Knowledge base

How tissue responds to load

• Tendon: how the Achilles adapts, and how it gets hurt

  What drives tendon adaptation (strain magnitude, heavy slow loading), how fatigue damage accumulates, and what it means on the gym floor.

• Bone: loading, damage, and adaptation

  How bone senses strain, why brief, high-rate, novel loading builds it, and how bone stress injuries happen when damage outpaces repair.

• Cartilage: the loading window

  Why cartilage needs moderate loading to stay healthy, how impacts and repetition damage it silently, and the path to post-traumatic osteoarthritis.

• Ligament: sprains, laxity, and fatigue

  How ligaments carry load, the ~5% subfailure damage threshold, why healed ligament stays weaker, and what that means for landings.

• Growth plates: physiology and vulnerability

  How the physis grows, why it's the skeleton's weak link, gymnast's wrist and traction apophysitis, and what's known about growth-spurt risk.

Coach education

• Eleven misconceptions in gymnastics training

  Common beliefs coaches hold — from 'weights stunt growth' to 'pain is part of the sport' — each with an evidence-informed rebuttal and what to do instead.

The mandate

• The Mandate Map

  What four national gymnastics federations require of their coaches, who controls those requirements, and where an evidence-based injury-prevention program can get in — country by country, with names, dates, and deadlines.

The model

• The Achilles tendon model

  A multiphysics computational model of the gymnast's Achilles: why a tumbling pass does ~520x the damage of a heavy slow rep with ~2% of the adaptive signal.

Essays

• When pain does not always mean gain

  The case for recovery-informed training in elite gymnastics: why the traditional schedule loads connective tissue faster than it can repair, and what a smarter week looks like.