Gymnastics can take years of practice before a young athlete gets the chance to compete at the highest level. But what happens when training for medals leaves little time for school, friends, family holidays, and other childhood experiences? This question has started an important discussion about how coaches should train young gymnasts.
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Katie Castle, a psychologist, believes that coaches need to rethink how much young gymnasts train. She is not saying that young athletes should avoid hard work. Instead, she wants coaches to understand how much training children need to reach their goals without losing their love for the sport.
“Whether or not a gymnast reaches elite at age 10 or 16 has NO relationship to their elite career at age 25,” Castle wrote on Instagram. “So what else could she have been doing between ages 10 and 16 that would have enhanced her life? Several more family vacations? Sleep away camp with friends? Cooking or sewing option classes at school?”
“As sport science improves, so should our training practices. As a community we have an ethical responsibility to train athletes only as hard as they need to be trained to reach their goals.
“Every coach has seen many extraordinarily talented gymnasts quit the sport at 12 because they got sick of missing out on everything else in life, sick of training the equivalent of a full time job while in elementary school. So now we know it doesn’t have to be this way.”
A strong point is that more training hours don’t always lead to better results in the long run. Instead, Castle believes that the quality of the training sessions matters more than the number of hours for gymnasts.
“Yes they need consistent and hard training, yes they need lots of repetition to develop air sense for difficult skills. But no they don’t need to train 20+ hrs a week at age 8 to get that. Even reducing hours slightly can have a positive psychological impact on high level gymnasts, improving their motivation and resilience and retaining their passion and love for the sport,” Castle added.
Research shows why coaches need to consider both the physical and mental demands of training young athletes. However, researchers have not found one perfect training schedule for every gymnast.
In a 2016 clinical report, the American Academy of Paediatrics warned that early specialization and intensive training can cause physical and psychological problems in some cases.
“Sports specialization is becoming the norm in youth sports for a variety of reasons. When sports specialization occurs too early, detrimental effects may occur, both physically and psychologically,” the report reads.
Gymnastics is one of the sports where athletes may need to specialize at a young age. This is because gymnasts can reach their highest level before they finish growing. However, the report also explained that researchers have not established the exact amount of training needed for success. They also have not identified a clear training limit beyond which the risk of injury, burnout, or quitting increases.
The American Academy of Pediatrics also published a clinical report in 2024 called Overuse Injuries, Overtraining, and Burnout in Young Athletes. It recommends that young athletes take at least one to two days off each week from competitions and sport-specific training. The challenge for coaches is to create training plans that help gymnasts improve without letting the sport take over their entire childhood.
Research explains why young gymnasts leave the sport
Katie Castle’s concerns also connect with research into why young athletes stop participating in gymnastics. A 1986 study by KA Klint and MR Weiss examined 106 competitive, recreational, and former young gymnasts. Published in the Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, the study identified several reasons why gymnasts left the sport.
“The most important reasons for leaving gymnastics were having other things to do, injuries, not liking the pressure, not having enough fun, and too time consuming,” the report says.
A more recent study published in the Journal of Physical Education and Sport in 2022 also looked at why athletes quit competitive artistic gymnastics. In the study, Researchers identified several factors.
“The qualitative data showed that a variety of factors influenced the decision of gymnasts to withdraw from the sport. The key themes identified through the interviews were having other priorities, negative social experiences, poor perceived competence, lack of motivation, feeling too old and poor coaching behaviours,” the Journal of Physical Education and Sport report says.
Together, these studies show that young gymnasts may leave the sport for several reasons. Former gymnasts’ experiences show that early success does not always lead to a long career.
Rebecca Liu, a former rhythmic gymnast, shared her childhood experiences in a 2021 essay for The Guardian. She started gymnastics at six and won national honours in her age group but spent much of her childhood training. After a disappointing international competition and a move to Hong Kong, she started training under a new coach. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect.
“After the coach – young, stern, sceptical – had evaluated my abilities, I was placed with a group she judged to be my Chinese-trained equivalents: five-year-olds. I hated this humiliating confrontation with my past-its-prime flesh, my useless body that could not bend in the way it was supposed to,” Liu wrote in the Guardian.
“I went to two sessions before deciding that this was not fun any more. I suppose that’s one way in which I have surpassed my childhood Olympic heroes. While they took their leave from the sport at 22, I retired at 12.”
She wasn’t the only one as Olympic champion Linoy Ashram also admitted to leaving gymnastics at the age of 12. In an interview with Ynetnews, she said, “When I was 12, I quit, I wanted to be a normal girl. After a month, I started crying and went back.”
It’s not quite the same as Liu’s story shows a different outcome. However, neither story proves that fewer training hours would have changed their careers. Yet both experiences show why coaches should consider more than medals and rankings when they judge a young gymnast’s journey.