WAG What percentage of the gymnasts at your gym end up having a serious injury?

[NinjaMeals]

By "serious injury," I am generally referring to broken bones, surgery, or long-lasting effects. Also, I am mostly interested in higher level gymnasts that have participated in the sport for a while.

 

[GymDadWA]

20%

 

[NutterButter]

90%. Most of these kids are L8-10 for 7+ years.

 

[NinjaMeals]

90%. Most of these kids are L8-10 for 7+ years.

Woah, that seems high. Among the 90% of them, what percent of the injuries would you say were broken bones, required surgery, led to long-lasting pain, etc?

 

[mom2newgymnast]

That's so tough to quantify. It really depends on how serious is serious to you. I mean my daughter is level 10 and has broken her ankle twice , but I wouldn't consider her to have had a serious injury. If you count things like that, I would say 75% or so. But if you mean like really serious injuries (out for 6+ months, surgery, having to quit the sport type injuries), it's much less. Probably less than 20%.

 

[coachAJ]

Our head coach is very adamant about safety before skills. We haven’t had even a broken bone in years! The most serious injury we've had is a trapdoor fracture which happened when an athletes knee came forcefully into her eye. It still affects her almost 10 years later. Many years ago we had a kid reach for the ground on a back tuck and break her wrist, now we teach them to fall without putting their hands down and we haven’t seen such injuries since. Years ago we also had a girl break her arm when she fell backwards and put her arms down with her fingers facing backward. Now we reinforce sitting with the fingers forward even at the very beginner rec level. This gets them in the habit of falling with the fingers forward too so the elbows can bend. No broken arms since! In terms of percentage, it’s hard to make an accurate guess but if we are including mild fractures I would say 10% or so.

 

[NutterButter]

Woah, that seems high. Among the 90% of them, what percent of the injuries would you say were broken bones, required surgery, led to long-lasting pain, etc?

Requiring surgery - very few; long lasting pain - even less. The 90% is mostly broken bones and for kids who were L8-10 for 7+ years. At some point, most have broken a bone.

 

[HopefulGymnast]

put her arms down with her fingers facing backward. Now we reinforce sitting with the fingers forward

Could you explain what you mean with fingers forwards or backwards? I am very curious but can't picture it at all...

Also, do you have any good resources for fall training? I'm in an adult class and we don't do that much, and as I'm getting further along I'm more and more wanting to be careful.

 

[raenndrops]

Could you explain what you mean with fingers forwards or backwards? I am very curious but can't picture it at all...

Also, do you have any good resources for fall training? I'm in an adult class and we don't do that much, and as I'm getting further along I'm more and more wanting to be careful.

Fingers forward - picture standing with your arms straight down, thumbs at your sides (so the palms are facing backward). If you were to put your hands down to sit from a deep squat, the heels of your palms would be the farthest back and your fingers would all be pointing toward the front (meaning pointing toward what your face is looking at instead of pointing to everything behind you).

In our gym, if a girl "falls wrong" (but doesn't get hurt), all the girls line up on the floor and get "pushed down backwards" and they cross their arms and bend their knees to do a controlled tuck and rock back.

 

[Carabistouille]

Try sitting on the floor and putting your hands flat on the floor with your fingers pointing backward. If you try bending your elbow, you won't be able to do it, which means you'll probably break it if you fall that way.
Then, try the very same position with your fingers pointing forward. You should be able to bend your elbows, which means that if you fall, your elbow will ebnd instead of break.

Although I must say that at our gym, we teach the girls not to put the arms down at all.

 

[raenndrops]

We have had 2 gymnasts who each broke their back twice ... but one gymnast had a genetic condition that contributed to it and may not have been fully healed, and the other one was low-level and nobody thinks either of hers (a year apart) actually happened at the gym.

 

[HopefulGymnast]

Fingers forward - picture standing with your arms straight down, thumbs at your sides (so the palms are facing backward). If you were to put your hands down to sit from a deep squat, the heels of your palms would be the farthest back and your fingers would all be pointing toward the front (meaning pointing toward what your face is looking at instead of pointing to everything behind you).

Ah okay, thanks. That's actually the only thing I could think of too, but I thought I was misunderstanding. I honestly couldn't imagine accidentally putting your hand the wrong way unless you fall so weird that you can't help it. My instinct is to catch myself with my hands forward, which I've actually been trying to unlearn a bit. (It's caused issues in a toe shoot drill, but also it's not always the safest to catch yourself with your hands I think. )

Lining up the kids to practise falling when somebody falls wrong is interesting. I'm not in charge of implementing things at our gym, but I try to find ways to occasionally practise fall safety. Basically the moment I started trying to learn giants and handstands on bars I started to think 'maybe I need some safety training first'. (I'm in a rec group where we decide a lot what we do ourselves.)

 

[JBS]

By "serious injury," I am generally referring to broken bones, surgery, or long-lasting effects. Also, I am mostly interested in higher level gymnasts that have participated in the sport for a while.

You would need to talk to owners and head coaches to get a realistic number from each club.

Also... just because someone has surgery doesn't mean they will have "long-lasting" effects. On the other had... very minor things can be pushed through and turn into things that will have "long-lasting" effects.

I am a head coach... so here is a stat. As far as complete non-avulsion fractures (like a broken arm)... we have had 2 in the past 4 years. Neither high level. One was a ninja that fell off an obstacle onto an 8" mat... the other and Xcel Silver. This puts us at less than one tenth of a percent... approx. < .06% of the students in our program over that time.

Now if you are talking about avulsion style fractures or partial fractures... that's a whole different story as kids have growth plates.

 

[Dahlialover]

My son has been on team a year and none of the 60 boys on tesmhave had a gymnast-related injury. There was an optional level girl in a boot for several weeks this summer but she was back to normal pretty quickly. We only have a handful of 9s and 10s, so that limits risk.

 

[CoachPow]

I would consider them relatively rare, but they can happen. We typically have between 25 and 35 kids on JV and Varsity each year. In 20 years of coaching, we've had 5 knee injuries that required significant surgery, and (to my knowledge) 3 broken arms-and two of those were the same kid. The knees were all level 8/9ish kids, and the arms were lower level when kids extended arms on falls. 4 of the 5 knees were twisting (doubles or Rudis) and one was a tsuk. One knee happened in the first meet I had ever coached at 20 years ago. The tsuker (17 years ago) was actually injured on a very good landing-the surgeon watched video and figured it must have been previously injured and just gave way then.

 

[Katie]

I’m on Xcel so not too high of level but we have silver-diamond. I’ve seen a handful of broken bones, only about half of them were gymnastics related. A few sprains that took a long time to heal and practically everyone has had a mild sprain. I wasn’t on team yet but according to one of my coaches a girl did a turn but her foot stuck and she really messed up her knee.

 

[Kolabola29]

Let’s also not forget that a fair chunk of “serious” injuries for gymnasts happen in kind of ridiculous situations. Like the girl in NCAA last year who broke a bone while excessively celebrating a teammate’s routine. I had a really awful ankle sprain that took months and months of recovery from … tripping over a mat.

 

[kimberlylovesgym]

By "serious injury," I am generally referring to broken bones, surgery, or long-lasting effects. Also, I am mostly interested in higher level gymnasts that have participated in the sport for a while.

Every gymnast especially at higher levels will always have some part of their body that will always cause issues. I would say in my gym by level 8/9 90% of girls have had some serious injury, but that doesn't mean they didn't heal from it.

 

[Gym4.eva]

I’m a level 10 gymnast and I’ve had 3 serious injuries dislocation of the elbow with a fracture , torn ligament in ankle and dislocation of shoulder . But at my gym usually around 75% gets serious injuries at about level 7 or 8.