Keeping gymnasts in your program comes down to gymnast motivation to continue either because they love doing gymnastics, and (ideally)/or are successful at it

Q:“Keeping gymnasts in your program during investment years ” – Patt 

A: I think that any strategy employed to keep the gymnasts in your program essentially come down to either

fostering a love for the sport despite any possible limitation (Love) 

AND/OR 

gymnast is on track to achieving long term goals (Success)

As coaches we should ensure first, that every effort is made to foster a love for the sport in all  programs (rec, team, Xcel etc), and than at an individual level work with  the gymnast so they feel that they are given every opportunity to achieve their goals (not our or parental expectations of them). I believe that essentially this is what it comes down to.

The investment years of a gymnast being around the 12-15 years of age. By this time gymnasts have usually developed socially enough to fall into 3 pretty distinct types or groups, differentiated by shared personalities and abilities

• Talented-Goal Driven
• Social Participant
• Loves the sport

Keeping gymnast in your program ultimately comes down to the gymnast motivation to continue, because they either love it, or are successful at it. At this age puberty has kicked in full gear, gymnastics is getting harder, social pressures are astronomical in the eyes of a teenager, and academic/school demands greater attention than previous years. At this age the gymnast is facing many challenges in the gym and outside, and as coaches we need to be aware these and recognize them. The best way to prevent a gymnast form dropping out during these years is to be able to intervene ahead of time. The coach can do that, by knowing what is going on in the gymnast’s life outside of gym to some degree (especially in school), to gather clues as to reasons that could push the gymnast towards dropping out. Its all about communication. Through an open communication with the gymnast and vice-versa, problem can be identify early and preventative solution can be found before its to late. Ultimately however the gymnasts motivation to remain in the sport will dictate their level of investment.

Each gymnast has different needs and how we recognize and meet those needs will in turn  dictate our ability to intervene when a gymnast is considering dropping out of gymnast or moving to another club. However this is not enough, as its only a treatment, we need to prevent. It important that at this point I mention that some gymnasts are simply ready to move on, and we should make their transition out of gymnast a pleasant one, one that leaves the door open if they wish to return.

An interesting study in the Journal of Sport Medicine and Physical Fitness , “Morphological and performance characteristics as drop-out indicators in female gymnasts ”, concluded:

” the physical make-up and performance capacities of our gymnasts under study are minor indicators for the withdrawal from competitive gymnastics, and it is hypothesized that the social and psychological factors associated with the older age of the drop-out girls are presumably more important. “

The study focused on 81 female gymnasts over a 3 year follow up period during with 46 (56%) continued and 35 (44%) dropped out. Gymnasts were aged 10+/-2.5yrs from Belgium. Overall I know one study is not enough to support anything for sure, but the findings are in accordance with my personal experience as a coach of 10 years . I think that the results are not surprising and have validity for any western country gymnast. What I think is really interesting based on the study, is that the gymnast morphological characteristics were not a reason to drop-out. This suggests that if the gymnast loves the sport enough they will persevere through physical challenges given the right condition. A possible explanation for this finding could be the age group surveyed,  thus a study looking at older ages groups  could yield different results, in either case its interesting to note.

So what can we as coaches do to compete with the social, psychological and sometimes external (like parents, school, participation in other sports) pressures that the gymnast is challenged with overcoming, to prevent them from ever wanting to drop out of gymnastics? Its now always easy to know how to do it, but I believe we need to make sure that as coaches we find ways to (this is just a few of the most important aspects, not a comprehensive list of):

• create a positive motivating training atmosphere
• help gymnasts set and work toward clear S.M.A.R.T goals (short, medium, long, and if possible dreams),
• run a productive training program, one that gymnasts see and feels is effective and produces results (personal or by others)
• being a knowledgeable coach, one the gymnasts trust, and respect
• effective, clear, and open communication between coach, gymnast, parents
• coach everyone appropriately, so no one feels they are under coached, or special treatment is given to some but not others.
• be flexible when able to accommodate the gymnasts needs, sometimes school, track, driving test etc. has to come first.

Simply stated, we need to give the gymnast reason/s to want to invest 16+ hours in the gym, instead of spending it with friends, studying, playing other sports etc. This is no easy task!, and it is even harder  when the gymnast is already close to being done, or is thinking about dropping-out. The ability for a club and a program to retain kids begins in the sampling and specializing years. A successful program will

• foster a love for the sport rather than competition results, during the sampling and part way through the specializing years. Ideally both should be accomplished
• The basics are taught correctly and reinforced through their gymnastics involvement, along with instilling good training habits (fun loving discipline as I like to think of it) that will help the gymnast make maximal use of their time in the gym
• Developing a strong relationship with each gymnast, one of mutual respect, also with the gymnast parents when possible, however I will say some parents are just not easy to get along with.
• Also if the gymnast is internally motivate it really helps, if not we need to find ways to develop this in them

A primary objective of any program should be to structure so that they kids wish to remain in the program, rather than coaches trying to find ways to persuade kids who already want to drop out to stay. Being able to retain kids and at the same time being successful is a sign of a mature, well established, consistent, well staffed club and team. Its something you build, rather something that just happens.

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” what can I realistically accomplish with the training time I do have? “ 

The reason why I think this questions is more relevant is because its pretty obvious that the more you do, the better. I have personally never heard a coach complain about having to much practice  time, if anything, I say with 99% certainty that majority of coaches feel the very opposite ” there is never enough time “. Well that begs the question then, how valuable is time and , what can I achieve with my gymnasts given the time I do have available? To answer those questions we need to consider how long it takes to achieve the level of expertise  of a high level gymnasts, and work out way back. 

EXPERTISE

In his book ‘ Outlier ’, Malcolm Gladwell “ examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success, linking back that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours “ [2]. The 10,000 Hour Rule as it is known, was first proposed by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson a Swedish psychologist who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise [3]. The rule is however more of a guideline then a sure thing, but it does give us a benchmark standard for total time invested to achieve success, or at least a starting poin, and best of all, based on the research available on it, the rule seem to apply quite universally across a broad range of activities, from basketball, to musicians, artist, tennis players, chess players etc. To help give our discussion some grounding backed up by supported science, we are going to assume that 10,000 Hour Rule also applies to gymnastics expertise development, which is not a unfair assumption to make, and one we will see later on that it fits quite well with the standard model of training. One point of note I will mention however, about the type of practice we are talking about here, is ‘ practice ‘ that is deliberate, structured and and focused, with every effort made to make each hour is as productive as possible toward a clear goal. 

If you can accept the assumption that the 10,000 Hour Rule applies to gymnastics to be true, then for a gymnast to reach an expert level of performance (a level 10 nationally competitive gymnast, I believe is a good definition of a expert level gymnast for the purpose of this article), it will require doing a minimum of 5 practices/wk  @ 3.8hrs a practice, over a 10 year period, which equals about 19.3hrs  a week, every week for a year, for 10 years (sometimes rounded to 20hrs/wk  in literature):

Approx hours of practice after 10 = ((f x t) x 52) x 10

Where f is the frequency of practices per week, t is the time interval per practice in hours, 52 is the number of weeks in the year, 10 is the total training years. If we take the average optional gymnast training time per week to be 16hrs (average over their whole career) , this means that over a 10yr period the gymnast will only will only have accumulate 8320 hours, which is not enough to reach a high level of mastery. This spells out problems for a club coach, wanting to produce high level gymnastics. However this alone does not tell enough about the training process, as it is a gross over simplification of the actual problem, which maybe can be better addressed by looking at what the gymnastics literature has to say about preparation times for gymnasts and training hours.

PREPARATION

Preparation time for a gymnast to achieve Level 10 expertise up to Elite, has been document to take about 8-10yrs for girls, and 10-12yrs for boys [1,4]. Of course  fluctuation arise between individuals, as there are many factors at play and not just chronological age in gymnastics preparation. The difference in preparation times between male and female gymnasts is likely the result of biological differences in maturation and growth between sexes and maybe to some small degree the additional events (rings and pommel horse) in men’s gymnastics. Clearly the gymnast begins at a very novice level, and progressively builds up, as that happens their training requirements also grow. 

The FIG recommends the following training hours to achieve each level of expertise [1]: 

• Fundamental movements - pre-team – Level 4 (6 – 8 hrs/wk)
• Basic specialization - compulsories Level 4  (8 – 10 hrs/wk)
• Secondary and Tertiary specialization - Compulsory from Level 5 to Level 7 (10-18 hrs/wk)
• Tertiary and Advanced specialization- Optionals Level 8- 10 (18-24 hrs/wk)
• Advanced specialization - very good level 10′s, or Elite’s that could not make it or go Collage (20-32 hrs/wk)
• High Performance - Elite and International competing athletes (24-36 hrs/wk)

The FIG divide the gymnast ‘ expertise development ’ [1] over time into 4 stages. I added my own definitions for each stage to reflect more closely my personal experience with coaching. 

Sampling - First 2 years after starting gymnastics, usually between 6 – 8 yrs of age, learning the foundation motor movements. These kids are either in recreational classes, pre-teams.

Specializing - Child chooses gymnastics as a main activity to focus on, usually around age 8 – 12 yrs of age, during this time, the child develops passion for the sport. level of expertise at this point varies between Level 5 and Level 10 skills. This gap in skill is a product of things like, talent, coaches ability, facilities, gymnast motivation etc..

Investment - Gymnast has chosen to sacrifice other activities and focus exclusively on their gymnastics, this tends to happen around 12 – 15 yrs of age, this age group also is a time that many choose to be done with the sport for various reasons, which merits a separate discussion. At this point the gymnast begins to focus more clearly on their goals.

Maintaining - Gymnast has made a long term commitment to pursue a career/high performance goals ideally beginning around 16+ yrs of age. The gymnast is training at for Collage, Elite, or National level recognition.

The graph shows with experience and level of performance the gymnast stage of development changes. With those changes come increased training times per week. There is a clear overlap between stages and level of expertise. Entering the specializing stage accelerates the gymnasts learning. This is the time to teach as much as possible, given your time availability.

The beginning of the maintenance stage at around 16 yrs of age, interestingly also marks the end of a 10 year training period, if the gymnast had started gymnastics at 6 yrs of age (the optimal age to start gymnastics for boys and girls [4]), which fits rather nicely with the 10,000 Hour Rule. 

So what is can I realistically expect with the training time I have?

Extrapolating from Fig 1, we can begin to make some logical conclusions about the results we can expect in our practices.

If we go by the average hours of training being between 16 hrs/wk at an optional levels, the gymnasts training 16 hrs is heavily disadvantaged in comparison to the gymnast training only 18hrs, let alone more. This is time that cannot be easily made up, and this is an area a club program should be looking into, if they are wondering why no matter what, they cannot make significant changes to their gymnasts performance. Its hard to sell parents that adding that extra 2 hours is worth their child’s time, their costs. Of course it does not mean that a gymnast training 16 hours a week will never reach level 10, but it most certainly will take them longer. Just 2 extra hours of practice a week is the equivalent of 104 hours a year, which is about 1000 hours over the 10 year period. That means that the gymnast training 2 extra hour a week has a 10% increase in their rate of improvement per year, that is just from just 2 hours a week extra. However I think this data begins to make a case for why its so important that once a child makes a commitment, that they continue to try and add more deliberate practice

If adequate time is not devoted to training during each phase, its unreasonable for coach and gymnasts to expect to achieve the level of quality, difficulty, or consistency of a high performance athlete, or a really good Level 10, regardless of talent, coaching ability, facilities etc. The implications for this are that, parents. gymnasts, and coach need to on the same page about what are the realistic expectations for the present and future, given the available training times. I believe this to be especially true, for gymnasts entering secondary and tertiary specialization, when the rate of learning greatly accelerates due to favorable social and biological conditions.

So is it all doom? No of course not. What can be done if your program does not training enough for the level and age, is to adopt a strategy that concentrates on developing clean lines, beautiful gymnastics, landings, and good form, with lower difficulty. This would the be most fruitful competitive strategy in my opinion. To many coaches do not accept their time limitations and in an effort to remain competitive try to teach high difficulty, or sacrifice form and presentation for difficulty. In my experience that leads to injuries, inconsistent preparation, and frustration. Its not what we want to hear but the evidence does seem to suggest that is what the reality is. Of course all of this is a huge simplification of a much more complex system of training, but it does highlight the importance of time, and most importantly, that no matter what, the is no way to shortcut the amount of work needed, if you want the results you have to put in the time, especially during the specializing years

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As promised I will continue to work on this project, so here is an updated version

beta.1 -

> renaming of the application to’  Gymnastics Training Planner ‘ (GTP) from ‘ Gym Notebook ‘

> Auto value parts requirement checker.

> vault values are now displayed in DV boxes in the routine builder window and when reviewing routines from the load profiles

> added tabs to load screen linking to YouTube and The Gym Press for fast referencescan

>edit profile photo from the Load Profile menu — > click image to edit

> CoP Color scheme to differentiate groups

> some GUI changes and design improvements.performance improvements and bug fixe

download from here or the main coaching software page
download gymnastics_training_planner.zip

As always feedback is highly welcome, if you find any bugs or errors let us know

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Federico Molinari (ITL) doing a V-cross, personally I think this skill looks awesome!. There is a lot of opportunity  for innovation if you had a skill like this in your bag of tricks. Something that the rings as an event is starting to need to be honest. Maybe in the future we will see combinations like V-cross to Victorian cross being done.

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The post Diggs with a 1/2 on Pommel appeared first on Coaching Methods.