college athletes , a lot of high school gymnasts , unfortunately , until you make the plan relevant to their goals , it's very hard to get by it right , like getting up at eight o'clock to go lift for

two hours before . You have to work all day before you have something to do in the summer is very challenging . So you have to kind of like , unite the crew on , like okay , what are our goals , what didn't go well last season and how can we make sure we're better prepared for next season ?

We're like well , preseason has to be a lot more challenging in a to make this vault , if we want to , you know , place at regional conferences , you have to be on your game and do this lifting program that we have made for you for twice a week and then also get to the gym and do all your basics and stuff .

So that's the first big takeaway I always give . People is

like the teams I see consistently who are in the mix , top 10 , top 20 , have a lot of kids in club . They're going to nationals or Easterns or Westerns or or just have happy kids that are healthy . It's not even about competing , they're just enjoying their season .

They're willing and able to do the work in the off season to prepare them to come into the floor level of preseason at a higher level , which , again , hopefully , as you work hard , gets you to like that penthouse , kind of like really high level stuff . So that is one of the big things I advise to people .

The second thing I advise to people is to be very careful about your plyo ramp up . As we talked about is that in the end of August you should be starting to ramp up the amount of plyos you're doing and how hard your conditioning is , so that when you get to season you can ramp up the routines right .

If you , as we talked about , in areas , you ramp up all your plyos , your conditioning and you're also ramping up your routine volume and your surface of is , it's harder If you do all that in the same month it's probably going to cause a lot of headaches .

So , end of August , be ramping up someone's plyo program and then have a nice slow progression of like skills to parts , parts to half , half to full routines and slowly increase the time in which you spend on harder surfaces as the as the months go on a preseason . So that's what I kind of share .

I'm not sure if you have any thoughts or advice about that .

So making sure that we're doing things with good form , to make sure that they're the plows that you are doing and the time you're spending ramping up plows that way are done correctly and not putting that at increased risk for injury . So I feel like those resources are definitely out there .

So , if you can like go and look at them , find them and make sure that you're like looking at your kids when they're doing them and have good form , or teaching them what adequate form is , so that when they're doing them they can correct their own form , I think it's really , really important .

And then , lastly , I have a kind of a question for you from a practicality standpoint , where I see mostly club kids in the summers summers what do you have any like practical recommendations , either for the club gyms or for the , the athletes themselves , to try and find a good like lifting program in the off season or where they might get that ?

Find that , or yeah , for sure .

So OCS is an orthopedic certified , sports is SCS . Someone who has that knowledge base is probably a good starting point because they can refer you or help you get kind of from zero to one , especially if you're coming back from an injury . Um , I think strength coaches who have a CSCS is really good .

So a certified strength conditioning coach is typically the more like sports performance oriented strength coach who wants to work with athletes or active people .

So , between those two groups either OCS , scs and or somebody with a CSCS you're probably going to find an environment that works with athletes and has a lot of people that are kind of on that wavelength and then from there , I think lots of online resources will help you create a program that's specific for gymnastics , right ?

So , like , we have tons of stuff online from like myself and Nick and Dan and others that , if you want a sample program and you want like something to get started . We can help that person learn about gymnastics to then , you know , take it on . We have like an entire course duetion I made based on just like all the things that we think are valuable .

So yeah , find the person first who's like willing to learn and maybe knows a lot themselves , and then maybe dovetail that with some stuff that we've offered .

I think it's unrealistic to just hammer through months and months of really hard work without giving someone a break and then if you do have people that are coming back in the season in a variety of different levels , some people maybe have gone to the vineyard for two weeks in the summer and they're not really up to speed with the conditioning program .

Other people have jobs and lives and they can't really be there all full time . Try to try to just separate a bit of the workload into , like you know , someone who had an injury or someone who was away or whatever .

They're not going to be able to handle the same workload as someone who was there and was doing everything because their life situation allowed it . Um , just be like courteous to that . You know , life happens . Um , some people obviously drop the ball and they fumble . They go to the beach instead of going to the gym .

Those people will just have to suffer on the assault bike a bit , but a lot of people , I think , unfortunately just can't . You know , people got to work , man , people got to go to school , people can't be full-time gymnastics in the summer all the time . So be accommodating to those people who are a bit , you know , all over the wavelength .

So , um , yeah , but I hopefully , um that kind of summary of like the workload stuff's really helpful . So there's Tim's papers , there's that floor ceiling paper . That's really helpful too as well .

Um , our paper got published , available for people , and I think that hopefully the goal is that we take the model of what we found useful and start overlapping it with like practical recommendations on like how much is too much , how much is not enough , what do we do to get ready for season , but then also start overlaying that with like injury , risk of like

Achilles rupture , maybe something like that , or shin splints or something . So that is the next step in progress . But just for now , I've always wanted to do a podcast on that paper because it's now out , but I think in the framework of workloads is very , very helpful . All right , sweet , we will keep it there and then we'll be back .

We're going to do one topic per week and so the next few weeks we have some stuff on elbow , ocd and then culture , and then , if you guys have topics you'd like to hear about , we just have like a Google doc where we share our thoughts and like kind of construct things and ideas .

But tell us if you like this format , if this is useful for us to just banter on one topic and be like a 30 , 40 minute episode , let us know about that . And then also let us know if there are topics that you've been itching to kind of maybe have a share some thoughts on , but for now we'll send it off . Bye .