Parents Most Common Gymnastics Injuries

[JBS]

Here is our next article by Jen Kula...

Common Gymnastics Injuries: When To See The Doctor

Gymnastics is a tough sport and aches and pains often come with the territory. When is it time to see a Doctor for an injury?

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The Most Common Gymnastics Injuries​

 

[JBS]

Tell us about your athlete's struggle with injuries.​

 

[rlm's mom]

Where should I start... will be up all night if I start listing out all 3 of my dd's injuries. Guess you'll all have to find out tomorrow when I'm a little less tired

 

[Deleted member 18037]

Broken elbow
Sprained ankle
Broken Ankle
Tweaked back
Gymnast wrist

 

[mom2newgymnast]

My daughter has been really lucky (knock on wood ).She hasn't had any overuse or chronic injuries and her only acute injuries have been to her ankle which she has had multiple breaks and sprains on.

 

[NutterButter]

• Numerous sprains
• Numerous broken toes and other bones in foot
• Stress fractures in back
• More back issues 2 years later
• A few bone bruises
• Achilles/tendon issue (possibly career ending for vault and floor)

 

[gymgal]

Broken wrist when she first started competing then was really healthy until L7 when she had at least 1 ankle sprain per year through L10. a serious knee injury in L10. The sprains didn't completely take her out. She could still train bars but was out of vt/tumbling/beam for at least a month each

 

[Pineapple_Lump]

Nice article. I especially like Dr Hart's point about taking time to build back up - There is some really interesting information/data out there about injuries and how they relate to breaks in consistent training load. Injuries are most likely to occur in a certain timeframe after a return from injury/break/lower intensity.

 

[MuggleMom]

My daughters most unique injury was she dislocated her finger it was her middle finger fully dislocated so it looked like a 7 (ugh) she popped it back in herself (yikes) then when and told her coach it did this and then pulled it sideways and put it back in place again (according to her coach my dd says she didnt do that lol) we were very lucky she didnt break it when she put it back in place. Her knuckle is still bigger than the other one.

 

[ReluctantGymMom]

Let's go chronologically:

1) Broken arm - broke and displaced ulna and radius. Casted and braced for 12 weeks.
2) Bone bruise - foot - Boot for 2 weeks, then they let her choose whether she wanted to run around on it. She did. It hurt. Covid shut everything down, lucky for her, because over a month in, it wasn't improving until she fully rested it.
3) Ankles - So. Many. Ankle. Issues. Rolled, sprained, who knows. Turns out, she's hypermobile everywhere except her wrists. Ortho sent her to PT to strengthen ankles, but said realistically only surgery to tighten ligaments is going to stop it from happening. Her gym doesn't do hard landings except during comp season (and usually only during comp week), and she HATES landing on mats or into the pit, and we have an ongoing fight about why she's trying to destroy her ankles
4) Wrists - Like 40 degree mobility in her wrists! Less in one of them! Checked and re-checked, no gymnast wrist, 3 months of OT fixed the wrist pain (which was literally, they don't bend back far enough to flatten on the ground without hurting). She won't do OT at home.
5) Back - Hurt her back doing back walkovers on beam. A month of no impact until she was cleared for everything after checking her in every possible way for a stress fracture. We've removed all back bends and walkovers.

I'm still paying the bills off on the arm but the months of PT and OT for ankles/wrists really wore down on my soul

 

[cmg]

She has had a concussion that took her out for a couple of months in the middle of getting ready for first year L9, was just getting going then covid hit. Once the gym was open, she started training L10, but the gym did not compete in 2021. She then broke her ankle. Two surgeries later with weekly PT she is still not released fully and may now need another surgery, but we are waiting for an MRI approval. If she does need another surgery, it is a small one with minimal recovery, like a week or so just for the incision to heal. She is so close to fully training again, yet so far. She has been busting her butt weight training and has gotten so strong I hope she has an opportunity to get it all together for next year. It has been a difficult time to say the least pretty much since Covid shut everything down in 2020. Her next competition is hopefully 2023 so it will have been 3 seasons since her last competition. I am praying every day that she gets her shot at competing again.

 

[RTT2]

I was surprised to learn just how serious OCD of the elbow is. I always think of back issues as the worst thing for a gymnast, but OCD of the elbow is no joke. That is a long recovery time!

 

[TumbleTimes4]

1. Broken toes
2. severs
3. Overextended knee
4. Sprained upper back
5. Sprained finger

The severs and broken toes happened simultaneously and the toes actually happened doing BHS outside the gym. That was the injury that she was out the longest for. The back happened after a nasty fall on bars and put her out about three weeks and then she slowly eased back in.

We have been extremely fortunate to so far (knock on wood) not deal with overuse or overtraining injuries. I think this is in part due to the gym’s strong emphasis on conditioning and strength training.

 

[rlm's mom]

I'll go from head to toe between all 3 of my gymnasts - I can't remember exactly who had which injury!

• Hair: DD got her hair caught in equipment had to have a chop
• Forehead - Multiple headaches watching meets (me)

Ok seriously now

• Broken nose
• tooth knocked out
• one shoulder fracture
• multiple rips, one which got infected and needed antibiotics
• elbow stress fracture
• fractured wrist
• broken little finger
• Fractured ankle
• Multiple tweaked ankles, sprains etc.
• Broken toe (DD claimed 3 years later she had broken it, we have no source)

No overuse injuries that I'm aware of.

This looks like a recipe! Method: enjoy it while it lasts.

 

[PeanutsMom]

We are in the midst of treating spondylolithesis and spondylitis in my daughter. She is 13, level 7 training level 8. She has never had an acute injury to her back. In fact, her back never really hurt, but her right hip was hurting pretty consistently for 3 months before we got an xray done. During COVID she grew 5 inches (4'4 to 4'9) and was dealing with Severs pretty badly. I thought her hip pain was just another growing pain. We went to PT and she was stretching. Nothing was helping. Finally in December of 2021 we got Xrays done. It showed the break between L4 and L5 and slippage. It wasn't until January of 2022 that we were able to get in for the MRI and arthrogram of her hip. Her hip was fine, but the slippage showed impingement of her nerves and we were sent to a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. The good news is that her slippage, which is between L5 and S1, is only a 1 (a 1+ maybe they said) and no surgery until a 4. The break between L4 and L5 will never heal, it is too wide a gap. It was probably a stress fracture that pulled apart because she is hyperflexible in her back. She has seen 2 surgeons now at 2 localish Children's Hospitals because it was her back and I wanted the very best advice. Both said she could continue gymnastics, but listen to her body. She needs to limit back walkovers, but she can tumble, she twist, and she needs to continue PT and keep her core strong (which isn't a problem for gymnasts as we know). We are making the decision to only do bars and floor for now as she does the most arching on beam (back walkover series) and vault (yurchenko timer). She is going to try to switch to Tsuk over the summer so she can do vault and do BHS BHS series on beam or switch to XCEL diamond and maybe add in her side aerial (still have to learn the code of points to see if that is possible). She is also going to change gyms. We are at a very small gym currently. They do not have a pit bar or a tumble trak so all skills are learned over a competition surface. She is doing all landings and new tumbling on the floor with mats rather than over a pit. The new gym will have all these things to limit impact on her back during some training. She wants to stay in the sport so we are doing what we can to prolong her involvement. Any suggestions on levels (8 or Diamond) would be appreciated.

 

[PeanutsMom]

I'll go from head to toe between all 3 of my gymnasts - I can't remember exactly who had which injury!

• Hair: DD got her hair caught in equipment had to have a chop
• Forehead - Multiple headaches watching meets (me)

Ok seriously now

• Broken nose
• tooth knocked out
• one shoulder fracture
• multiple rips, one which got infected and needed antibiotics
• elbow stress fracture
• fractured wrist
• broken little finger
• Fractured ankle
• Multiple tweaked ankles, sprains etc.
• Broken toe (DD claimed 3 years later she had broken it, we have no source)

No overuse injuries that I'm aware of.

This looks like a recipe! Method: enjoy it while it lasts.

Ooh, I didn't include the knocked out baby teeth in my daughter's injury. She was 8, split the beam on a leap and knocked out her front upper teeth. One was loose and ready to fall out, the other was not. And when she caught the beam, she dug her thumb nail into her chin. Boy did she bleed between the teeth and the chin.

 

[MuggleMom]

Hair: DD got her hair caught in equipment had to have a chop

This is so funny! Once my kid was pulling up a Velcro thing that went the length of the vault runway and like a fool she was like pulling it up and going underneath it (kind of like putting it over her head down her back??) and got it stuck in her hair/ponytail. It got all up in her very long hair. They sat at the front desk for over an HOUR slowly pulling this Velcro thing out of her hair. I told them they are better than me I would have thought about cutting it but since it was on top of her head too not just her ponytail I am not even sure if cutting it would have been realistic. The person who helped too is not who I would have expected at the gym she can come across a little....intimidating... and isn't the one my kiddo usually works with.

 

[rlm's mom]

This is so funny! Once my kid was pulling up a Velcro thing that went the length of the vault runway and like a fool she was like pulling it up and going underneath it (kind of like putting it over her head down her back??) and got it stuck in her hair/ponytail. It got all up in her very long hair. They sat at the front desk for over an HOUR slowly pulling this Velcro thing out of her hair. I told them they are better than me I would have thought about cutting it but since it was on top of her head too not just her ponytail I am not even sure if cutting it would have been realistic. The person who helped too is not who I would have expected at the gym she can come across a little....intimidating... and isn't the one my kiddo usually works with.

She had really long hair, can't remember exactly what it got caught on, but was only the bottom few inches. Coaches called me for consent and I said as long as my DD gives consent she was totally fine with that big chop but would have wanted to do it herself!!

 

[KIPSOG]

Our gym is really good at injury prevention, so I haven't had to deal with too many serious injuries.

I broke my elbow in preteam, but that wasn't doing gymnastics, I jumped out of a tree. I had to get surgery.

I struggled with severs for a long time starting at about 12yo. It was a whole year if stretches everyday and icing every night. 4 years later and I still wear cheetah cups while tumbling and vaulting.

I also pulled a hamstring pretty bad over quarantine and that took a long time to heal.

Besides a few minor hyperextensions and a couple finger injures, that's about it.

 

[novagymmom]

My daughter was incredibly fortunate in her 7.5 year (L2-9) gymnastic career. She was never out for a full month. The only issues she ever had were:
- hit her toe on a cable or something and it completely took all the skin around her big toe off. A LOT of blood, but healed the next week on vacation.
- pulled hamstring that limited everything except bars on and off for a few weeks
- very minor hairline fracture in wrist (from skateboarding during COVID). Healed before back in the gym