# Moving principles into practice — Gymnastics Injury Prevention Consortium > What the evidence changes about a real training week, and what belongs in mandatory coach education. - [Home](https://provingconsortium.org/) - [Principles](https://provingconsortium.org/principles/) - [Into Practice](https://provingconsortium.org/practice/) - [Knowledge Base](https://provingconsortium.org/knowledge/) - [Consortium](https://provingconsortium.org/consortium/) Working site From the lab to the gym floor # Moving principles into practice The studies measure percent strain and collagen synthesis. Coaches control schedules, repetitions, and culture. This page is the translation — and it is the seed of the coach-education curriculum the consortium exists to make mandatory. An honest caveat up front: this translation goes one step beyond what the studies directly tested. It is the reasonable practical reading of the evidence, not a set of proven prescriptions — and it is education, not medical advice for any individual athlete. Firming up this translation with gymnastics-specific research is one of the consortium's jobs. ## Structure the week around tissue, not just skills - **Alternate high- and low-impact days.** Vault, floor, and beam tumbling are high-impact; bars, choreography, flexibility, and strength work are comparatively low. Aim for roughly 48 hours between sessions that heavily load the same joints — the window connective tissue needs to complete a repair cycle. - **Don't stack maximal rebound days.** Follow a heavy tumbling or vault day with lower-rebound work. Total training hours can stay the same; the load pattern on tendon and bone changes completely. - **Protect at least one full rest day a week** , and reduce load deliberately during rapid growth phases instead of fighting through them — the growth spurt is the highest-risk window in the sport. ## Count what matters - **Track high-impact repetitions** — landings, tumbling passes, dismounts onto hard surfaces — the way pitch counts work in baseball. Technique lowers the cost per rep; it never makes volume free. - **Change volume gradually.** Damage tracks sudden change: the return from a break, a new surface, a pre-competition spike. After any layoff, restart well below where the athlete left off and rebuild over weeks. - **Use surface progressions deliberately** — pits and soft surfaces for volume, hard landings reserved and counted. ## Do the work that actually builds tissue - **Heavy slow resistance work, two to three times a week.** Slow, controlled, genuinely heavy strength work (think calf raises where 5–8 controlled reps is a real effort, ~3 seconds up and down) is the best-evidenced tendon builder — and in the model it cut accumulated landing damage ~25-fold while multiplying stiffness gains. - **Judge tendon programs in months, not weeks.** Material change takes 8–12 weeks; a block abandoned after three weeks was never given a chance. - **Keep a 10–15 minute prevention block in every practice** (landing mechanics, calf and wrist capacity, trunk control) and treat it with the same seriousness as skill work — it's not overhead on training, it's what keeps training happening. - **Never use conditioning as punishment.** It adds uncontrolled load in a fatigued state and teaches athletes that the very thing protecting them is a penalty. ## Respond to symptoms early and correctly - **Use the next-morning test.** Pain and stiffness the morning after training is the most practical signal that yesterday's dose exceeded today's capacity — respond by trimming springy volume, not necessarily by stopping. - **Change load, don't remove it.** A cranky tendon in its early, reversible stage needs the high-energy loads reduced and the heavy slow work kept. Complete rest actively weakens tissue; training straight through repeated flare-ups is the road to the degenerative stage that doesn't come back. - **Build a reporting culture.** Sharp, localized, bone-or-joint pain gets reported and evaluated, full stop — and no athlete is ever punished, socially or in assignments, for reporting. Whatever gets punished disappears from view, not from the body. - **Persistent or worsening pain is a job for a clinician** , not a training tweak. ## Support the rebuild - **Sleep is training.** Adolescents need 8–10 hours; collagen synthesis and motor learning both run on sleep, and sleep-restricted young athletes get injured more. - **Fuel for the work required.** Restriction produces lighter, then injured, then gone. No weigh-ins, no body commentary; warning signs (fatigue, recurrent stress injuries, menstrual changes) go to medical professionals, not coaching pressure. - **Feed the tendons on their schedule.** Gelatin or hydrolyzed collagen with vitamin C 30–60 minutes _before_ loading — tendons absorb nutrients when loading pumps fluid through them, not from the post-workout shake. ## Why this is a coach-education problem Nothing above requires new equipment, new staff, or fewer training hours. It requires that the people who control training load — coaches — are taught how the tissues under their athletes actually work. No federation currently requires any of it at any certification level. That is the gap the [consortium](https://provingconsortium.org/consortium/) exists to close, and the [misconceptions log](https://provingconsortium.org/knowledge/misconceptions/) is a running record of the beliefs the curriculum has to replace. [Gymnastics Injury Prevention Consortium](https://provingconsortium.org/) — working reference for the founding group. Moving principles into practice. Working reference site, shared by link and not indexed by search engines. Content is for general information and isn't medical advice; see a qualified clinician about any injury.